Have you ever felt that your heart is beating so fast in response to a stressful situation? Or maybe, your palms may get sweaty when you’re confronted with a remarkable event or task? That’s how anxiety kicks in as a response to our body’s natural response to stress.
If you have not recognized your anxiety triggers yet, here are some common: Meeting your partner’s family for the first time, your first day at a new job, or giving a presentation or speech in front of a lot of people. Everyone has various kinds of triggers, and identifying each of them is one of the most critical steps to coping and controlling your anxiety attacks. According to the National Alliance Mental Illness (NAMI), around 40 million American adults have an anxiety disorder. And these statistics make anxiety disorder the most common mental illness in America.
Recognizing your triggers can take some self-reflection and time. And here are some popular methods and their strengths and weaknesses:
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – CBT
CBT therapy highlights rational and logical ways to see into a person’s intrusive views. And, therefore, looking for ways to change their emotional states.
Strengths: Ancient teachings around Stoicism derive cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Stoicism preaches emotional state control, rational thinking, and is a philosophy that emphasizes the need for harmony and balances no matter what takes place externally. The strength behind CBT treatment is that it opens up to new choices on how to deal with our problems. Sometimes these choices aren’t at the forefront of our thoughts since our feelings and emotions are the very parts of us, making all these decisions.
CBT therapy provides some helping tools that can help an anxiety patient take off the old fearful lenses they’ve been using, and put on new ones. CBT has the potential to drive a person towards superior thinking, which requires turning any outer or inner challenge into an indeterminate experience that can be learned from. Superior thinking is what reflects your mental health.
Weaknesses: CBT therapy can be quite weak in the face of severe distress and anxiety. Rational and logical thinking strategies can’t easily override a nervous system that is highly invested in survival and fear at every turn. And also, CBT is challenged by its incapability to track down and reframe past traumatic events. Its strength resides in the current moment, with milder to medium forms of inner distress and newly diagnosed anxiety patients.
Hypnosis
Hypnosis is the altered state of work that presents direct access to a person’s subconscious mind.
Strengths: Hypnosis works faster if a person is focused, absorbed, and entirely united with the process. The most effective types of hypnosis are strategies that engage one’s body, as well. Somatic engagement is a crucial aspect of hypnosis because it connects a person’s past experiences and trauma to where they have stored the repressed sentiments and emotions in their body. We are all always in a trance anyway. Hypnosis’s main goal is to get out of the thoughts that aren’t helpful and into the thoughts that are helpful.
Hypnosis gives us all the chance to neglect what is known as the critical factor (the subconscious mind’s security guard). This is the protective part of one’s subconscious mind that allows the ideas that were placed there as from our childhood experiences, rejections, and anything that disturbs our mind. This is one of the reasons why positive thinking strategies are failing over and over again. To replace new core beliefs and thoughts, a person must learn how to overcome their critical factor.
Weaknesses: Altered state of work is what helps anxiety to grow, and it’s an essential component to healing. One of the weaknesses of this procedure is that when it comes to mild or more profound levels of work is in a person’s incapability to let go of the process. Hypnosis work may be quite challenging at the start of anxiety warriors as they have a hard time letting go.
And also, it doesn’t offer any tools or tips to be used throughout the day. The effectiveness of hypnosis therapy depends on the sessions that are taking place. Once that every course is over a person is reliant entirely on how the hypnotic session went.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming – NLP
Neuro-Linguistic Programming was founded by Linguist John Grinder and Dr. Richard Bandler. NLP includes the study of successful human behavior. It is profoundly connected to understanding the habits of successful thinkers.
Strengths: Neuro-Linguistic Programming provides adequate tools based on asking anxiety patients appropriate questions and manipulating the picture in our heads. Most of the time, these pictures are the representations of one’s future negative situations and past traumas. We may not be aware of these facts all the time, but NLP can help to alter the thoughts and emotions for the better. This program is heavily involved in mirroring one’s external and internal ways of living a fulfilling life.
This is important for anyone because this program tells us that we don’t have anything new to invent to comfort our inner state. All we have to do is to follow the lifestyle or ways of other successful people who are happy and are where we want to be in our future self. NLP provides us with the option to make comparatively significant progress during sessions and as well as utilize tools.
Weaknesses: One of the weaknesses of NLP is that it can get complicated sometimes. If you still didn’t get the desired outcome even if a focused practitioner helped you, then all the process may feel like more work that only develops more anxiety. Another weakness maybe when it comes to NLP; if you have not done enough imagery work or meditation, the pictures you are looking to alter through your visualization may not be there.
To Conclude
Sometimes people believe that meditation, exercising, and going nature heal their anxiety. But these are the factors that lead you to the information that you need to improve the source of your anxiety issues. This will help you to uncover the missing pieces of information that you then take to methods such as NLP, hypnosis, and energy healing to solve them.
These surface-level healing methods can be taken into account to reduce one’s stress. Consulting a mental health therapist and seeking ways to heal your anxiety issues seems to be a good way. They can help you with finding the right remedies with your issues to resolve your problem once and for all.
Author: Mandy Kloppers
Mandy is a qualified therapist who treats depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, trauma, and many other types of mental health issues. She provides online therapy around the world for those needing support and also provides relationship counselling.
