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In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy we often use the example of the stress bucket. When it becomes full, we can lose intellectual control and our primitive behaviour patterns of anxiety, anger and depression can start to come out.
So how do we create this anxiety that causes us to move from the intellectual, sensible part of the brain to the angry, anxious and depressed part? Anxiety is caused by negative thinking. It is not the events of one's life that necessarily cause the perception of crisis. No, if that were the case everyone working in a hospital would be suffering from panic attacks and we know that is not the case. So it must be our thought patterns surrounding those events in our lives.
Every negative thought we have is converted into anxiety. We can create anxiety by negatively forecasting the future, big things like: 'I'll never get that promotion.' ' I'll never win that race.' I'll never find someone to share my life with.' It can be small things like that meeting at work. Here we should remember that the mind cannot tell the difference between imagination and reality. Intellectually you know that the meeting is going to go OK because they generally do, don't they? But being you, you start thinking about things that can go wrong. You might think about it 50 times. The actual meeting goes quite well but you have attended 51 meetings and 50 of those have been disasters.
We can also create anxiety by negatively introspecting about the past. We can replay events from our past that did not go well or made us feel bad. Every time we do this, we are adding to our stress bucket.
Thankfully, there are ways to empty your stress bucket to keep you feeling relaxed and free from anxiety so you can stay in your intellectual mind and make good decisions based on a proper assessment of the situation.
If you want to know more about how to reduce anxiety and restrict the amount of stress you are putting in your bucket, give me a call for a free consultation or send me a message.