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Rediscover Your Calm: A Strategic Approach to Overcoming Anxiety and Depression
Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or burnt out? These are common feelings that often lead people to seek help from mental health professionals. But when you dig deeper, anxiety and depression are often at the root of these experiences, no matter what label you give them. Understanding how these challenges manifest and how a strategic approach can effectively address them is crucial in choosing the right therapy for you.
Contrary to popular belief, anxiety and depression aren’t hereditary or fixed conditions. They’re learned processes—patterns of thinking and reacting that we pick up as we grow, often from those around us. If you were raised by an anxious parent, you might have unconsciously adopted their anxious responses. Over time, these responses can become so ingrained that they feel like the only way to react to certain situations. But here’s the good news: just as we learned these patterns, we can unlearn them and create new, healthier ways to respond.
Strategic Hypnotherapy works on the premise that learning a new response is similar to learning any new skill. Think about how you learned to ride a bike—you didn’t just hop on and start cycling perfectly. You learned each step, practiced them, and eventually, it became second nature. In the same way, you can learn the steps to respond differently to anxiety or depression. Hypnotherapy helps by reinforcing these new, more helpful responses in your subconscious, making them feel natural and automatic.
Anxiety is often rooted in future-based thinking. If you struggle with anxiety, you might find yourself fixated on worst-case scenarios, constantly worrying about things that haven’t happened and may never occur. With a strategic approach, we help you learn to distinguish between thoughts that are useful and grounded in the present and those that are simply unhelpful fears about the future. This process empowers you to live more fully in the moment, with a greater sense of control and calm.
Depression, on the other hand, tends to be tied to past-based thinking. If you’re dealing with depression, you might spend a lot of time replaying past events, focusing on what went wrong and how you’ve been affected. Unfortunately, we can’t change the past, but we can change how we relate to it. A strategic approach helps you learn how to let go of the past and move forward, building a future that reflects the life you truly want to live.
If you’re ready to break free from the cycles of anxiety and depression and start creating the life you desire, I invite you to take the first step. Book a free 20-minute consultation today, and let’s explore how Strategic Hypnotherapy can support you in this journey. Your path to calm, balance, and a brighter future begins here.
Stop Overthinking by Asking for What You Need
If you are an overthinker then you are familiar with having thoughts whirl around your head as you work through all the ‘what ifs’, including many that are almost completely impossible, and none of which are good outcomes, because you don’t spend your time creating positive scenarios do you?
This makes you spiral as you imagine outcomes that are worse than anything that could actually happen, and means that you are in a state of anxiety about things that you have created in your own mind. The good news is that you can stop this pattern with a simple step. Identify what you need and ask for it. And you can, can you not? I will illustrate what I mean with an example.
A friend of mine noticed that her partner was quite distracted and wasn’t making plans to do anything together with her as they discussed what events they had coming up over the next few weeks. In her overthinking mind she started to worry that he was not happy with their relationship, found spending time with her to be a chore, and wasn’t giving her priority in his life. This then spiralled into her thinking about what would happen when their relationship ended, whether she would feel able to meet other people with a view to a relationship with someone else, how she would tell their children, what their finances would look like, who would get the dog, etc. Over the course of a few days she became more and more distressed as she thought about this scenario, and became more withdrawn from communication with him as she tried to protect herself from the pain of rejection.
Except that he hadn’t rejected her. When we spoke about this I suggested that she think about what she needed – did she need more information, did she need a conversation, did she need a break? At the heart of it she needed to know whether he was unhappy in their relationship. After some encouragement she asked him. And discovered that he was really happy with his relationship with her, was completely unaware of her thoughts and feelings that things were falling apart, and had been distracted because he was exhausted after finishing a big project at work. He had taken her quietness as her understanding that he needed some down time to recover, and had been completely oblivious to her distress. Sound familiar? If she had asked for what she needed earlier in the process, she would have saved herself a lot of distress and worry, and understood what he needed and how it impacted her. Her sleep would definitely have been better!
Sometimes what you need is not an answer from a person but a piece of information for a work project, or a decision from a business about a contract. Recognizing that this is what is needed can be enough to stop the overthinking as it helps you to understand what is within your control and what is out of your control. If you can’t make a decision about something until you have that piece of information, then no amount of rumination at 3am is going to change the outcome.
