Anxiety and the cycle of emotions

Anxiety is unfortunately rather prevalent in modern society. It causes discomfort on all sorts of levels, stopping us from doing things in life, saying things that we need to say, planning for our future and so much more.

Different terms are used to describe the state of anxiety and may include worry and panic. Anxiety isn’t an emotion. It is an over-arousal of the nervous system caused by underlying emotions and when we resolve these, anxiety is greatly reduced.  

Hypnotherapy is a wonderfully flexible tool and combined with other therapies, can bring real relief to anxiety. For example, I use Integral Eye Movement as well which has a wonderful model for identifying and working with the different emotions that might underlie anxiety. 

A hypothetical scenario 

It is important to know that anxiety is future-focused. We might envisage worst-case scenarios, for example, imagining things that might happen as a result of our actions or indeed inactions. The imagination is powerful, and these kinds of ruminations can bring real distress. 

However, when examined more closely, we can see that a cycle of emotions has been entered. Take for example the following illustrative event. 

You go out to a party one evening and drink rather a lot of alcohol. In fact, you drink enough that you can’t remember the evening too well. The next day, you begin to wonder what you did and whether you embarrassed yourself in any way. Your mind begins to work overtime, you worry what others might have thought of you and you begin to feel angry with yourself for your lack of control, and even ashamed. The anxiety you feel over what you imagine you might have said and done remains with you, and, as well as berating yourself for your perceived failings, you vow to take measures to not let this happen again.  

Anxiety and the cycling of emotions 

Here we see a cycling through anxiety to anger to shame and back to anxiety with no resolution. This is commonly what happens with anxiety. Identifying what the emotions are in a person’s cycle of anxiety in any given arena means that we can address all aspects of it and bring relief.

Shame is in fact a retrospective emotion, so in this scenario it is possible that shame is an issue for the person and it has been triggered by this incident, and so how shame has manifested in this person’s history would be something to investigate and address, if necessary. 

Indeed, another person might not have had this reaction at all and may have simply viewed it as a good night out. 

Powerful background emotions 

In the background of anxiety, we can very often find emotions such as guilt, shame, regret and remorse. Sometimes a person is also prone to outbursts of anger and temper or feels anger internally.

The impact of some or all of these and possibly other emotions, will also have had an effect on the person’s sense of identity. This means we may have developed certain beliefs about the kind of person we are and ideas of our competence or incompetence in life. We may feel ashamed of ourselves for example, angry at ourselves for our perceived failings and guilty for the way we express ourselves. We need to tease these out and address all aspects to arrive at the best possible resolution. 

Rules and anxiety

This is an interesting aspect of the model of anxiety we use in Integral Eye Movement work. When we experience retrospective emotions, we do so because we break our own rules. These of course may be rules we have taken on from other people. In the example I gave earlier, I can feel regret or shame because I have a rule that I must never lose control for example or do something that might cause others to see me as foolish. The kinds of rules we hold for ourselves might also be ones that need addressing if they are contributing unnecessarily to our anxiety.

If I get angry or lose my temper, I do so because you have broken my rules. You may for example have said something to me that I felt was invalidating, you may have omitted to consider my feelings and so on. Again, the injunctions we hold that cause us distress may need investigation.  

When we feel anxious, we don’t know what the rules are in a certain arena. We don’t know how to act and what the expectations of us there may be. This is why a common view of those with public speaking anxiety is that they should remember everything they want to say, be word perfect and always present with a thoroughly polished delivery. As you can imagine, this unwritten expectation puts people in an extremely stressed and fearful place. In fact, many well-known speakers and those that speak for a living make mistakes, forget what they want to say and miss things out. The difference is that they don’t let it bother them unduly. We are human after all. 

It is interesting to note that those who grow up in a liberal environment are deemed more prone to anxiety. I have worked with more than one person whose parents lovingly told them they just wanted them to be happy, which resulted in a lack of structure and expectation. Guidance provides a container within which we can grow and develop. 

Moving forward

Once the emotions driving the anxiety are addressed as well as the identity implications, we can elaborate the changes with hypnotherapy and bed them down more fully so that more validating behaviours can come into play. You will already know what you want these to be for you.

Hypnotherapy can be very powerful in enabling you to see yourself acting in the way you want to in different arenas, so that the wanted behaviours simply become more natural for you in your daily life. Self-hypnosis can provide you with the means to continue working with these images so that you can really feel you are taking more control of your life.