Sometimes anxiety is perpetuated by other people’s anxious responses, causing anxiety to bounces from one person to another, growing intensity until there’s some big explosion.
How can we avoid escalating this? By keeping a low quiet voice. Talking quietly and seriously can help to create a leveling in their emotions. Avoid bombarding them with more information or things to do until they’ve calmed down and avoid getting caught up in the drama yourself.
Anxiety has lots of energy and it can be a sign of repressed energy. So, if you’re someone who is predisposed to anxiety – if you’re doing anxiety a lot of the time, make sure that you are moving enough, make sure you’re getting enough exercise. Anxiety has a lot of adrenaline in it and that adrenaline needs to be used.
Remember that NLP can be really useful for anxiety because sometimes anxiety is an unconscious response, meaning that the person behaving anxiously doesn’t know what started it or why.
This is especially likely to happen if the anxiety has become a habit.
Usually there is an event that started off the habit – a very intense event, or a period of time when things remained intense for uncomfortably long.
We’re all exposed to anxiety inducing situations of course. If you’re driving and a fox runs out in front of your car, your anxiety will spike maybe even peaking into panic, but after a few minutes your brain realises that the troublesome situation is over and the problem is gone. The emotions pass and you get on with your life.
If someone is suffering with anxiety, they might find that those same emotions (a spike of anxiety, maybe peaking into panic) occur in random and unnecessary situations, such as going to the fridge to get some milk.
The brain mistakenly trips into hazard mode and as well as it not making sense in that moment, it’s less easy to draw a halt to it because not knowing what the hazard is, makes it impossible to acknowledge and convince yourself that the hazard is gone. In times like these developing the skills of self reassurance is helpful. It might also help to take the anxiety as a message or a reminder to do something positive, like make a good decision or to practice mindfulness in that moment.
This can also happen when someone has an underlying, unaddressed worry. In this instance, self reassurance is less likely to work, because the communication here is “You’re still not dealing with the thing. You know the thing that we keep avoiding addressing and hoping will just sort it’s out.”
You might not have had a conversation with yourself about this yet, let alone anyone else but if you don’t air this thing out in the open soon, and start looking at what options you have for resolving it, the chances are the anxiety is going to keep poking at you like a blow fly trying to get out of an already open window of your house in the summer time.
Working with an NLP coach is a great way to explore what those hidden anxieties might mean and most importantly, what you can do to resolve them.
People Building in an NLP and personal development training company for teachers and professionals working in education.
For more information about our courses designed to reduce stress in teachers and avoid ‘teacher burn-out’, contact us on 0345 3192 666
By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk
