Saturday, July 24, 2010

How Does Hypnotherapy Reduce Stress and Anxiety?

Unfortunately, anxiety and stress seem to show up like unwelcome guests in nearly everyone’s lives. It can come from our jobs, our homes, our relationships or any other situation. The way we react to stress dictates how it affects us and unfortunately, many of us let it overwhelm us.

As much as we try not to let stress and anxiety affect our relationships with others, it often does. We may be rude to co-workers or short with our spouses, even snap at our children. This type of behavior makes us feel worse, raising our stress levels and compounding the problem.

Hypnosis can break that vicious cycle by giving us the tools we need to turn stress and anxiety to our advantage instead of allowing it to overwhelm us. A hypnotherapist can provide a door of communication with the subconscious mind, that part of our brain that drives our desires and actions.

A good example of a subconscious reaction is meeting a person and automatically disliking them even though they are well liked by everyone else. Although we don’t know why we dislike that person, it is probably because they inadvertently tripped a memory recollection in the subconscious—perhaps a gesture or facial expression reminded us of a negative or painful experience that our conscious mind has forgotten.

The subconscious is made up of memories and reactions to those memories that aren’t readily available to our conscious mind. A dog that frightened you as a child may be responsible for your aversion to dogs as an adult. There is no logical reason for the fear but if you could access your subconscious memories you would recognize that it came from an unpleasant experience.

Hypnosis puts you in touch with your subconscious and allows you to insert new instruction through suggestions. For instance, if you feel stress or anxiety every time you get on the freeway your therapist can suggest that the freeway is perfectly safe and pleasant. He or she can suggest the traffic jams are a good opportunity to listen to music or an audio book. The situation can be turned into a relaxing advantage through a few positive suggestions to the subconscious.

A hypnotherapist doesn’t help you deal with stress by turning you into an incurable optimist or anything else that changes your personality. He or she merely gives you options to deal with anxiety and stress in such a way that those options will come to mind before anything else. You will be able to deal with everyday stress in a positive rather than a negative manner.

Hypnosis will not make you invulnerable to stress and anxiety but your subconscious will then deal with it in different ways. You may even find it relaxing but it will no longer impact your life, your job and your relationships in a negative way.

For more information about how hypnotherapy can help to reduce stress and anxiety, please contact Susan Gallaher at Inner Awareness Hypnosis.

Article Source: http://www.hypnosisarticlesdirectory.com/rss.php?rss=267