Anxiety disorders involve excessive fear and anxiety and can come with various unwanted or disturbing behaviours.
Fear is the emotional response to real or perceived imminent threat, whereas Anxiety is anticipation of future threat, or apprehension. In other words, excessively worrying about unpleasant outcomes or things going wrong in the future.
There is some overlap, but the two are experienced differently. Fear is usually more like surges of nervous fight or flight stimulation, with thoughts of immediate danger, with urges to escape. Anxiety is more like muscle tension and vigilance, ready for future danger and goes with cautiousness or avoiding things.
You might experience trembling, chills or hot flashes, dizziness, dry mouth, nausea, heart palpitations, profuse sweating, restlessness, tense muscles, or some other symptom. In acute cases, symptoms can seem so unexpected or inexplicable that they can be rather frightening.
Sometimes people have developed some kind of avoidant behaviour that brings down the fear or anxiety. These behaviours can get out of hand; I recall one client who used to cling to a bottle of iced water, for example.
Panic attacks are a particularly extreme category of behaviour. I have written about these in another article.
Need Help Dealing with or Overcoming Anxiety?
Anxiety problems can be grouped according into Phobias, Panic, separation anxiety and various unspecified anxieties, and more all-pervading or generalised anxiety (GAD).
From the point of view of treating anxiety disorders using Hypnotherapy and NLP, these ‘labels’ do give us some general clues as to the nature of the behaviour and which way to go about the anxiety therapy. For example, I would usually regard specific phobias in a very different way from General Anxiety Disorder. Panic is often structured differently from either. I have separate articles on panic and phobias.
I take the view that every symptom has some root in our particular ways of thinking and the clues for anxiety relief are there to be uncovered. Even though Hypnotherapy and NLP are generally short treatments, quite often learning to fully overcome anxiety symptoms can take some ongoing practice.
Anxiety in Children – Therapy and Resolution
Children are increasingly frequently suffering with anxiety, which I find very unsettling. Perhaps we don’t realise how we are putting more pressure on our children than ever before. Parents have busy and often stressful lives themselves, and naturally want their children to do well or better. This can all get mixed up in the child’s mind.
The good news is that it can be really delightfully successful working with children, and often very quick. Often a big step towards resolving their anxiety is in helping them to understand and untangle things in their mind, and how anxiety comes about. It’s good to know that nothing’s seriously wrong; they are not ‘ill’, and that there are ways out. I find it’s seldom necessary to actually ‘hypnotise’ them to resolve the problem.
In addition, it often really helps to come up with a few supportive changes that the parents can make, perhaps in what they say or how they react to the problem. Sometimes a combination of working with the child and a parent works well. The thing is, I really want to avoid the seeding the idea in the child’s mind that they are to blame, or that that they are somehow ‘bad’ or a failure, since this would only likely make things worse and undermine their self esteem.
Dealing with Social Anxiety or Social Phobia
It’s common enough that some of us experience anxiety in social situations, which can include blushing, as you know. However, it becomes a social anxiety disorder when the feelings are intense and the whole problems goes on for some time (typically 6 months). It’s called social phobia when we persistently avoid those situations. Usually those situations involve some kind of perceived scrutiny by others, and the fear is of acting in a way (or showing anxiety symptoms) that will be embarrassing and humiliating. Extreme and persistent blushing is a classic example of a social phobia.
Dealing with Social Anxiety and Social Phobia with Hypnotherapy and NLP techniques is usually quite different from treating ‘ordinary’ phobias of things like spiders, flying, lifts and the like. We can either treat the feelings directly, or we treat the underlying root cause. Sometimes we need to deal with both.
I am very happy to chat over the phone about you or your child’s anxiety, and what might suit best to resolve it. Contact me at 
