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The Causes of Anxiety

While there can be many different causes of anxiety, they can be broadly put into two main categories, reactive anxiety (which is a feeling of anxiety caused by a current situation), and underlying anxiety (caused by a past even or series of events that are still affecting the person).

Reactive Anxiety

Reactive Anxiety (a feeling of anxiety caused by a current situation), can include a fear of flying, driving test nerves, or worrying while making a speech at a wedding, for example.

Reactive Anxiety can be helped by changing the way the person thinks about the anxiety. For example, if someone is afraid of flying, they are often reacting to the flight, or even the anticipation to the flight, because they are brooding about what they fear might happen during the flight. If that person, instead of brooding on that, broods about what their wonderful holiday is going to be like, and how proud of themselves they are going to feel when they step out of the airport at the other end, their perception of the problem can often be very different, very much more positive.

Reactive Anxiety can often be helped with treatments that help to change the perception of a problem. Hypnotherapy is a good example of a type of therapy that can help with this. For example, there many very good hypnosis downloads available that can help with this, that you can use at home.

Underlying Anxiety

When someone has an Underlying Anxiety, the anxiety that they feel doesn't mainly come from the situation that they find themselves in, it will often come from something that the current situation reminds them of.

For example, suppose someone (for whatever reason), develops a fear of 'being out of control'.

That person is highly likely to go on to live their life in such a way, that they are in control whenever possible.. they might go into a 'controlling' type profession, such as a teacher, army or police officer, or traffic warden, for example. They may spend their life avoiding situations where they feel out of control.

This person might develop a phobia later in life, that has an 'out of control' aspect to it. A fear of spiders or mice for example.

When they come into contact with a spider, or mouse, the amount of fear that they feel, is out of proportion to the actual 'danger' that the object or situation presents... the object has simply become a 'trigger', for them to feel their underlying anxiety.

To treat this kind of 'Underlying Anxiety', it's the Underlying Anxiety itself (in this case the fear of being out of control), that needs to be dealt with, rather than the 'trigger'.

Therapies such as Pure Hypnoanalysis aim to do just that. By resolving the underlying anxiety, the fear, phobia or anxiety can be completely resolved.

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If you're looking for help with an anxiety based problem, then we'll do what we can to help you.

There are lots of different ways we may be able to help you to feel better... we'd love to meet you for a chat at one of our practices, or, if you're not near us, there's the LifeShaping Process which is a superb, web based process that you can use at home!

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