Anxiety is not a choice but a very common yet complex condition that affects millions worldwide. Hypnotherapy, as opposed to many other therapies, directly impacts your nervous system, your thoughts patterns, and your body physiology, making it an effective fast relief from and longer term way to treat both high anxiety and generalised anxiety. Hypnosis can regulate your body anxious response, can redress your overactive nervous system threat-detection and fear, and can bring your mind into clearer emotionally balanced thinking.

The Physical Side of Anxiety and How Hypnotherapy Brings Relief

Anxiety is not just in the mind or emotions—it powerfully affects the body too. When you are anxious, your body goes into “fight-or-flight” mode, with the sympathetic nervous system flooding the system with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. This creates all-too-familiar physical symptoms: a racing heart, shallow breathing, tense muscles, sweating, reddening and blushing, and even digestive issues. Over time, this constant physical stress takes a toll, increasing brain-fog, making it hard to be focused, impacting sleep resulting in disturbed sleep or insomnia, lowering your immune function, giving you digestive issues. When unchecked, prologued background anxiety has a tendency to get worse and increase, leading to high anxiety, freezing, and or panic attacks.

Hypnotherapy activates the body’s “rest-and-digest” system, the parasympathetic nervous system, which changes the very experience you are having in your body. When in hypnosis, your breathing slows, heart rate decreases, and muscles release tension, providing immediate physical relief. Studies have shown that hypnosis lowers cortisol levels and relaxes areas of the brain linked to stress, creating a natural, balanced calm that becomes easier to access over time.

How Anxiety Works in the Mind—and How Hypnotherapy Can Help

For most, anxiety often begins in the mind, with patterns of worry and fear-filled thoughts that seem to run on autopilot. Our brains are wired to notice threats to keep us safe, if you are anxious this natural “threat detector” becomes overactive, constantly on the lookout for problems—even when no real danger exists. When feeling anxious, key parts of the brain, like the amygdala (which processes fear and emotions) and the prefrontal cortex (responsible for planning and reasoning), keep sustaining a cycle of worry and stress that feeds and increases anxiety.

Research shows that hypnotherapy reduces activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN), the area responsible for worry and self-focused thinking. Calming this part of the brain makes it easier to break free from loops of anxious thoughts, helping you experience a quieter, clearer mind. Additionally hypnotherapy empowers you with healthier thinking patterns that last because in hypnosis you become more cognitively (thinking) and emotionally flexible (see my article on how hypnosis works here and my blog entry on the specific mechanisms of hypnosis on anxiety here).

By guiding you into a deeply relaxed, focused state where your mind is open to new perspectives, I can then help you reshaping your anxious thoughts, replacing them with more healthy thoughts and responses. For example, someone with a phobia of public speaking can be guided to enjoy speaking in front of people and feeling both emotional, mental and physical confidence in their capacity to speak in that context, breaking the automatic link between public speaking and fear.

Taming Anxiety-Driven Emotions with Hypnotherapy

Anxiety and fear go hand-in-hand. When anxiety hits, it triggers intense feelings of fear. The brain’s amygdala is at the centre of these emotional reactions, flooding you with feelings that can be hard to shake. This experience of fear can spread to various situations—social events, crowded places, work presentations, getting on the tube, sexual relations —leading to patterns of avoidance and more stress, or even occasional or recurring panic attacks.

Studies reveal that hypnosis can lower activity in the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. At the same time, it increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotions. This combination leads to a calmer, more balanced emotional response, making hypnotherapy a highly effective way to address the emotional core of anxiety. So, a once-feared situation like public speaking becomes less about fear and more about confidence and control.

Hypnotherapy is a holistic approach for Treating Anxiety at All Levels

Hypnotherapy works on every level to treat anxiety—from breaking patterns of worry and reducing fear-driven emotions to calming the body’s stress response. By using hypnotherapy for anxiety, you can gain a holistic tool that addresses the mind, body, and emotions in one integrated approach. Research shows that hypnotherapy does not just mask symptoms; it helps rewire your response to anxiety, promoting lasting resilience and calm.

Whether you are dealing with generalized anxiety, social anxiety, or specific phobias, hypnotherapy offers a proven path to relief. As a trained hypnotherapist, I can help you replace worry with calm, transform fear into confidence, and soothe your body’s stress response, allowing you to live a more peaceful, fulfilling life.

During the treatment, we will use hypnosis to directly affect the physical and physiological experience of anxiety, and at the same time we will seek to identify and changing maladaptive thoughts and behaviours. In this sense the work we will do will bring together effective hypnotherapy and coaching. Working on several levels at the same time, we will address the immediate body responses, and the thinking around your experience of feeling anxious, whether it is high anxiety or a more background experience.

Hypnosis offers a neuropsychologically informed approach that integrates the mind and body, providing a holistic method for managing both high anxiety and low anxiety symptoms. As a result, hypnotherapy is increasingly considered a valuable, science-based tool in the broader landscape of mental health care.

While hypnosis is a very effective way to treat anxiety, treatment outcome vary from person to person, and are based on adherence to treatment and variable life circumstances.

References:

Halsband, Ulrike, and Thomas Gerhard Wolf. 2019. “Functional Changes in Brain Activity After Hypnosis: Neurobiological Mechanisms and Application to Patients with a Specific Phobia—Limitations and Future Directions.” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 67 (4): 449–74. doi:10.1080/00207144.2019.1650551.

Brugnoli, Maria Paola, Giancarlo Pesce, Emanuela Pasin, Maria Francesca Basile, Stefano Tamburin, & Enrico Polati. “The role of clinical hypnosis and self-hypnosis to relief pain and anxiety in severe chronic diseases in palliative care: a 2-year long- term follow-up of treatment in a nonrandomized clinical trial.” Annals of Palliative Medicine [Online], 7.1 (2018): 17-31. Web. 14 Nov. 2024 https://apm.amegroups.org/article/view/17664/html

Pei-Ying Chen et al. “The Effect of Hypnosis on Anxiety in Patients With Cancer: A Meta‐Analysis.” Worldviews on Evidence‐Based Nursing, 14 (2017): 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1111/wvn.12215.

T. Rotaru et al. “A Meta-Analysis for the Efficacy of Hypnotherapy in Alleviating PTSD Symptoms.” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 64 (2016): 116 – 136. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2015.1099406.

Ling Chiu et al. “THE EFFECTIVENESS OF HYPNOTHERAPY IN THE TREATMENT OF CHINESE PSYCHIATRIC PATIENTS.” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 66 (2018): 315 – 330. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2018.1461472.