Glasgow Anxiety Therapy

This is National Anger Awareness Week. Most of us get angry from time to time. But if we get angry often and easily, unable to resist the urge to flail out and unable to control our actions, then we need to take things in hand.

Anger not only damages relationships, but our own health too. All those fight or flight hormones flooding into the bloodstream cause a range of problems - high blood pressure, lowered resistance to illness, chronic back pain, stroke, insomnia, skin problems, depression, alcoholism. These risks have been shown to be associated with failure to control anger responses.

So in Anger Awareness Week, here are some tips.

When you notice the signs (the red curtain coming down, the faster heart rate, the dry mouth and many more) step back. If you can leave the room, so much the better. When your fight or flight hormones are flooding your bloodstream, you have a choice. Try flight instead of fight.

Go for a run or a brisk walk. This gets those hormones used up and out of your body.

Count backwards from ten.

Breathe slowly. Breathe in deeply, hold it at the top till it is uncomfortable, then breathe out slowly. Simple, but effective.
If you tend to breathe lightly just in your chest rather than down in your belly (like athletes do) then learning belly breathing would be useful. Yoga teachers know how to do this.

As a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist, I can help you to change the style of thinking that could be contributing to your anger. Maybe other people just don`t respond to you as they should. Or they ought to do the things you want them to do. If you hear yourself say Ought, Should or Must, then  your demands of others might be unreasonable. If you feel hard done by, this will make you angry. The more you think these thoughts, the more miserable you will be. And when you feel bad, you get angry, your self-confidence plummets, your self-esteem drops.

Challenging these ways of thinking will help to feel calm and in control, confident, strong and empowered. You could learn how to do this by coming to see me, or try some useful self-help books, like David Burns `Feeling Good`.

Health worries, when they are unrelated to any physical problem, are a cause of considerable personal distress. If you are concerned all the time that you have a terrible and undiagnosed illness, then you are going to be seeking help all the time. You are going to be calling on the doctor, searching the internet for some cause for your symptoms. And then once you have found the illness that matches the symptoms, the worries will increase because the doctor doesn't agree with the self-diagnosis. The technical name is health anxiety disorder and 10% of people attending hospital have it.

The good news is that cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy is a very effective treatment, requiring no risky invasive procedures.

One of the characteristics of health anxiety is hypervigilance and body scanning. A sufferer will be constantly on the lookout for uncomfortable bodily sensations. They pay close attention to them, and scan the body for supporting symptoms. As a result of this constant self-focus, the perception of the symptoms increases.

Hyperventilation is often a bedfellow of health anxiety. It is the source of many of the symptoms - chest pains, tingling, numbness, and many more. Just learning that you can recreate these symptoms at will, demonstrating that they are temporary phenomena and not at all dangerous, can be a source of considerable comfort.

Imagine you can hear a party going on while you're trying to sleep at night. The more you pay attention to all the noises, the music, the laughing, the cars revving, the more annoying it becomes and the more you focus on it and you feel it is getting louder and louder. You just can't stop noticing it. As the sounds get louder, so your distress increases. It is the same with health anxiety. The more you focus on the symptoms, the worse they feel. This self-focused attention becomes constant and distressing so that the person just can't shift their attention to anything else.

The approach in cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy aims to shift the focus away from the self. The techniques are simple and effective, with plenty of evidence to back it up. Mmm, evidence. That is something you tend to discount if you have health anxiety! No matter what the doctor tells you, you just don't believe it. And so to a bit of doctor shopping in search of someone who takes your symptoms seriously. The symptoms are distressing, and cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy will help you get rid of them. Well worth a try!!