Anxiety, what is it?
Anxiety is a term that refers to fear or worry, but it also is used to describe a state of feeling in the body and or the mind. The medical definition of anxiety is “A feeling of apprehension and fear, characterized by physical symptoms such as palpitations, sweating, and feelings of stress”.
There are several types of anxiety disorders, the most common being ‘generalized anxiety disorder’ or GAD. Other anxiety disorders include separation anxiety, selective mutism, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and agoraphobia.
Anxiety disorders are the most common category of psychiatric diagnoses, and can also be caused by a medical illness, or other medical conditions. Use of or withdrawal from certain medications or substances can also cause an anxiety disorder.
Anxiety can produce a wide range of both physical, mental and emotional symptoms.
Physical symptoms can include:
- strong, fast or irregular heartbeat
- shortness of breath or shallow breathing
- sweating
- dizziness
- tiredness
- muscle aches and tension
- trembling or shaking
- dry mouth
- stomach-ache or feeling sick
- headaches
- difficulty falling or staying asleep
Mental and emotional symptoms can include:
- racing thoughts
- reoccurring thoughts
- worries and obsessions
- difficulty concentrating
- irritability and disturbed sleep.
What’s happening?
The physical, mental and emotional symptoms of anxiety can be connected to the body's normal "fight-or-flight" response. The fight or flight response refers to the body’s natural reaction to danger. When we perceive a threat, the sympathetic nervous system becomes active. This means that the brain sends signals through the nervous system to activate an emergency response. More accurately, the hypothalamus in the brain sends signals through the sympathetic nerves to activate the fight or flight response. This begins a whole series of bio-chemical reactions.
Most importantly, neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline, and hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, are released from various glands in the brain and body. This response “switches on” when we perceive a threat. A threat can come in the form of real danger, for example if you are threatened with physical violence or if you step in front of a moving vehicle. However, it can also be activated by perceived threats, such as being late for work or school, before sitting an exam or doing an interview. Situations where you would say, you feel “nervous”. Whether real danger or a perceived threat, the body immediately switches on the fight or flight response.
Before someone goes to perform on stage, or play a competitive game in sport, people usually feel nervous to some extent. The body releases stress hormones and neurotransmitters to prepare you for action. These stress hormones and neurotransmitters have many effects on the body many of which can be felt physically. Heart rate increases along with blood pressure, blood flow is directed into the arms and legs and away from the skin and the gut. That is why when you are nervous you get “butterflies” in your gut as that strange feeling is described. Also, you may become more vigilant or aware of your surroundings or get “tunnel vision” where you become more focused but may be unable to think critically or clearly and assess a situation correctly.
As part of this response the body shuts down all non-essential functions such as digestion, healing and repair, it also suppresses the immune system. Your subconscious mind through the autonomic nervous system makes the decision that all the bodies resources are required to get you out of immediate danger so that you can survive. These pre-programmed responses are a survival mechanism and are there because of the evolutionary process and have been instrumental in allowing human beings and other creatures to survive to this point in the earth’s history. It is important to know how these responses work and to understand where they came from. Through this understanding, we can take more control over them, even conscious control to some extent.
These responses are very useful when we need to get out of danger, or to help us in performance. However, these responses become a problem when they are turned on too easily, not turned off when danger is absent, or when the response is too strong.
Excessive anxiety that causes distress or impairment, that interferes with normal function, or causes avoidance of important activities and people in life, is considered an anxiety disorder.
Where does anxiety come from??
You may be asking now where does anxiety come from?
There are multiple factors…
- In reaction to shock or trauma
- Situational anxiety
- Intuitive response
- Birth shock
- Damaged or weakened energy field
- Gene faults
In reaction to shock or trauma
If a person has experienced a lot of shock or trauma in their lives, this can be the primary factor in their anxiety. This is due to the fight, flight or freeze response having been switched on too much too frequently and their subconscious mind is not allowing that response to switch off completely. This is the case in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which is commonly associated with the effects of battle on soldiers. However, you do not have to have been on the battlefield to suffer with PTSD, any traumatic events can trigger this. Also, on-going situations can be a cause, for example those living or growing up in an abusive home or environment, people that get stuck in abusive relationships and even from bullying or abuse at school or in the workplace. People will often have lasting effects from these situations even when they permanently change that situation or leave the abusive environment.
