NEUROSCIENCE-BASED

Anxiety Treatment
anxiety

ANXIETY THERAPY 

A practical approach to freeing yourself from anxiety

Anxiety can be debilitating & extremely frightening. You may feel that there is little you can do for relief, that your symptoms control you and that you’re caught in a perpetual cycle battling against anxious thoughts and feelings, whilst trying to function and put a brave face on it all. For some, you’ve tried other anxiety therapy but found they were only partly helpful or a Band-Aid solution as they work in a conscious, analytical way, hoping that willpower alone will help you control it. Yet you know it is your unconscious mind that is running the show and needs changing, so it’s been an uphill battle with limited success!

For others, you may have been offered medication, but would rather not be on it and want to find a permanent way to reduce and control your anxiety without the need to pharmacologically control your symptoms.

Tam specialises in successfully treating anxiety, and is an area she is extremely passionate about. With the previous personal experience of dealing with it herself, as well as her expertise in this area, she not only understands it, but she has developed a highly effective approach to eradicating it. She knows that it does not need to control you and that there are ways not only to manage the symptoms and take charge of your thoughts but more importantly, to become a calm and confident person.

 

What is Anxiety?

As you may already know, anxiety is a normal process that helps us prepare for danger, and the totally normal reaction to things that we all experience such as it sounds, a new date or job interviews for example.  A bit of anxiety is normal and means we are adaptable to the world we live in. we all experience it from time to time and it can get our brain, mind and body in a helpful state to be focused and productive. It is essential for genuinely threatening circumstances where you need your fight flight or freeze response, as well as providing drive and momentum to get your project done before its due date.

However it becomes a problem when our brain and body is telling us that there is a danger when there isn’t, or when it seemingly comes out of nowhere, crippling you, causing you to be wading in your own pool of sweat and tears, shaking, feeling your heart is going to jump out of your mouth, like you can’t quite get your breath, or at its worst, die… and it’s all stopping you from getting on and thriving in the world around you. You mind teams up with your body and puts you in threat alert mode, even though you have no idea why. It’s an extreme and unnecessary response, it’s not useful or needed and yet, it doesn’t have to be this way.

No-one is born with anxiety, which may seem hard to believe right now, but that’s good news!

Anxiety is not something we get, have, or are. It’s something that we ‘do’.

Tam Johnston

We (by that I mean our brain!) learn to become anxious, just as others learn to become calm and confident overall. It starts as a pattern of behaviour, formed through the experiences and influences we have been exposed to.  Yes, agreed (if you’re full of ‘yes… buts’ right now!), there are certain things that can predispose us to be inclined towards anxious behaviour, including genetics, but ultimately and most importantly here, you (as we all do) have the ability both within yourself and your brain and physiology to regulate and re-balance this anxious behaviour. You can ‘un-learn’ the behaviours and stop the responses.  Neuroscience has shown us through something called neuroplasticity that you are able to change. Your brain is adaptable, no matter what age you are. Anxiety is a habitual pattern that you run, that often has become so ingrained that it runs unconsciously. It has its own, well-rehearsed pathway in the brain. I explain more about the causes here, but most importantly for you to know is that it can be changed, through us interrupting and breaking its connections and by us forming new ‘neural’ pathways.

Some presentations and Disorders of anxiety

Reactions to Stress and Trauma

Acute reaction to stress (acute stress reaction)

Delayed onset stress reaction (Adjustment reaction)

PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)

Other Anxiety Disorders

Panic disorder (Re-occurring panic attacks)

Generalised Anxiety Disorder, GAD (Effecting all areas of your life)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Hoarding, Skin picking and Hair pulling disorders

Body Dysmorphic Disorder

Avoidance behaviours or use of coping mechanisms, such as through increased alcohol and drug use, compulsive rituals, etc.

Phobic Anxiety Disorders

Social anxiety

Separation anxiety

Performance anxiety

Driving anxiety

Claustrophobia

Agoraphobia

Health anxiety

Shy bladder

Sexual anxiety

Other phobias

How we can help

Tam’s personal experience, medical background and training in applied neuroscience, NLP, targeted havening-therapy and CBT combines to bring a uniquely practical, scientific and therapeutic based approach to treating anxiety.

Her evidence and experience based program will help you:

  • Gentle resolve any underlying issues or events that have caused the anxiety, the deeper rooted and past causes that other therapies don’t clear out
  • Take you back to the drawing board to get you back in control, giving you clear understanding about how you create that anxiety in your thinking and physiology, which in turn through this understanding helps you recognise what is going on and how to take control of it
  • Break the unconscious patterns of thinking and behaviours that feed into anxiety, using integrated effective techniques and tools to change those neurological pathways
  • Use a revolutionary, scientific technique to alter uncomfortable bodily sensations, down-regulate’ and remove your emotional responses, meaning avoiding prolonged, uncomfortable re-exposure (desensitisation) that is common in other therapies.
  • Use the best and most effective cognitive techniques to help you change your unhelpful thought patterns, for good
  • Teach you a ground-breaking, evidence based process based on neuroscience to alter the state of your brain (known as your landscape) thereby reducing your vulnerability and susceptibility to threats and challenges, meaning you can finally approach situations calmly confidently
  • Identify the triggers, so it doesn’t ‘just happen’ form new responses and patterns for those triggers, as well as working with you to gain new and more effective strategies for dealing with stressful life events, manage working relationships, finding solutions, handle challenges and manage your state.

 

You can free yourself from it. Naturally, it will take you fully committing to the process and to the task in hand, but of course so does anything in order to get results! So if you’re looking for an expert in anxiety and you’re up for that, and ready and willing to take back your choices and control over your body and you want some fun along the way, give us a call. We would love nothing more than to help you make it happen.

Other specialities

Anxiety

PHOBIAS

SELF esteem

ptsd

trauma

stress

confidence

intensives