Anxiety and fear can wreak havoc on your mental health. However, they can also impact your body, creating a vicious cycle that’s often hard to escape. When you are faced with something threatening, your body goes into “fight or flight” mode and tenses up. Typically, when that fear-inducing situation passes, the tension eases and you’re able to find comfort again.
Unfortunately, when you’re riddled with anxious thoughts, tension mounts, perpetuating an almost ceaseless fight or flight response. That tension can lead to chronic pain, headaches, and muscle aches throughout your body. The tenser you are, the more pain you’ll feel. The more pain you feel, the more anxious you can become.
So, what can you do to avoid this miserable cycle? It might be time to consider hypnosis.
How Hypnosis Helps With Anxiety
Hypnosis has been used as a treatment for anxiety for years, but it has really begun to spike in popularity. People are dropping the negative stereotypes associated with it and utilizing it for its effectiveness. Hypnosis is often considered the “antidote” to anxiety, and there are several ways it can help. One is by putting your mind and body into a completely relaxed state—the antithesis of fight or flight.
Another great way to combat anxiety is to get to the root of the issue. Hypnosis can help with that, allowing you to recognize and release the fears and worries contributing to your anxiety.
The relaxed state of mind you’re in while hypnotized will stay with you for some time, and the subconscious mind will respond to any future triggers. You’ll be fully awake and aware during the session, while simultaneously accessing a sense of calm and comfort that can ease any lingering tension. This, in turn, can provide relief from, and prevention of, the fear-tension-pain cycle you might regularly experience.
How Hypnosis Can Help With Pain
Sometimes it becomes so prominent that it’s all you can think of and you just have to do something. Sometimes pain becomes so prominent that it’s all you can think of. If the pain (which may be physical but can also be emotional) you’re feeling from tension and anxiety is becoming unbearable, hypnosis can help.
It’s important to understand that hypnosis doesn’t take away pain. Nor does it try to convince you that you’re not experiencing it. What hypnosis does is to help you relieve the anxiety that contributes to pain. Let’s face it, dealing with a tension headache or muscle aches can become all-consuming. You can’t help but focus on the discomfort, and if you’re prone to feeling anxious, this can cause you to overthink and over-worry about everything.
Hypnosis can make it easier to manage worry and fear and change your perspective. It will redirect your attention, so you can focus on things other than a headache or throbbing muscles. When you’re not hyper-focused on the pain you’ve been feeling, you’re also not going to be as fearful or anxious about it. That’s when you can start to home in on where your anxiety stems from in the first place.
Using Hypnosis to Stop the Cycle
One of the great things about hypnosis is that it can help you feel more in control. There’s a misconception that you’re somehow not in control of your own behaviors and actions when you’re hypnotized, but that’s just another myth.
Instead, your hypnotherapist will work with you to put you in the driver’s seat over your anxiety, your fear, and even your pain. Following each session, you’ll be more empowered and able to alleviate the fear-tension-pain cycle you’ve been struggling with.
If you want to learn more about hypnosis and how it can help you with the fear-tension-pain cycle, feel free to contact me. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have or help you set up an appointment.