by Jane Pendry

Anxiety can be mastered and managed with Solution Focused Hypnotherapy or SFH.

With a trained and accredited Solution Focused Hypnotherapist, you can gently and steadily calm your central nervous system, tone your vagus nerve and gently and naturally rewire your mind to reduce anxiety and get you firmly back in control.

How can Solution Focused hypnotherapy help to reduce anxiety?

All forms of accredited hypnotherapy are likely to be helpful, but Solution Focused Hypnotherapy in particular combines an understanding of neuroscience, tried and tested Solution Focused Brief Therapy techniques, and and gentle suggestion-based hypnotherapy to empower you to master your own anxiety with relative ease.

What kinds of anxiety can SF hypnotherapy him with?

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is ideal for helping you to manage, reduce or even eliminate specific anxieties including:

• agoraphobia and claustrophobia

• exam and study fears

• generalised anxiety

• panic attacks

• phobias and irrational fears

• ruminating and obsessing

• social anxiety

• sleep issues and insomnia

• travel anxiety

How Can SF Hypnotherapy help with Generalized Anxiety?

Many people come to me suffering from anxiety they can’t explain. It’s as if anxiety has seeped in to their psyche when they weren’t looking, and now it’s overtaken their lives.

What is generalized anxiety?

If you find yourself worrying about small things, like going shopping, answering the phone or picking up the children from school, it’s likely that you are suffering from generalised anxiety. This sort of anxiety isn’t pinned to anything in particular. It just seems to pervade every aspect of your life.

Now it’s impacting sleep, making you irritable, causing headaches regularly, and impacting on your work, your social life, your friendships or your family life.

Imagine and create your future

Solution Focused Brief Therapy explores how you would like to feel rather than focusing on analysing your problems or talking about the past.

It’s a form of neuro-psychotherapy that leverages the brain’s ability to change itself, called neuroplasticity, which helps to create positive long-term changes to thoughts, behaviours and attitudes.

Imagining your future as you would like it to be uses a part of the brain that opens the mind to new possibilities and begins to change the way your mind perceives those things that are causing anxiety.

The carefully crafted suggestions embedded within Solution Focused Hypnotherapy help you to create new, healthy templates in your primitive subconscious mind, and healthier responses to everyday challenges.

In general, anxiety dissipates after a few sessions, enabling you to once again enjoy family life, work and friendships.  

Where there is overwhelming anxiety or deeply embedded generalised anxiety recovery to normal, healthy levels of anxiety may take longer. I may add in helpful tools such as breathing techniques, NLP anchoring or Swish to support you on your journey.

Can SF Hypnotherapy help with Social Anxiety?

Many people suffer from social anxiety.

Sometimes social anxiety is underpinned by a fear of being judged or not fitting in. If you have been struggling with a difficult situation, such as the death of a loved one or acute illness, it may be that you don’t want to discuss it. Well-meaning friends may ask you direct questions you are not yet ready to answer.

Maybe there is no root cause

Perhaps your social anxiety may not seem to have any root cause. You just get anxious in the pub, at family gatherings or when invited to social events of any kind.

As a result, you may withdraw from any kind of social gathering, missing out on exciting opportunities, losing friends and tipping towards depression as you feel more and more socially isolated.

What if I want to socialise less?

Perhaps you are just naturally more introverted and have been shamed for avoiding social events that just don’t interest you and just want to resolve self-limiting or negative beliefs so you can socialise in the way you prefer - small gatherings, through hobbies or shared interests.

Perhaps you have sensory processing issues and loud noises, bright lights and over-crowded spaces don’t fill you with joy! All you want is to communicate your needs and wants without causing offence, set firm boundaries and just feel safer and happier being yourself.

Perhaps you just would like the skills to take control of your socialising, stop pleasing others and become your authentic self.

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can support you as you learn to be more quietly assertive and help you develop firm boundaries so you manage those challenging situations you can’t avoid, and enjoy those social engagements you really want to attend.

SF Hypnotherapy for social anxiety

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is an ideal therapy for social anxiety. The client is encouraged to create dynamic visual images of the future they prefer, and this in itself allows the subconscious mind to begin exploring new and better possibilities.

The hypnotherapy element, with its open suggestions and positive affirmations, helps embed a new sense of confidence and clarity that over-rides the instinctive anxiety response, and gives you back your sense of self, enables you once again to live life to the full and restores you to calm.

Hypnotherapy to prevent Panic Attacks

Panic attacks are debilitating. Your heart races and feels like it is hammering in your chest. You struggle to breathe. Your palms go sweaty and you feel nauseous.

What are panic attacks?

Panic attacks are, in effect, acute bouts of anxiety that make you feel out of control. Often they result from being stressed or anxious over a long period of time; or being exposed to situations you find deeply uncomfortable.

You know when you are having a panic attack. They can be extremely frightening for the sufferer and for anyone who witnesses them. Attacks can be triggered by all sorts of events, from seeing dogs, to a visit to the dentist. Hypnosis, supported by helpful breathing techniques, can help change the way you react to the triggers to reduce, usually eliminate, panic attacks altogether.

Building inner resources and resilience

Even the fear of having a panic attack can trigger panic. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help you to build the inner resources and strength to enable you to change the way your mind and body deal with anxiety and stress, until you no longer experience panic attacks at all.