Intuitive response/situational anxiety
Candace Pert a famous scientist and one of those that is credited with first discovering the receptors for opioids in the body and many more after that, wrote “the body is inseparable from the mind, that we are one unit a MindBody or BodyMind”. What we feel in our bodies is due to the interaction of stress hormones, neurotransmitters and peptides. But also, our emotions and perceptions influence the balance of these Bio-chemicals in turn affecting how we feel. It is a two-way network1. She described in her book “molecules of emotion” that the gut feeling that people often experience is due to the peptides, neurotransmitters and receptors that line the gut and that excitement and anger increase gut motility, while contentment decreases it. This demonstrates the link between what we feel emotionally and the physical responses of the body.
The gut feeling can also be associated with our intuition. Intuition is defined as “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning”.
So, we must bring awareness to the fact that often we get a feeling about something without being fully conscious of why we are getting that feeling. This is the body’s way of communicating that it instinctively feels positively or negatively about something. Your subconscious mind is evaluating everything around you at the neural-biological level.
This can be a situation at school or work it can be with another person such as a partner, a friend, a colleague, boss, teacher or anyone you might meet. It is important to listen to your body and understand its messages.
We can consciously put ourselves into situations that internally we are not happy to be in, because at a conscious level we make decisions on what we think is best for us or will bring us closer to achieving our goals or gaining something. Whether it be material or related to our social standing. When we do this, we can often feel anxious as our fight or flight reaction switches on and again this is the body telling you “I don’t like this situation, or I feel threatened”.
Of course, throughout our lives we must do things we don’t like or enjoy and often have to interact with people that we do not like or see as downright threatening, especially in the modern work or study environment as you may not have a choice as to who you work with or are put into a classroom with. However, it is important to become more in tune with these responses and listen to your body’s messages. Ultimately this can allow one to reduce the strength of these response or switch them off altogether.
Often, assistance from the outside is needed and this will usually come from therapists, doctors, health-care practitioners, family and friends or others. HiddenMind therapists can assist the person and facilitate healing, so that the fight/flight or freeze reaction can be reset back to normal for that person. Therefore, helping to eliminate anxiety or reduce its intensity and /or duration making it much more manageable.
Birth shock
Often if there has been a traumatic birth the body and the brain can be damaged, affecting development and therefore have not become fully functional. The stress response in the body can be overactive from very early stages of childhood. What is described as anxiety in teenagers or adults can be the equivalent of ADD / ADHD in children.
Please read the article on birth shock for more information.
Damaged or weakened energy field
If your Energy Field or Auric field is damaged or weak then you can be more easily affected by people around you this would be a significant factor in social anxiety disorder, agoraphobia and even bullying.
Of course, body language, facial expression, tone of voice and words can all have a significant impact on a person’s reaction to others. However, most communication is non-verbal, and it is tone that communicates much more than the words themselves.
through your whole body not just the tympanic membrane in your ears. It is this vibration that is picked up through your energy field.
Check out this 4-minute video by Dr. Steven Porges discussing his polyvagal theory for more information on how we react differently to those around us depending on how safe we feel and how we even can misread facial expression based on those feelings.
From an energetic point of view if our energy field is damaged or weak then you may be much more sensitive to other people’s energy and can feel overwhelmed in crowds, being in enclosed spaces with others or even from certain individuals. Please read the article on energy fields for more information.
Gene faults
There can be genetic factors that play a role in all disorders, even in anxiety. However, it is not just the genes we inherit, but also environmental influences which impact how the genes express themselves. These changes can then be passed to subsequent generations. This is known as epigenetic inheritance. If previous generations of family have been through a lot of trauma, that can be carried through the bloodline and affect a person’s gene expression. Perpetuating gene faults can be identified by a therapist through the HiddenMind Investigative and Corrective Sound Protocol (HM I&CS). Please read the article on perpetuating gene faults for more information.
