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Rewiring the Anxious Brain: Techniques and the Role of the Havening Therapist

Rewiring the anxious brain leverages the brain’s capacity for neuroplasticity to change its responses to anxiety. Anxiety is understood to involve the amygdala and cortex pathways. Techniques targeting the amygdala, such as exposure therapy, relaxation, exercise, and Havening, aim to modify emotional memories and threat responses through experience and direct neurological intervention. Techniques targeting the cortex, like cognitive restructuring and mindfulness, focus on changing anxious thoughts, interpretations, and awareness. Other approaches such as NLP, SFBT, Hypnotherapy, and Neurofeedback also contribute to this process by addressing subconscious factors, promoting solution-focused thinking, conditioning relaxation responses, or directly altering brainwave patterns. A Havening therapist is particularly integral to this process by facilitating amygdala depotentiation through techniques like Havening and guiding clients in self-practices such as CPR for the Amygdala, enabling effective and controlled healing of trauma and building resilience. The goal is to build new neural pathways that resist anxiety and allow individuals to live more fully according to their values.

An Exploration of Havening Techniques for Anxiety

Havening Techniques for anxiety are a psychosensory treatment using touch to generate delta waves in the brain, which is understood to depotentiate distress encoded in the amygdala. Practitioners guide clients through Havening Touch or Self-Havening, working with issues like panic attacks, phobias, stress, and trauma. A key benefit is the ability to work content-free, meaning clients do not need to verbally disclose details of distressing events. Havening acts as a valuable addition to existing therapeutic toolkits, potentially enhancing the effectiveness of other modalities. It is seen as surpassing traditional anxiety treatments in its described speed, efficacy, and gentleness, allowing clients to process difficult experiences without re-traumatisation. The real-time results and focus on underlying neurological processes are highlighted as particular strengths. While still gaining wider recognition, practitioners find it transforms their practise and provides a powerful self-care tool.

Coaching for Depression

This report has examined coaching for depression, drawing on principles and techniques found in various therapeutic modalities. Coaching-informed approaches differ from traditional therapy by focusing on solutions and positive emotions rather than problems, viewing the client as the expert rather than the therapist, and emphasising possibilities over impossibilities. Potential advantages include building confidence, fostering hope, and promoting action-oriented strategies. For clients, coaching can be preferable due to feeling more understood, empowered, and less blamed. Practitioners may benefit from a more collaborative role and the fulfillment of helping clients achieve lasting positive change. A critical element in coaching for depression is the constant monitoring of progress, often done through scaling questions, tracking goal achievement, and regular check-ins to identify what is better. Key techniques include using positive focus, finding exceptions, externalising problems, challenging negative thoughts, setting SMART goals, and promoting behavioral activation.

Comparing Havening Techniques and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Mental Wellbeing

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and its variants like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) are established psychological approaches that address anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma by focusing on changing thoughts, behaviours, and responses to internal states. CBT often involves techniques like exposure therapy and thought records, aiming to modify reactions that interfere with life goals. While self-help resources exist for CBT, professional guidance is recommended for complex issues and challenging techniques.

Havening Techniques are a newer psychosensory modality that targets the neurobiological encoding of distress, particularly in the amygdala. It involves gentle touch (self-applied or by a practitioner) and aims to depotentiate traumatic memories and reduce stress quickly and effectively. Havening can be used content-free and integrates well with other therapies. It is effective for anxiety, stress, and trauma, helping to provide a sense of safety and facilitating shifts in perception. Self-Havening is a valuable tool for self-care, stress reduction, and building resilience, but professionals are necessary for treating significant or complex trauma. Both approaches offer distinct pathways to support mental wellbeing, with professional guidance being crucial for more severe or complex challenges.

Benefits Of Havening Techniques For Managing Emotional Distress

The benefits of havening techniques lie in their neuroscientifically informed approach to reducing emotional distress. For anxiety, Havening can target the root causes in the amygdala, providing swift relief from panic and phobias. In stress management, it helps to lower baseline stress and build resilience through self-regulation techniques. For trauma, Havening offers a gentle yet powerful way to depotentiate distressing memories without the need for re-traumatisation. While not a primary treatment for depression, Havening can enhance well-being and foster a more positive outlook. Clients undergoing Havening can expect a gentle process involving soothing touch, often leading to a noticeable reduction in emotional intensity and improved coping abilities, with many gaining valuable self-havening skills.

Navigating Stress: Understanding the Roles of a Stress Coach and a Stress Therapist

A stress coach focuses on practical strategies and goal setting to improve stress management skills in the present and future, while a stress therapist delves into the underlying causes of stress, emotional patterns, and potential mental health conditions, often exploring past experiences. The choice between them depends on the nature and severity of the stress, the presence of underlying issues, and the individual’s desired outcomes, with therapists being qualified to address mental health disorders.

Psychosensory Therapy: Brain Activity and Havening Techniques

Psychosensory therapy is a therapeutic approach that uses sensory input to create changes in the brain, offering an alternative to traditional talk therapy and medication. Havening Techniques, a type of psychosensory therapy, uses gentle touch, often combined with distraction, to address distressing memories and emotions. It is theorised that Havening works by generating delta brain waves and promoting depotentiation in the amygdala, the brain region involved in processing emotions and trauma. A Havening practitioner guides clients through the process, which can involve recalling distressing experiences or focusing on emotions while applying specific touch protocols. Havening can be facilitated by the practitioner or self-applied by the client, and can even be effective without the client needing to disclose the specific details of a traumatic event. Havening is considered a rapid, gentle, and neuroscientifically grounded approach to healing and personal growth that can be integrated with other therapeutic methods.

