Anticipatory Anxiety

Is most of your worrying just anticipatory anxiety about the future, rather than concerns about what's actually going on now?

Do you get eaten up with dread about upcoming events and how they will turn out?

Your ability to imagine a goal in life, and to work out detailed plans to deal with obstacles, is a truly valuable resource. Deciding what you'll do if things go wrong is key to effective planning. It would be downright silly to assume everything will always go smoothly. Flights will be delayed, rain will fall on garden parties, people will forget what they were going to say, tomato sauce will get spilled over you...

It happens to everyone.

Too much thinking leads to anticipatory anxiety

The trouble is, when you spend too much time thinking too closely about everything that could go wrong, the famous mind-body connection goes into overdrive. Your worrying thoughts can trigger the actual physical emotions that would accompany those unfortunate events. Your heart rate rises, adrenaline floods into your bloodstream, and your body gets ready to face what it believes is a real and present danger.

When really it's all in your imagination.

Now obviously, it doesn't make sense to say you should just stop preparing for future events, and planning for negative eventualities, altogether. That would be likely to bring you some perfectly real (as opposed to imaginary!) difficulties.

What's needed is a way to think about eventualities (good or bad) calmly. A way to calm down any emotional response that gets triggered, so you can stay detached, make sensible plans, and then get on with your life.

And hypnosis is a brilliant way for you to do just that.