The importance of learning relaxation skills 

During our first appointment, one of the things we will focus on is learning how to fully relax with specific relaxation skills practice. This may surprise you since you have come to me to help you with hypnotherapyfor the anxiety you are struggling with, but as you know, people who struggle with anxiety will find it hard to relax. 

For example, someone who has Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is going to be living with a huge amount of anxiety and muscle tension – and will have done for some time. They may struggle to recall a time when they truly felt fully relaxed and instead, they always feel tightly wound up as they constantly lookout for a threat. Just the perception of a threat triggers the stress response that prepares the body to fight or flight causing the body’s defences to assemble and get ready. This is exhausting as the person constantly feels tense and on edge.

Another person may be experiencing social anxiety, meaning they either avoid as much social interaction as is possible, or, if they must attend an event, they will spend a lot of time agonising over it and feeling a sense of dread each time they think of it. 

And the person who has an upcoming presentation due at the next team meeting and who has a fear of public speaking – this is going to impact their time out of work as they think ahead to Monday during their precious time off at the weekend. This person will not be able to enjoy feeling relaxed in this scenario at work when the time comes, and will instead will be experiencing stressful, physical symptoms during the presentation such as rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, sweating and generally feeling panicked. 

Everyone knows that being anxious causes stress and muscular tension. Some stress here and there is fine and normal, if the body can then switch the stress response off after a short space of time. If this doesn’t occur, it begins to affect all the bodily systems since there is no time to repair and power down in the parasympathetic system (repair and restore mode) as the body is always in the sympathetic (fight or flight) mode. This affects the immune system, and can cause stomach issues, palpitations – and of course extreme muscle tightness – amongst other things.  A person in this state will have little motivation to embrace change and plough forward with pleasure and joy.

Therefore it is so important to start with the client first learning some fantastic relaxation coping skills. Once this has been achieved, we can use the power of hypnotherapy where the client gets to try out their new ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling in whatever scenario they have been struggling with – and all the while feeling totally relaxed in body and mind. This cannot be achieved if the person has not relaxed in such a long time that they don’t know how to.

These simple but effective techniques need to be learned and understood first. Once this has taken place the client takes away these great skills and goes on to practice relaxation in the days afterwards, building on their skills. 

It only takes a little time each day to do this and in doing so, you will be resetting your central nervous system, and allowing you body to truly relax, repair and uncoil.  A great time to do this is at the start of the day, setting you up in relaxation default right from the get-go. Couple this with listening to your hypnosis audio/s and quickly you are going to enjoy feeling confident, good about life - and like you can do anything. In fact, clients report feeling so much better after just one session!

It may be hard right now to imagine things feeling better and being free from the clouds of anxiety. I fully understand it can feel overwhelming not knowing how to move forward, so much so that zero steps are taken. However, avoiding taking just one step forward, and continuing to allow anxiety to ruin life’s experiences, is far worse than starting by learning some coping skills. 

Do you feel it’s time to take a step towards leaving anxiety behind? If you do, drop me an email via jackie@innermedicine.co.uk to arrange a no-obligation chat on how cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy can help you in so many ways.