Anxiety

Many people today suffer from anxiety. Most of them are afraid that something is seriously wrong with them, and even worse – they have a fear that it might be incurable.

The facts are that in today’s Western society EVERY THIRD PERSON SUFFERS A CLINICALLY SIGNIFICANT ANXIETY DISORDER at some time in their life.

Symptoms of anxiety are wide and varied.

Anxiety often expresses itself in physical symptoms such as increased heart rate, difficulties in breathing, tension in different places of the body, dizziness, weakness, vomiting, hyperventilation, and more.

People suffering anxiety typically experience a lack of energy due to all their energy being channeled to a ‘fight or flight’ body mode, and to constant worrying.

Sleeping difficulties are common. Many people cannot stop thinking about their worries while in bed, and fail to sleep.

A big anxiety challenge is that it produces a FEAR OF THE FEAR. Anxious people often spend much time and energy worrying and fearing “when and how will the next panic attack come?”, living in a nightmare, constantly replaying in their mind all the worst scenarios HAPPENING TO THEM at the worst times, places and situations. It is an overwhelming feeling of lack of control.

Stemming from all the above, anxious people become experts in AVOIDING. They do their best to avoid everything that might trigger these symptoms and thoughts. As a result, they miss out on many beautiful things in life. Unfortunately, even the things they don’t have to avoid are being missed out on, because spending most of their energy on avoiding leaves them little time and energy for the rest of the good things that life has to offer.

Anti anxiety medication: As mentioned, in today’s Western society anxiety is highly common. Every third person suffers a clinically significant anxiety disorder at some time in their life. Overwhelmed by anxiety, people turn to the doctor for immediate help and relief. Doctors frequently prescribe anti-anxiety medication.
The medication can sometimes be helpful as a crutch, when it numbs people’s emotions, including the overwhelming anxiety.
Often people report that medication numbs all emotions, and so they are unable to fully experience the positive ones.
The problems with anti-anxiety medication are that it does not cure the anxiety, and dependency is very common. In many cases the dependency on these widely prescribed drugs is to a severe degree, that is very hard to overcome. Some people suffer years of severe withdrawal when they make the brave decision to overcome common anti-anxiety medication dependency.

The long term cure

Counselling sessions, Hypnotherapy and NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and different forms of psychotherapy, use completely natural ways that people have successfully used since the beginning of time to cure and heal people from anxiety for good, and with NO SIDE EFFECTS.

How does psychotherapy, counselling, Hypnotherapy and NLP cure people from anxiety?

To simplify, anxiety is the habitual focusing on the negative and on the future. Instead of having a balanced view of things, anxious people tend to over think about bad things that might happen and about what could go wrong. In their perception they often delete and forget about positive things in their life and positive possibilities.
There is a simple principle in life: What you focus on is what you get.
When you focus on the negative, you’ll feel bad.
A major difference between anxious people and happy or calm people is their focus of attention. Happy calm people don’t necessarily have less traumas or less sad or negative things happening in their lives. They are simply focused on the good things that have happened and that are happening and that will happen. Hoping for good things to come does not promise it will. Yet, it has a good effect on the person, as well as increasing the chances for these good things to happen.

Your mind works best with a clear picture and a clear direction of where you want to go. Your mind will follow the direction you give it, whether negative or positive.
Hypnotherapy and NLP help you automatically be refocused on helpful thoughts and resourceful body sensations. With the help of different techniques you relax, you choose what you want to automatically appear on your own ‘screen’. Hypnotherapy and NLP then create the link to your own helpful pictures, thoughts, sensations and memories so they subconsciously and automatically replace the negative ones.
Some of the techniques involve conversation and imagining pictures and sensations while in a wakeful state, eyes open. Some techniques involve different hypnosis trance work.

Underling issues for anxiety and panic attacks

Although most people don’t see the connection straight away, most often the underling cause for the anxiety and panic attacks is related to unaddressed issues of self-worth and issues with connection to loved ones and to family of origin.

Why is that? Well, trying to cut a complex answer short: we are a social animal and when we can’t feel connected in a deep and safe way to other humans, we feel very unsafe.

Imagine a caveman. Even a strong man could not survive the wilderness on his own. With our small teeth and nails, with our funny two legs, we are a weak animal and could not make it on our own in the wild. We needed others to survive. That has not changed. Evolution-wise we’re only a split-second away from when we were cavemen (just a bit less hairy, thank goodness…).
So it’s in our nature that we feel safest and calmest when we feel confident in our connections with other humans.

