Overcoming Excessive Anxiety and Worry

Hypnotherapist Simon Pimenta shares strategies for understanding and overcoming anxiety and worry.

Are you a worrier? I used to be a worrier. I was really good at it. If it were an Olympic sport, I would be in Team GB. However I learned how to be rubbish at it!

I have worked with a lot of clients who have lived in a state of constant worry/anxiety, for instance lying in bed conjuring up all kinds of unhelpful scenarios of things that could happen to their child, imagining vividly having to deal with that scenario, and the heartbreak it would cause. We all know that this is not useful, but people are often unsure as to why they do it, or how to stop it.

I worked in the mental health field, trained as a counsellor and then as a Hypnotherapist, and have learned a lot about overcoming anxiety.

Sue came to see me back in 2008. She was 23 years old. Her parents drove her from Liverpool down to London. She was experiencing extreme anxiety; she hadn’t left the house for 18 months, and didn’t want to answer the phone or front door. She experienced panic attacks, depression and low self-esteem. She undertook a 3-day training course, in which I taught her a number of strategies. This includes the following concept that you may find helpful, which will give you some ideas about breaking the worry habit:

The brain is like a muscle. 
Scientists used to think that the adult brain was fixed. We now know that every time you use it, the brain builds new connections. There are many studies that have confirmed this idea, called neuroplasticity, that the brain grows with use. Eleanor Maguire from University College London carried out one of these studies in 2000.

She studied London’s black cab drivers, to look at the affect that learning the knowledge had on their brains. Black cab drivers have to memorise the names and locations of 25,000 streets and be able to describe the route between any two streets. 
What she found was that part of their brain, the hippocampus, responsible for memory and spatial awareness, is larger than that of the general public.

[Reference: Woollett & Maguire. 2011. Acquiring ‘‘the Knowledge’’ of London’s Layout Drives Structural Brain Changes. Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.018]

 

So what are the implications of this? Imagine you are learning to play the guitar. At first you really have to think about where you put your fingers. However, as you practice, the connections in the brain get stronger and faster, so you get better at playing the guitar, until it becomes an automatic and unconscious skill; you don’t even have to think about. Watch an accomplished violin player; you will see that they are moving their fingers so quickly that they can’t possibly be doing it consciously.

So it is with our thinking. Every time we get worried and anxious, we get better at being worried and anxious, and it becomes something we do habitually. We are literally training our brain to be good at something that is not that useful. Worry in itself isn’t a bad thing if it results in positive action. For instance if you are worried that your young child might get their hands on a bottle of bleach, putting child-locks on cupboards is a sensible precaution. However worrying endlessly about things that may never happen isn’t helpful.

Fortunately it is possible to break these unhelpful patterns. So how do you do this?

Training The Brain

I teach people how to become aware of all the unhelpful thoughts and pictures that we playing in our head. As stated above, some of the thoughts we have are so habitual that we don’t even realise we are thinking them; those worry thoughts have become the automatic. It doesn’t feel like they are anything that is to do with us.

Yet we can change these patterns. It requires work. If you think in the way that I used to, you may then think ‘This is going to be hard work, I’m not up to the task of changing all those unhelpful thoughts’. This results in feelings of anxiety and helplessness/hopelessness. However that thought is just another unhelpful thought, and we can change our thinking patterns when we know how.

It is important to address this kind of limiting mindset. If you had approached learning to walk in the same way, you would have never learned to walk! However, when you decided to learn to walk, you hadn’t learned those ideas of success and failure, and fear of failure. You just kept practicing until you mastered the art of walking, even though we fall over, according to a doctor, on average 1,500 times. It is important to recognise that the way we think is simply something we learned, and we can unlearn it.

So had did Sue get on? This is what she says:

“After the first day I felt a lot more positive. After the second day I couldn’t believe the changes. I walked back to meet my parents on my own. I had not left the house or been anywhere on my own for 18 months and here I was walking through London, somewhere totally unfamiliar on my own! It really was amazing and I felt so happy, something I hadn’t felt for a long time. Also that day we went into London on the tube went to Harrods and ended up going to see Chicago! There was no way I could have done this a few days earlier. At the end of the third day I knew I would now be able to cope with pretty much anything back home.”

A few months after seeing me she sent me this picture of her abseiling at centreparcs. She says, “There is no way I would have done this before… I was terrified of heights!”

A couple of years ago I emailed her to ask her a question. She replied saying that she was away and would respond when she got home. Here is the picture that she sent me.

So what we practice we get good at, we are building connections in our brain each time we use it. So if we are running lots of unhelpful thoughts, we need learn how to interrupt our thinking. We need to recognise that we are in charge of our thinking, and that even if those unhelpful thoughts seem habitual and automatic, we can change them. If you can learn to walk, then you can learn to take charge of your mind. Sue did it and I did it, you can do it too. Of course there are still times when you may experience anxiety, but you will have tools to help you manage the anxiety, and anxiety and worry are kept in perspective.

Consult Your Doctor

If excessive anxiety and worry is an issue for you, consider discussing this with your GP, who may be able to eliminate possible causes. For instance, anxiety can be a side affect of medication. There is a medically documented case of two psychiatrists taking a very low dose of a commonly prescribed antipsychotic drug (one tenth of the initial recommended dose). They both reported a marked slowness of thinking and profound feelings of restlessness and symptoms of severe anxiety, so much so that they had to leave work for 36 hours. 
[Belmaker RH and Wald D: ‘Haliperidol in normals’. British Journal of
Psychiatry, 131 p222, 1977].
 Your Doctor may be able to refer you to free therapeutic services: counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

Free Talk

If you live in London, I am doing a free talk at the Little Escape Therapy Centre in Crystal Palace, SE19 on Thursday 5th September 7-9pm. Call 020 3384 0509 or email hello@thelittleescape.com to reserve a space.

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For more health and wellbeing tips and strategies, plus a free copy of my report ‘Six Steps To High Self Esteem’, visit my website https://inspiringchange.co.uk and subscribe to my blog.

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SIMON PIMENTA is a hypnotherapist, coach and trainer working with people to boost resilience and performance, and minimise stress.

After working in a demanding job as the Director of a Housing Trust, he went off sick and remained unable to work for the next 8 years.

He discovered a pioneering approach to resolving health issues and quickly got back his health, and now trains others using these same techniques.

To find out about resilience and performance training for career-oriented Professionals visit:

www.resilience.uk.com