Next time you find yourself stuck in the overthinking loop, try asking yourself ‘what do I need’ as a pattern interrupter, and say it out loud to help you move forward.
3 steps to avoid taking on other people’s drama
As adults we often find ourselves dealing with friends, family or colleagues who are experiencing big feelings, emotions, or dramas. It can be hard to know how to show up and support them, without taking on the burden of their drama as your own. In supporting clients on how to approach this challenge I refer to one of the best tools I learnt during my parenting journey – emotion coaching. This technique is based on the work of Dr John Gottman and is a useful way to help your children learn to understand and regulate their emotions. It is a technique designed to validate your children’s feelings, to help them name their feelings and to be able to sit with uncomfortable feelings. (Gottman Institute)
As a therapist I have supported my clients to understand that the principals of emotion coaching can be used by to navigate many relationships, whether with their offspring (small or grown), friends, colleagues or acquaintances. A simple three step approach to support your friends without taking on their feelings is set out below.
3 steps to avoid taking on other people’s drama (with a bonus optional 4th step!)
1. Be curious
The first step in managing these emotional interactions as an adult is to use curiosity rather than ‘telling’. This means that instead of telling your friend that you can see that they are angry, you ask them if they are feeling angry. A great phrase for this is ‘I wonder if you are feeling……(insert the feeling you are observing.) By asking them in a curious way you are showing them that you are open to their answer, that you might not be correct, and that you care about them.
2. Validate
Once the other person has defined how they are feeling, the next step is validation. “ I can see how hard that must be”, “ that sounds tough’, or “those are difficult feelings to have”. Validation is about seeing the person’s experience. You aren’t agreeing with it, you aren’t judging it, you are just seeing it for what it is.
3. Let them sit with their feelings
And the final step can feel like you are doing nothing. It is the step where you let them sit with their feelings, offering your supportive presence, but not offering to solve the problem, carry the burden, or fix everything for them. (A good neutral sympathetic humming noise can be a great filler here.) This gives the person time to understand that you have heard them, and you understand their problem, and can see the effect it is having on them. Often this is enough to help the other person. When we step in to solve the problem we can take away their agency to solve the problem themselves.
4. Optional fourth step – ask what they need from you to help solve the problem.
If you feel that the person still needs more from you, then asking them what they need from you to help them, rather than telling them what you will do to solve the problem leaves them responsible for their feelings, but knowing that you are there to support them if possible.
Give this approach a try, and see how it feels and what the impact is. It might take a bit of practice to change from offering a solution straight away, but with time you can make this your default response and still maintain your connections with friends without carrying their burden on top of your own. Let me know how it works for you!
Does Anxiety give us magical powers?
A client recently commented that she was reluctant to talk about the good things that could happen as it could ‘jinx it’. My response to her was ‘Wow – let’s talk about your magical powers! If you can stop something good happening by talking about it, can you make something good happen by talking about it too? Or are your magical powers only limited to stopping the good stuff in life?’
She of course laughed and said that she doesn’t have magical powers but understood the point that I was making. If what we say and don’t say could impact our future negatively, why can’t it also impact our future positively? The reality is that when we have a well-trodden anxiety response we look at the future through the lens of all the things that can go wrong, and we forget to also look for the things that can go well. When we are looking for the things that can go wrong, we subconsciously look for evidence to support our expectation. When we expect things to go badly we see the missed parking spot as a sign that we don’t deserve good things, or the rainy day as a sign that the universe is against us. We see a person walking slowly in front of us as deliberately trying to make us late, and the neighbours playing loud music as them trying to stop us from enjoying our TV show.
If we look for the good in each day and reframe our thoughts, we start to look for the evidence to support the expectation that good things happen. The missed parking spot becomes a chance to find another spot that is closer to where we are going, the rain is an excuse to break out our favourite umbrella or be grateful for the garden being watered. The person walking slowly is a chance to smile at them as we walk past, or to be grateful that we are healthy enough to walk faster than them. The loud music next door can be an excuse for a dance party in the kitchen, or to knock on the neighbour’s door to have a chat. Saying that ‘good things will happen today’ can change our whole demeanour so that we are looking for good things to support our statement.
Using our magical powers for good and setting ourselves up to find the moments of joy in each day is a powerful way to reframe our thinking and improve our mental health. How can you reframe your day today?