Your Nervous System

Ongoing stress, trauma and childhood trauma burden the nervous system and put it into a habituated state of Fight-or-Flight. In this hyper tense state people typically experience the physical and cognitive symptoms, the panic attacks and a general state of anxiety described along this page. Anti-anxiety medication does not calm the nervous system, it just numbs it.
Hypnotherapy is one of the best ways to help calm the nervous system.
There are many ways that you can help calm your nervous system, as suggested in the cure section below.

Trauma and Childhood Trauma

Trauma and especially childhood trauma is a major underling cause of anxiety.
Growing up in abusive environments forces the child into adaptive survival strategies that a carved in the brain and the whole nervous system for life if not addressed. It can be addressed and healed both in childhood as well as in adulthood.
Childhood trauma isn’t necessarily what you’d sometimes think of as sever abuse. Many people who had a relatively happy childhood still suffer from childhood trauma. Often all you need to have in order to create habituated stress and anxiety in adulthood is growing up with parents that are stressed, overworking, depressed, in an unhappy marriage etc.

How to cure anxiety?

Be kind to your nervous system:
Go for a walk, spend time with loved ones, and address your issue with them.
Go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning, allowing 8 hours of sleep 7 days a week.
Spend time with your hobbies, enjoy the outdoors, and make sure that on a daily and weekly basis you spend time doing something that you enjoy.
A few minutes of daily stretching, yoga or breathing can go a long way in calming the nervous system in the long run.

In counselling and therapy sessions, using the different modalities and more, the different facets of anxiety are being addressed:

Hypnotherapy is great to calm and heal the nervous system and subconscious from accumulated stress and trauma. Hypnotherapy and hypnosis can also be used to explore the past and address it in a healing way. It is done in a safe and pleasant way, bringing positive emotions, resources and healing to where it was needed. Addressing the past can greatly calm the nervous system today.

Systemic Family Constellations is highly effective in addressing childhood trauma, family issues and healing couple relationship.

RLT (Relational Life Therapy) helps address marriage and couple relationship difficulties and bring joy into the marriage. Stressful couple relationship tend to cause anxiety, and must be addressed in order to heal from anxiety.

NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is very helpful at redirecting our thoughts and inner images in a way that automatically connects us to our resources. By being resourceful we tend to not stress so much and heal anxiety.

People bring a lifelong change when addressing the different facets of anxiety: the physical level and the nervous system, the brain connections, relationships issues, trauma, childhood matters, lifestyle, the subconscious level. Yes, it is “a lot of work”, but once you have done in you will not look back. It ends the struggle and the conscious effort to stay calm or reach calmness. Instead you become naturally calm from within.

During the healing process you will be assigned some homework, such as visualization, breathing, exercise, and focusing on specific things a couple of times a day. This takes a few minutes daily, and people who do this tend to achieve better and faster results.

There is of course much more to it, and you are welcome to come to 1:1 sessions or to join a workshop to learn more and to heal from anxiety.

How long will it take?

Successful results can be achieved from a single session, and more often a few (4-6 average) sessions are needed to reach a full life-transforming change, and to live free from anxiety, waking up every morning joyful and at peace. Some people enjoy and continue coming to counselling sessions after they achieved a major life change, seeing life as a journey to be learned from and enjoy deepening their understanding about themselves and life.

Different anxiety related problems Yael has had great results with:

For over20 years Yael has been successfully helping people overcome different forms of anxiety and trauma. It is Yael’s main specialty area. Different anxiety related problems Yael has had great results with:

General anxiety
Panic attacks
Phobias
Claustrophobia
Agoraphobia
Test anxiety
Public speaking anxiety
Social anxiety
Low self-esteem
Nail biting
Hypochondria
Stress
Negative thinking
Trauma
Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD)
Trichotillomania (obsessive hair pulling)
Anxiety or fears regarding childbirth
Anxiety and fears around sexual issues

Child anxiety related therapy:

General anxiety
Panic attacks
Eating, fussy eaters
Bullying
Phobias
Nail biting
Social anxiety
Low self-esteem
Shyness
School related anxiety
Soiling/Encopresis (fear of pooping in the toilet)
Trichotillomania (obsessive hair pulling)

Consider if all that makes sense to you. I am happy to be here to assist you in this major life transformation. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
Warmly,
Yael