7 Common Anxiety Mistakes (and How Hypnotherapy Can Help)
If you're struggling with anxiety, you're far from alone. But here's something that might surprise you: many of the things people do to try to "fix" their anxiety can end up keeping it going. These are well-meaning efforts, and they make perfect sense at the time, but they can leave you stuck in the same cycle for far longer than you need to be.
I've been working with people for 37 years, first as a mental health nurse and social worker and now as a solution-focused hypnotherapist and psychotherapist here in Belfast. I see these patterns again and again. The good news is that once you can spot them, you can start doing something different. Here are the seven I come across most often, and how hypnotherapy can help with each one.
Mistake 1: Avoiding help altogether
This is the big one. So many people suffer in silence, hoping their anxiety will simply fade away by itself. You might have told yourself, "I should be able to handle this on my own," or "It's not that bad yet." Sound familiar? Embarrassment and worry about being judged keep a lot of people from reaching out, and meanwhile the anxiety settles in a little deeper.
How hypnotherapy can help: Sessions offer a calm, private, non-judgemental space. Solution-focused work doesn't ask you to dig through every painful detail of the past; we look at where you want to get to and the small steps that will take you there. And simply making that first contact is often a real turning point, because you've moved from putting up with things to doing something about them.
Mistake 2: Getting caught in worry and rumination
Everyone has anxious thoughts from time to time, such as "What if it happens again?" Having the thought isn't the problem. The trouble starts when we grab hold of it and turn it over for hours: why did it happen, when will it come back, what does it mean? The more attention we give those thoughts, the bigger and louder they seem to get.
How hypnotherapy can help: In the relaxed state of hypnosis, we work on letting thoughts come and go without getting tangled up in them. Positive suggestion and guided imagery help your mind practise turning its attention towards what's going well and what you want, rather than the endless "what ifs".
Mistake 3: Constantly checking your body for symptoms
Checking in with yourself over and over, scanning for a racing heart, a tight chest or a funny feeling in your stomach, is one of the sneakiest anxiety traps. It feels like you're being careful. In reality it keeps your system on high alert, and the more you look for signs of anxiety, the more likely you are to notice something and feel worse.
How hypnotherapy can help: Hypnotherapy helps retrain where your attention goes. Through deep relaxation and visualisation, your body gets a chance to remember what calm actually feels like, so feeling settled can start to become more familiar than feeling on guard.
Mistake 4: Making anxiety the centre of everything
It sounds odd, but thinking about anxiety too much can make it worse. Reading about it late at night, analysing every episode, organising your days around it: before long, anxiety is taking up far more room in your life than it deserves.
How hypnotherapy can help: This is where the solution-focused approach really comes into its own. Rather than studying the problem in more and more detail, we spend our time on what you'd like instead. What would you be doing if anxiety wasn't getting in the way? What's already working, even a little? Focusing there helps shift your attention towards the life you want.
Mistake 5: Relying on safety behaviours and avoidance
Safety behaviours feel helpful in the moment, but they can quietly keep anxiety alive. Always sitting near the door, only going out with a certain person, carrying something "just in case", leaving early, or avoiding the shop, the bus or the meeting altogether. Each time, you get some short-term relief, but the anxious part of your mind learns that the situation really was dangerous and that you only got through it because of the safety behaviour.
How hypnotherapy can help: In hypnosis we can rehearse those situations in your imagination first, seeing yourself handling them calmly and confidently. That makes it easier to take small, manageable steps in real life, and each step builds the confidence for the next one.
Mistake 6: Hiding or bottling up your feelings
Lots of us were brought up to just get on with it. So we put on a brave face, keep busy and push feelings down. The trouble is that bottled-up feelings don't disappear. They tend to show up somewhere else, often as tension, irritability, poor sleep or more anxiety.
How hypnotherapy can help: Sessions give you a safe space to acknowledge how you really feel, at your own pace. Hypnosis is deeply relaxing, and in that calmer state many people find it easier to notice their feelings without being overwhelmed by them, and to respond more kindly to themselves.
Mistake 7: Having no structure or daily plan
Vague goals like wanting to be "rid of anxiety" or to "feel normal again" are understandable, but they're hard to act on. Without a clear idea of what to do when anxiety turns up, or how to look after yourself day to day, even good techniques can fall by the wayside. Many people also push through day after day without giving themselves any real time to rest and recover.
How hypnotherapy can help: Hypnotherapy gives you practical tools you can use every day. I can provide a relaxation recording to listen to at home, which helps build a steady, calming routine between sessions. We also set clear, specific goals together, so you know what you're working towards and can notice your progress along the way.
You don't have to work it all out on your own
If you recognised yourself in a few of these, please don't be hard on yourself. These are very human ways of coping, and almost everyone with anxiety falls into some of them. Noticing them is the first step towards doing something different.
Everyone is different, and I can't promise the same results for every person, but I've seen many people find their way to feeling calmer and more confident. If you'd like to talk about how solution-focused hypnotherapy could help you, I offer a free, no-obligation consultation at my clinic at 2C Mount Merrion Avenue, Belfast.
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