Facing anxiety: How hypnotherapy can help men overcome anxiety

Anxiety is what I hear about a lot as a therapist. If you're suffering from anxiety, you might get the gut-clench at 3am when your brain decides to rehash every bad decision from the past 20 years. You're lying awake, your brain goes into overdrive, and there is no more sleep. Does that sound familiar?

For a lot of middle-aged men, anxiety is always there. It lives in the background. You tell yourself to crack on. Work harder. Man up. Pour a drink. Scroll on your phone. Have another drink. Numb it out. And of course, it's true for women, too.

The brutal truth is that anxiety isn’t going anywhere. Not until you stop running from it and actually face it. You need to start exploring where it is coming from and what triggers it.

Untreated anxiety can turn into something else:

• addiction
• alcohol abuse
• emotional shutdown
• disconnection from your partner
• rage at your kids

You might be feeling like you’re losing your grip, but pretending you’re fine.

You’re not alone in this. I see it all the time in my work. Men in their late thirties, forties or fifties who’ve done everything “right”. Career. Mortgage. Family. Maybe a divorce or two. But inside? It’s like a cracked windscreen. Functioning, yet the pressure’s building.

Why men don't talk about it

What I have found in my practice is that most men don’t want to talk about their feelings. We weren’t raised that way. Vulnerability got you teased. Sensitivity was a weakness. Yes, we got on with it. Most of us never questioned it. And now this is turning into chest-tightening anxiety and creeping addiction.

I’ve worked with men who drank a bottle of wine every night just to get to sleep. Others who hit the gym obsessively to outrun their feelings. Some who numbed out with porn, work, gambling, food, scrolling. The addiction doesn’t matter. The why behind it does.

How can hypnotherapy help? 

Hypnotherapy is about accessing the unconscious patterns running your life. The hidden beliefs that keep you stuck. The old stories that say you’re not enough or you’ll never change. That’s what fuels the anxiety. That’s what keeps your hand going back to the bottle. It’s not weakness. It’s programming which is picked up in habits over the years.

And that is where hypnotherapy works. It (kind of) bypasses the logical, surface-level stuff and dives into the root of the anxiety. It helps you meet:

• The 10-year-old boy who felt invisible.
• The 18-year-old who got rejected and decided never to feel again.
• The 32-year-old who quietly gave up on his dreams because “it’s too late now”.

In trance, you're not asleep. You’re focused and present. You tap into your unconscious. And that's where real change happens.

One man might need hypnotherapy for anxiety and guided regression to explore a recurring fear of abandonment. We then work on rebuilding confidence and direction. Another might need mindfulness practice alongside hypnosis to shift trauma that lives in his nervous system. Every approach and combination of modalities is unique.

Maybe you’re a high-functioning executive drinking to manage stress. We go under the hood. Hypnosis to address the anxiety. Therapeutic coaching to rewire habits. 

An integrated approach

As an integrative therapist, I use hypnotherapy alongside other tools. I've written about using parts (internal family systems) before, but I've also explored other modalities, including Gestalt, TA (transactional analysis), and SFBT (solution-focused brief therapy), which are great to be combined with hypnosis. Regression, where we explore the past, works really well, too. 

Alongside my therapeutic practice, I've been recording over 100 episodes of my podcast, Man Up/Man Down, where we interview men about their journey and experience. Whether that's erectile dysfunction, body dysmorphia or suicide attempts. We talk about the raw stuff and what makes or breaks us men. The stuff no one wants to talk about.

Because men are still dying from silence. From shame. From trying to push through anxiety and addiction. From not knowing help exists that isn't about labels or medication or 12-step meetings, that just don’t resonate.

Hypnotherapy gives you a way in. A gentle, powerful doorway to clarity and to feeling like yourself again. Or maybe feeling for the first time.

As a middle-aged bloke myself, I know how resistant we can be. How conditioned we are to “sort it ourselves”. Spoiler alert: if you could’ve, you would’ve by now.

If anxiety is running the show, if addiction is creeping in, if you’re snapping at your kids or lying awake wondering, 'Is this it?', then maybe it’s time to try something different.

You’re not broken. You’ve just been surviving. Let’s talk about what thriving could look like.