Hypnosis: A Tranquilizer You Were Born With The Roots of Anxiety – Part Two

As we noted in the part one - A Tranquilizer You Were Born With The Roots of Anxiety, chronic anxiety can have many causes, and it affects different people in different ways. However, wherever it comes from, every case of chronic anxiety has at least two things in common.

First, while some people have an inborn tendency to worry a little more than others, no one is born with severe anxiety; it always has a cause—trauma. It may be physical, or emotional. It may be one terrible event, or a series of small things, like constant ridicule, that add up over time. When I was a pre-teen boy, my friends and I used to play a dumb little game where we took turns hitting each other’s biceps with a knuckle. The first few punches were nothing, but eventually the pain of the repeated punches was excruciating. The child who is repeatedly told he or she is stupid suffers the same eventual pain. The difference is that the pain from those punches on the arm went away. The pain of ridicule lasts.

The second thing that is true of chronic anxiety is that it engenders a sense of helplessness and impotence, a feeling that you cannot prevent bad things from happening to you. That, not surprisingly, leads to passivity, and an unwillingness to try to deal with negative people and events.

Sooner or later, most people suffering from chronic anxiety seek help. Too often, that means going to a physician and getting a prescription for whatever anti-anxiety medication is the latest cure-all. Or they may go online and seek out “natural” tranquilizers—kava, or lemon balm, or stinging nettle—to ease their anxiety.

There are numerous problems with that approach. A big one is that many of these medications are habit-forming, so that you actually wind up with two problems—your anxiety and drug dependence. Many of these medications, even if they help at first, lose their effectiveness over time; and many of them, often the most expensive ones, don’t work at all, right from the beginning.

There is a much better way. A growing body of research has clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of hypnosis and hypnotherapy in combating anxiety. The truth is, your brain has its own anti-anxiety chemicals, known as neurotransmitters, that can be mobilized to deal with anxiety.

In the coming blogs we will take a look at how that works.