If you suffer from anxiety (including the self-doubt, procrastination, self-esteem, and confidence issues that often accompany it), would you like to know how to recover?

If you genuinely want to end anxiety, once and for all, and be free to live your life the way you want, then read on.

Let me tell you what often goes on in the head of a sufferer.

Your Brain – Your Control Centre

Our brain is designed to keep us safe and conserve energy, and it loves familiarity. Imagine you are presented with an opportunity, whether for work, social, or business.

The brain darts back to the past and has a quick scan:

• “Have we done anything like this before?”

Let’s say it comes back to the present with the following answer:

• “Yes, we have, and it didn’t work out that well; I was disappointed, hurt, uncomfortable, terrified”, etc.

These same feelings will then be projected into your future. It’s scary as hell. So, again, back to the “cave”, to safety, except it’s not safety, it’s stuckness and fear. This, by the way, happens in a nanosecond. You find yourself right back where it’s familiar, it’s disappointing and limiting your life, but at least you know it.

Hence, you stay exactly where you are, in your comfort zone: no stretch, no momentum, and no change. After all, you can just “manage” it, like you always have.

Feeling Safe

• This happens because you don’t feel safe because your nervous system isn’t registering safety. It doesn’t matter if it’s obsessive thoughts, panic or OCD. At the centre of this is the vagus nerve, the body’s main communication pathway linking the gut, heart, and brain. When it’s dysregulated, your whole system shifts into protection mode, making calm, connection, and ease feel out of reach.
• Instead of all three being coherent, it’s chaotic; you’re basically in your limbic brain, which is survival mode. So nothing new or creative is available to you.

Anxiety – a misfiring of neurons

Your thoughts have become so habitual that you now believe it’s who you are. That, then, becomes a belief, felt in the body. The body is now running you.

In order to recover from anxiety, we have to first get the nervous system calm and stable. Then teach the brain to make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar.

Teach it to know that there is no danger, that the “what ifs” are just thoughts, don’t fight them, you’ll give them energy, let them be, and any physical symptoms are just an extension of the worry, because the body is part of the subconscious mind and it’s running you right now.

We can then teach it new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. Luckily, the brain is neuroplastic, so it can be rewired in various ways.

Rewiring techniques

Rewiring the brain is simple; however, it does require three elements before you even start:

• Commitment & Consistency
• Energy
• Desire – to have your freedom

Therein lies the problem; most sufferers just put up with it. They run unconscious beliefs such as:

• “It’s just how I am. I’ve tried everything, but nothing works.”

Often, underlying this is an embedded belief: “What if I fail?”. This is interesting. Why does the brain have this mechanism? Well, it’s a kind of ‘safety valve’ protecting you in a very deep way. This is something we delve into in client sessions.

The bottom line is that, because the brain likes familiarity and to conserve energy, it doesn’t want to be challenged, so we become lazy and settle for a lower standard of well-being. This applies to many areas in life.

We often fall back on the mindset of “well, it’s not so bad; I can get by.”

Stop for a moment and really think about this.

Can you imagine any successful person having that attitude?

You are choosing to limit your quality of life out of fear of leaving that comfortable cave. This leads to stunted growth and stagnation.

However, when you are taught to retrain your brain and feel more confident, stable and in control, your energy shifts and you develop a new identity, the non-anxious you. You are then on the road out of anxiety. Imagine what else you could achieve with this new attitude?

To recover from anxiety, I use a multimodal approach combining hypnosis, neuroscience, EMDR, breathing, and body techniques. We have to treat the ‘whole’ of you, not just the mind.

If you’d like to talk deeper about recovering from anxiety, book your free 30-minute consultation below.