How To Stop Feeling Anxious For No Reason

When you feel anxious for no reason, you are experiencing a form of self-hypnosis. If you feel anxious when there is no actual threat present, then you are experiencing thoughts that your mind is mistaking for reality. That is one definition of hypnotic phenomenon – to experience an imagined idea as more real than reality.

So how do you stop feeling anxious for no reason? Learn to understand the illusionary nature of your thoughts and feelings and you will recognise there is no actual threat. All thoughts and feelings are neutral, regardless of their content, and you suffer when you mistake the content of the thoughts for reality.

Anxiety is a warning system. Sometimes the warning system has a bloody good point and it's well worth listening to it for your own wellbeing. If this is the case then it is useful information to act upon, but there is no need to be overwhelmed by it.

In other situations it might be that you start feeling anxious and there is no threat present. In this case, the feeling is incorrect, it is not useful information. If you ask yourself in that moment 'where's the threat?' your mind might try to answer you 'this might happen' or 'that happened' casting forwards or backwards in time to when there was or might be a threat. In this moment though, these thoughts are just thoughts and they are not a threat to you. These thoughts are either an image in your mind or words in your mind – a reimagining of past or imagined future. Imagined words and images are not a threat to you regardless of that they are saying. If they feel like a threat then you are mistaking those thoughts for reality – you are experiencing an imagined idea as more real than the reality of the current moment. This is a detrimental form of self-hypnosis.

If you cannot identify an anxious story, then you are experiencing the anxious feeling as a threat. Now some people experience anxiety as a churning sensation in their stomach, others as a raised heart rate, others as heat somewhere in their body, or nausea – anxiety is experienced differently by different people because anxiety is not a feeling. It is a concept that you learn as you grow up. As soon as you label a sensation as anxiety it becomes threatening to you. If you feel anxious for no reason then you can identify the feeling, and sit with it. What does it feel like if you experience the sensations without labelling it anxiety? Just feel the sensation as a sensation without that label. You will find that it stops escalating, starts feeling more neutral or the anxious feeling stops completely. The feeling is not a threat to you.

I do a lot of work with clients along these lines together with more traditional hypnotherapy techniques. I call it un-hypnosis?

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