Anxiety as a Negative Trance

By Jessica Levine

There are many different kinds of anxiety, ranging from mild free-floating feelings of unease to panic attacks. Some people experience anxiety in response to understandable triggers (deadlines, illness, arguments), others in response to factors harder to pinpoint, like changes in the weather, decisions, or general overwhelm. For some, anxiety is a kind of background noise, continually present for no clear reason. People who are chronically anxious have often been so since childhood, when they began to worry in response to stressful situations at home, in school, or in their community.

In almost all these cases, there is a history of negative experience and consequent beliefs. The mind remembers (perhaps at a subconscious level) some negative event(s) and imagines something similar is going to happen again. A negative projection about the future is made based on past negative experience. Anxiety is a bad habit in which the imagination, put to poor use, infects our more rational minds with fear.

Because anxiety largely originates from the imagination moving unconstructively between past and future, we can interrupt it by bringing our attention firmly into the present moment.

The first step in reducing anxiety is to short-circuit the physical processes that go with it. Whether you experience tightening of the chest, rapid heartbeat or a more elusive "hyper" or "suspended" feeling, you can reduce symptoms by counting from 1 to 3 on the in-breath, then 1 to 3 on the out-breath. Keep breathing and counting until you feel a change. Keep bringing your focus back to the numbers until your mind begins to settle and clear. One client tried this at home and said, "I did it for a couple of minutes and it didn't work." So I said, "Try it for ten minutes." Be persistent. It took you a lifetime to perfect this habit—why expect to be able to undo it in a couple of minutes? Remember, it's impossible to maintain a high level of anxiety and to breathe deeply and regularly at the same time!

Make contact with each of your senses, notice what each sense is registering outside the self and supply some detail for each sensory perception. Ask yourself, What am I seeing? What color or colors? Oh, there's the desk, a honey brown, there's the tree outside, dark green. What am I feeling? I can touch the arm of the chair, it's fuzzy and warm. I can touch the table, it's cool and smooth. Go through all the senses in this fashion, then begin again if necessary. This exercise brings one firmly into physical awareness of the moment.

When you are aware of the thoughts or beliefs triggering the anxiety, try repeating the opposite message to yourself. Thus, if you have the thought, "I'm going to flub my presentation and my boss will fire me," you would try the opposite: "I'll do fine and my job doesn't depend on one presentation anyway." Here's another example. Right now many people are worried about their financial future. If you have the thought, "The economy is going to continue to tank and I'm going to lose my job/never be able to retire," try the opposite, "The economy will eventually improve/I have or can acquire the skills I need to survive."

Of course, positive affirmations by themselves won't change the future, but they draw your attention to the imaginary basis of your fear. After all, why believe a pessimistic story more than a positive one? Since you're the story-teller, why not take charge and rewrite the script? By trying on more hopeful variations of the original thought, you can see the made-up nature of all the tales you tell yourself and influence future behavior.

Sometimes working on your own to "correct" negative self-talk simply doesn't work, even though you may be rational and persistent. You may feel on a gut level that your pessimistic projection is more "likely" because of your experience in a certain area of life. Returning to the example of weathering an economic downturn, someone whose parents experienced unemployment will suffer more anxiety than someone whose childhood was financially secure. Stress and trauma trigger a hypnotic state that preserves any associated feelings, thoughts and conclusions. This negatively charged trance can then be reactivated by subsequent stressful events.

Because stress and trauma cause the mind to go into spontaneous trance, it makes sense to address chronic anxiety by using hypnosis to unravel and rewrite the code.

Let's say you've done the breathing and repeated positive messages to yourself and are still suffering. When the deeper mind resists the light of logic, another approach is warranted. Many people find that they achieve greater clarity and are more able to absorb positive and rational affirmations when in a hypnotic state. Here again, persistence and repetition are key. Remember, anxiety developed over time as a coping strategy, and it may take time to break the habit. A good hypnotherapist will make you a personalized CD or audio file leading you into a trance and repeating the affirmations you need to hear.

One client of mine was experiencing general anxiety around work. I led her in a regression to cause, and she went back to some painful high school experiences in which she'd been ostracized. Assuming a punk persona, she had found herself repeatedly threatened with violence. In hypnosis, she had the opportunity to rewrite these memories. Using an imaginary pencil like the one in the child's story, "Harold's Purple Crayon," she drew herself a whole new world. In her alternate reality, she went to an art school in Paris and spent time relaxing and painting by the Seine. She experienced a feeling of release around work, which I was then able to reinforce with positive hypnotic suggestions.

This kind of work is accessible to everyone. People who have grown up with abusive or neglectful parents, without any positive relationships or experiences to draw upon, may find themselves creating alternate realities based on movies or even video games. That's fine. Positive fantasies, however playful or fantastic they seem, do serious work: Once accessed, that part can then be cultivated as a safe inner sanctuary, the starting point of journey toward a more joy-oriented life.

Occasionally I work with someone who cannot uncover the cause of an anxiety pattern or phobia, even in hypnosis. I had a client with a fear of traveling more than a few miles away from home. Crossing a bridge and taking an airplane were out of the question. She had a sense that her phobia had begun in high school but our attempts to understand it yielded no results. Sticking to a more direct approach, we used hypnosis to practice imagery of her moving a couple miles from home, then a few more, and so on, interspersing that imagery with affirmations, memories, and fantasies of a positive nature. Thus we gradually increased her tolerance of moving farther from home and were able to free her of her phobia.

In all these cases, the primary work involves retraining the imagination. We cannot change what we believe about ourselves until we change what we imagine about ourselves.

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