Negative Self-Hypnosis: Fueling the Anxiety Fire
Are you adding fuel to the fire of your anxiety with negative hypnosis?
It feels inescapable—the event that panics you not only overwhelms you in the moment, but also sucks all the air out of the days and weeks leading up to it. You see yourself terrified and really uncomfortable at the event, feeling all that muscle tension, nausea and jumpiness even now as you inhabit the dread and fear. Whether it’s something like a fear of public speaking/presentations, a phobia about flying, panic about medical appointments, or any number of things that can flip a person out—it takes up more and more space in your life as it balloons out past the time boundaries of the event itself, and, unfortunately, you might be just making it a whole lot worse.
understanding Hypnosis
First off, let’s unpack what hypnosis is for a minute, before we dive into negative self-hypnosis. Hypnosis happens to all of us, on the regular, and much of the time we are doing it on our own. All of us go in and out of a bit of a trance state whenever we focus our attention inward—we can be daydreaming, absorbed in a three hour movie that did NOT feel like three hours, or just so caught up somewhere else in our own minds that it feels like we drove our car home on autopilot, barely registering anything on the way. This trance state can condition our emotional responses and open us up to learning, even when we don’t know we’re learning. I would have to review a math textbook really hard to remember how to use the quadratic formula to solve for that pesky x, but I could absolutely sing you a whole variety of tv show theme songs of the 1980’s and 90’s. I didn’t set out to learn those theme songs, but they stuck a whole lot more than all the effort I put into to high school math. I will also probably start to actually salivate if you describe the details of an amazing chocolate cake to me. Much like Pavlov’s dogs that salivated to the sound of the bell because they had learned to associate the bell with food, I can just hear the words associated with a chocolate cake and have a reaction that mirrors what would happen if it that cake were right in front of me. We are amazing in this capacity for using this non-conscious learning and emotional conditioning. But that doesn’t always work in our favor.
Imagination Working against you
We love to think about imagination as a really cool thing that helps us be innovative and creative. And it is really cool like that! But, that same powerful skill can be misused and work against us as well. Chronic worrying or persistent rumination—picturing all the many ways everything could or has gone wrong, over and over again—is imagination gone rogue. The same inner processes that produce daydreaming and storytelling get hijacked into this train of thought that makes life really unpleasant and hard for us. Hopeless expectations that go along with depression also fit into this set up. So we want to be mindful about how we use this powerful tool of the imagination.
NEgative Hypnosis in Action
See if this sounds familiar. You’ve got an event coming up that makes you really nervous—something you’ve maybe had difficult experiences with in the past. Perhaps it’s a kind of medical appointment or an interview or an airplane flight, if you’re someone that gets nervous about those things. You imagine yourself in that future situation. And while you are imagining this, you’re feeling anxious, wound up, tense, sick, or just plain miserable and freaked out right now. [Bad news here, folks. When you are feeling strong emotions while imagining something, your unconscious mind is building a connection, an association, between that feeling and that situation. This is called hypnotic rehearsal.] Now, repeat this imagining while freaking out and feeling miserable dozens of times, over and over again, before you go do the event.
When you finally do show up to the event in question, you’ve trained your unconscious mind to jump right in with the feelings and emotions that you’ve already paired with the event in your imagination—in this case, anxiety, tension and fear. You’ve been rehearsing this connection so well that your unconscious mind thinks that these feelings are the required response to this event.
When you are in a hole, stop digging
Once we know that we are doing something that’s making life harder for us, we can be aware of it and stop doing it! Becoming mindful of when we are creating these feedback loops of discomfort, fear and learning can help us get back on track by detangling all these threads that have gotten mixed up together. For clients wanting to use hypnotherapy with me, we work on separating out those feelings of panic from thoughts of the events, and then creating new, more pleasant, more helpful associations. Clients learn how to mentally rehearse events while feeling calm and relaxed so that their minds become primed to be more calm, relaxed and confident when those events do happen.
Even without using hypnosis and hypnotherapy, try this for yourself. If you’ve got a challenging event coming up, try only thinking about it while you are feeling really good—either deeply relaxed in rest or really strong and confident. I know that most things seem a lot easier when I think about them after some vigorous exercise or even a nice, long walk. My mind harnesses all those positive feelings of accomplishment and strength and links them up to thoughts about what I need to do, providing a sense of, “I’ve got this!”.
Our imaginations are incredibly powerful! Just like Spiderman knows—with great power, comes great responsibility. Use your powerful imagination in ways that work for you, not against you, and enjoy the benefits of a mind that’s on your side.
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