Navigating Anxiety: Understanding Treatment Therapy

Anxiety treatment therapy is a collaborative process focused on helping individuals understand and manage their anxiety, regain control, and find meaning in their lives. Therapists work with clients to build understanding, develop coping strategies, address underlying patterns, gradually face fears, clarify values, and foster self-acceptance. Common tools include psychoeducation, relaxation techniques, exposure exercises, solution-focused and scaling questions, mindfulness, acceptance techniques, values exploration, and goal setting.

Embracing Experience: Understanding and Moving Beyond Avoidance

Experiential avoidance, the attempt to evade unwanted inner experiences, plays a significant role in various mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma, leading to restricted lives and intensified distress. Overcoming this pattern involves cultivating awareness, acceptance, willingness, cognitive defusion, present moment contact, value clarification, gradual exposure, and self-compassion, enabling individuals to engage with a full range of experiences and move towards a more fulfilling life.

Cultivating Resilience: Building and Maintaining Healthy Habits

Building healthy habits and breaking old ones are crucial for managing mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Creating new healthy habits involves starting small, being specific, linking to existing routines, focusing on positive outcomes, consistent practice, and self-compassion. Breaking old habits requires awareness of triggers, understanding underlying needs, replacement behaviours, and patience. Examples of beneficial healthy habits for mental well-being include mindfulness, exercise, good sleep, healthy eating, journaling, hobbies, time in nature, breathing exercises, self-compassion, social connection, and self-Havening (a form of CPR for the amygdala). Self-Havening can enhance other healthy habits by promoting calmness and emotional regulation. The timeframe for habit change varies, and consistency is more important than a specific duration. To maintain new habits, prioritise them, find accountability, visualise success, focus on progress, reflect on benefits, adapt if needed, and embrace the process.

Empowering Change: Coaching as a Positive Force in Addressing Depression

Coaching for depression offers a valuable alternative or complementary approach to traditional therapies like CBT. By focusing on strengths, resources, and future goals, coaching empowers individuals to take action and build a more positive life. The integration of unique tools like the Havening Technique by coaches may offer additional avenues for managing emotional distress. While CBT traditionally delves into negative thoughts and past experiences to facilitate change, coaching prioritises increasing positive affect and creating a vision for the future. Both approaches aim to alleviate the suffering associated with depression, but they utilise different methodologies and emphases. The most suitable approach will often depend on the individual’s preferences, the specific nature of their difficulties, and their desired outcomes.

Leveraging Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for Anxiety Relief

NLP for anxiety is a set of techniques that aims to help individuals understand and manage their anxiety by exploring and modifying their internal mental processes and behaviours. It operates on the principle that anxiety is a learned response pattern that can be reprogrammed. Several factors contribute to its potential for faster, better, and more lasting results, including its focus on the structure of individual experience, the empowerment it provides, its methods for identifying and reframing triggers, its approach to accessing inner resources, its work with subconscious associations, and its perspective on anxiety as a learned skill. NLP for anxiety can be effectively combined with other approaches such as hypnotherapy, Havening Techniques, mindfulness-based practices, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to enhance therapeutic outcomes. Havening is being used by some NLP practitioners to help process traumatic memories and reduce anxiety through psychosensory touch, often facilitating a relaxed state while maintaining client control.

The Distinctions Between an Anxiety Specialist, General Therapist, and Coach

An anxiety specialist is a mental health professional with dedicated training and experience in diagnosing and treating anxiety disorders using specialised, evidence-based therapies like CBT and ACT. Their focus is on alleviating anxiety symptoms, understanding underlying patterns, and developing long-term coping strategies. Psychiatrist anxiety specialists can also prescribe medication. A general therapist provides therapy for a wider range of mental health concerns, including anxiety, but lacks the specific, in-depth expertise of an anxiety specialist. A coach concentrates on helping clients achieve specific goals and improve performance, without the therapeutic training to address anxiety disorders. Choosing the right support depends on the individual’s needs, with an anxiety specialist being the most appropriate choice for significant or persistent anxiety.

Empowering Change: Coaching as a Positive Force in Addressing Depression

Coaching for depression offers a valuable alternative or complementary approach to traditional therapies like CBT. By focusing on strengths, resources, and future goals, coaching empowers individuals to take action and build a more positive life. The integration of unique tools like the Havening Technique by coaches may offer additional avenues for managing emotional distress. While CBT traditionally delves into negative thoughts and past experiences to facilitate change, coaching prioritises increasing positive affect and creating a vision for the future. Both approaches aim to alleviate the suffering associated with depression, but they utilise different methodologies and emphases. The most suitable approach will often depend on the individual’s preferences, the specific nature of their difficulties, and their desired outcomes.

The Role of a Therapist for Anxiety

A competent therapist for anxiety will have specialised training in treating anxiety disorders and will prioritise the establishment of a good therapeutic connection with their clients. They recognise that seeking help for anxiety is a sign of courage, not weakness.