Are Phobias linked to Anxiety?

Phobias are related to anxiety and often trauma.

We all know what phobias are and they can be crippling. They can limit your life considerably, stopping you from flying, visiting friends with a dog, or even going in to the garden shed where the spiders live! More seriously a needle phobia might mean you don’t get the medical treatment you need.

Why people don’t always address phobias?

However, oddly, people often choose to live with their phobias rather than address them because they imagine they will be re-traumatised during the therapy process. They have also adjusted their lives around the phobia and almost don’t perceive it as a problem; that is until some specific event makes them want to tackle the issue. An invitation to fly to a wedding means facing the fear of flying, or an emergency procedure means having an injection.

Hypnotherapy and Rewind Trauma Therapy for Phobias

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy and Rewind Trauma Therapy do not involve re-experiencing the trauma. In fact, the sessions ensure you stay calm and in control throughout, and your phobia can be eliminated quite easily, often in just one or two sessions.

Complex Phobias, however, can mean living in a constant state of hyper-vigilance and anxiety.

Social Phobias can often be more complex, along with claustrophobia, agoraphobia, medical and needle phobias, and emetophobia.

Complicating factors are innate physiological responses (being sick creates panic), associations with terrifying events, coercion and trauma.

I write about complex phobias elsewhere throughout my site. Resolving anxiety associated with complex phobias invariably takes longer.

However, getting rid of your phobia - simple or complex - can be hugely liberating and can reduce general anxiety levels as you stop needing to avoid the thing that causes the fear.  

How can Hypnotherapy help me get control over my Social Media?

The constant stimulation and flow fast-paced information overload from social media can also lead to anxiety.

And let’s face it, most social media content is full of political debate, gossip, personal judgments and violent images, all likely to cause anxiety when they are viewed frequently.

More often, the issue with social media is that it’s addictive and can so easily dominate your life. Your phone disturbs you with its pinging late at night; you are obsessed with staying in touch with friends or you feel rejected and anxious when friends don’t get back to you quickly.

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help you get control of your social media habit, so you reduce the time you spend on line and minimise the impact on your state of mind.

Can Hypnotherapy help with Exam Stress and Anxiety?

Exams are stressful.

Firstly, we know the results matter. We will be judged on the outcome. Secondly, you may be depending on the results for your university place, or to pursue your career.

Additional pressures

There may be additional pressure from your school, university, peers and parents. I deal with exam stress and anxiety in other blogs in detail, but in short, Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help you get in the right frame of mind to take your exams, can help you keep calm and focused during the study season, stop you procrastinating over your course-work or exams, or ruminating on your results after you have taken your exams.

Can Hypnotherapy help with insomnia?

Insomnia is a sleep disorder characterized by difficulty falling or staying asleep.

People with insomnia sometimes find it hard to fall asleep in the first place, wake up during the night and then find it hard to go back to sleep, wake up far too early in the mornings, or always feel tired upon waking.

How does hypnotherapy help?

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy focuses on reducing the stress levels that are at the heart of sleep disorders. By reducing your anxiety and stress levels, it becomes easier to get to sleep and to stay asleep. When you start to sleep better, you experience more REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, the time you spend dreaming and processing the stresses of the day.

The right amount of REM sleep means you will wake up more refreshed, breaking the cycle of sleep issues that lead to chronic anxiety.

Can Hypnotherapy help me overcome my Travel Anxiety?

Anxiety around travelling is remarkably common. I have found that after childbirth, when women are exhausted, sleep deprived and overwhelmed by their new responsibility, they can develop anxiety around travel. Or travel anxiety develops as a result of generalised anxiety, or because of a specific incident.

Kinds of travelling fear

The fear of travelling can be related to driving, being a passenger or flying. ‘Templates’ that driving or flying are scary are laid down in your primitive mind. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is very effective in changing these templates to enable you to drive, fly and be a passenger once more.

Why do we become anxious at all?

Anxiety is pervasive and natural. We are meant to be anxious about some things, like being attacked by another wild tribesman or a sabre-toothed tiger.

But in our modern society it isn’t quite so helpful in keeping us safe.

A sycamore seed is caught by the wind, spins and whirs, falls and takes root. It grows in to a magnificent tree without conscious effort or anxiety. You can create your preferred future without anxiety too.

When anxiety becomes pervasive and illogical then it’s time to take action.

And no therapy is safer or more effective than Solution Focused  Hypnotherapy.

Click here to read more about The Sense-Ability approach.

To find out more about Solution Focused Hypnotherapy see The Association for Solution Focused Hypnotherapists.

Jane Pendry
Sense-Ability Hypnotherapy & Coaching

DSFH, HPD; Reg CNHC, AfSFH, ABNLP, ABNLP, ABH, IARTT;
BA Hons (London), PGCE (Cantab)

Compassionate and Caring Solution Focused Therapist & Hypnotherapist helping you resolve issues from the past, uncover your authentic values and motivations, and create a better, brighter future.

Oxford based, working online across the UK, Europe & USA

Farm Close Road, Wheatley, Oxford
jane@sense-ability.co.uk
+44 (0)7843 813 883
www.sense-ability.co.uk