What is Anxiety? What Therapy works for anxiety?

On average one in four people will experience anxiety at some stage in their life. During a year over two million Australians experience anxiety.

What Is Anxiety — And How Can You Actually Calm It?

Anxiety isn’t the same as stress. It’s deeper, more physical, more overwhelming — and if you’ve experienced it, you know that it can take over your whole body.

Where stress might come and go depending on life’s pressures, anxiety often lingers. It can show up even when there’s no real danger. Your body responds as if there is — and suddenly, your heart’s racing, your chest is tight, your mind’s spiralling, and you feel trapped in fear.

Symptoms of Anxiety

Anxiety symptoms can be wide-ranging — and they’re not just in your head. Here are some of the most common:

• Fast or irregular heartbeat

• Tightness or weight in the chest

• Racing or catastrophic thoughts

• A sense of impending doom

• Nausea, gut tightening, or IBS

• Sweaty palms or trembling hands

• Feeling like you can’t breathe

• Panic attacks or hyperventilation

• Feeling like you’re going to die

• Needing to urinate frequently

• Insomnia or disrupted sleep

• Fear of getting anxious (anticipatory anxiety)

One of the most frustrating aspects of anxiety is that the fear of anxiety becomes a trigger in itself. You might start avoiding places or situations where you’ve previously had an anxious episode — school, a plane, a social event — and that avoidance reinforces the fear.

Anxiety Is a Misfiring Safety System

At its core, anxiety is your body’s fight-flight-freeze response. It’s designed to keep you safe. But in people with chronic anxiety, this survival response is triggered inappropriately — sometimes by a thought, a memory, or just a heightened nervous system with no obvious cause.

Your body and mind are reacting as if you’re in danger — even when you’re not.The solution? We don’t fight the anxiety. We teach your system to calm down. We show it how to feel safe again.

What Causes Anxiety?

Anxiety can be triggered by many factors — often a combination of biology, life experience, and nervous system sensitivity. Common causes include:

• Chronic stress

• Unresolved trauma (abuse, death, accidents, etc.)

• PTSD or CPTSD

• Genetic predisposition to anxiety

• Not feeling safe in childhood or at home

• Bullying or social trauma

• High pressure or perfectionism

• Inner critics or harsh self-talk

• Parenting stress or hypervigilance as a carer

  
  

There’s also growing conversation around the impact of modern technology and electromagnetic frequencies on the nervous system — something that may contribute to the rise in anxiety in children and teens. You can read more about that in this article:🔗 10 Reasons Teens Have So Much Anxiety Today – Psychology Today

How to Calm Anxiety: Start with the Body

One of the most powerful (and underrated) tools for managing anxiety is breathwork.

Try this simple breathing technique:

Inhale for 4 secondsHold for 2 secondsExhale for 6 seconds (slowly)

Repeat this for a few minutes. It may seem simple, but this rhythm speaks directly to your nervous system and signals: You are safe. Over time, it reduces the intensity of your fight-or-flight response.

Hypnotherapy for Anxiety Relief

Hypnotherapy is another powerful tool for calming anxiety. In a trance state — which feels a lot like deep relaxation or guided meditation — your nervous system settles, and your unconscious mind becomes open to suggestion and change.

In this state, we can work with the parts of you that are still in survival mode — the “protectors” trying to keep you safe by keeping you on high alert. Hypnosis allows us to retrain those parts and build new, calmer pathways.

We may also use parts therapy, inner child healing, or regression to clear past experiences that are keeping you locked in fear.

Working with the Body|Somatically in Trance

Many of my clients are surprised to discover where they hold their anxiety. They might assume it’s in their shoulders or neck — but during trance, they notice it’s actually in the belly or chest.

Somatic mapping (noticing sensations in the body) helps you:

• Understand your unique anxiety signature and work with settling the alarm system in the body using touch and obeservation - leaving your 'worry brain' behind.

• Identify early warning signs

• Learn how to calm your system before it escalates using breath, touch or awareness

• Help the body complete the stress cycle and return to balance

This is where real healing begins — not just coping, but changing how your body responds to life.

By combining hypnotherapy and body-based therapy, you begin to work with your anxiety — not just try to think your way out of it. We target it at it's core. Under the alarm is often trauma or a distressed inner child.

Psychotherapeutic Integration: Working With Your Inner System

In addition to hypnotherapy, I work psycho-therapeutically with clients to address what’s driving the anxiety underneath the surface. This might involve:

• Reconnecting with a younger version of you that felt unsafe

• Working with parts of you that need control to feel safe

• Soothing a tough inner critic that’s always on alert

• Understanding where your hypervigilance began and why it persists

This is deep, effective work. It helps bring all aspects of your inner world into balance — so you’re not constantly battling with yourself.

Thoughts Can Trigger Anxiety Too

Your thoughts have power. If you’re constantly catastrophising, expecting the worst, or running through fearful scenarios, you’re activating your body’s fear response.

In therapy, we work on identifying your thought patterns and then retraining your brain to respond differently — using techniques from CBT, NLP, and mindfulness-based approaches.

There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Cure — But There Is Hope

Anxiety is personal. It doesn’t show up the same way in everyone, and it doesn’t leave the same way either. But in my experience, a multi-layered approach that addresses both body and mind is incredibly effective.

We don’t need to erase anxiety — we just need to help your system feel safe again. When the body learns it’s okay to relax, everything begins to change.

Want to Learn More?

I’ve developed a body-mind approach for anxiety that combines:

• Hypnotherapy

• Somatic therapy

• Breathwork

• Parts work & subconscious reprogramming

• Nervous system regulation tools

You don’t have to live in fear of your own fear. Healing is possible — and it starts by learning how to feel safe in your body again.

In addition working psycho-therapeutically can also help. This involves working with your 'protector' that is attempting to keep you safe and regaining authority of your system. It can involve working with past experiences that have switched on hyper vigilance. It may be working with parts of you that feel unsafe if not in control or a tough inner critic.

Working somatically with the body/mind connection while in a trance can really help. While in a trance and deeply relaxed, if triggered to go into an anxious state you will be able to map really easily what parts of the body respond and how to control them. People are often surprised when they do this exercise as they may have thought they held anxiety in their neck and they may find it's actually their belly that tightens, making sense of their chronically bad digestion issues.

Thoughts can also trigger anxiety so it's useful to understand what thoughts you are having at the time you become anxious. By retraining the brain you can bring about change.

There is no single pathway to relieve anxiety but I find a combination therapy for the body/mind is highly effective.