How HiddenMind therapy helps with anxiety??
- Engages with the autonomic nervous system through the subconscious mind
- Helps to turns off the fight/ flight or freeze reaction in the body
- Helps the person process the emotions associated with past trauma
- Allows the body to return to its own natural and optimum stress reaction
- Helps the person understand where their anxiety is coming from
- Brings more awareness to what triggers it and how to switch it off
- Works beyond the level of talk therapy
- Helps individuals to become more in tune with their body and to listen to and understand its messages
A person’s body can be overproducing or underproducing peptides, stress hormones and neurotransmitters. Through the HM I&CS protocol the percentage of over or under production can be measured by picking up the energetic signature, they can then be reset back to the optimum or normal levels. The person’s own subconscious mind through the autonomic nervous system resets production levels back to optimum within a few days to a few weeks. Often people will feel a change even over the three or four days of therapy. It can of course take some time for these levels to reach their optimum, but it is amazing as to how quickly the body can respond, in some cases, as soon as a correction made within the subconscious mind.
If a HM therapist picks up the energetic signature that the person’s body is overproducing adrenaline and/or cortisol by 15 – 25%, it can be assumed that that person will have symptoms of mild anxiety. We would associate a measure of over 25 – 40% with symptoms of a moderate anxiety disorder and a measure of 40% overproduction or more suggests the person has a severe anxiety disorder.
Overproduction is defined by elevated levels during routine activity such as when a person is in a relaxed situation such as sitting down at home, carrying our normal daily tasks or part of their work routine, not in an acute situation.sfor example by 30%, this meaninhisngted levels during routine active home, carrying our normal daily tasks or part of their wor Meaning their fight/flight response is switched on without a threat or real danger, when there is no need for the response to be stimulated.”
This can lead the person to feel anxious. It also means that when their fight/flight or stress response should be activated when there is a legitimate need for it, their body will produce the optimum amount of these stress hormones plus the extra 30% which can leave people feeling extremely anxious and overwhelmed as the physiological and psychological changes occur.
By engaging with the subconscious the therapist essentially plugs in to the body’s software and measures the levels of production energetically. This process alone can stimulate the subconscious mind to reset these levels back to normal through the autonomic nervous system.
However, there must also be a reason for this malfunction and the over or under production of stress hormones, therefore certain shocks or traumas may be identified. By identifying the shock(s) or trauma(s) that have caused the malfunction or that triggered a massive stress response, therapists are essentially helping to start the process of deleting the negative or overloading response associated with them. The memory of the events associated with the shocks/traumas are not deleted, they are mostly retained but the bio-chemical response in the person’s body changes.
For example, when a person is suffering with PTSD after a trauma the fight/flight reaction in their body is activated too easily or not switching off correctly. The same can happen to people experiencing a low to moderate amount of stress or pressure but over a prolonged period.
When people experience shock or trauma they often tend to supress or repress emotions, emotions such as fear, worry, terror, sadness, grief, anger, frustration, unhappiness and others. And when someone has experienced more trauma in their life, they are more likely to experience anxiety or have an anxiety disorder. Again, often the case is that the stress or fight/flight response has been switched on too much too frequently and their subconscious mind is not allowing that response to switch off completely. HM therapists work directly with the subconscious to reprogram the response back to the normal level for that person and that it only activates when appropriate. This helps in all types of anxiety disorders from separation anxiety, selective mutism, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, Obsessive compulsive disorder and agoraphobia not just for generalised anxiety disorder.
To understand more on how and why this happens please read the article on tension myositis syndrome as it explains how we all have tendency to supress and repress emotions within the subconscious mind and that it is part of a mechanism of protection for one’s self.
Sound frequency
Sound frequency is used to amplify the corrective process, as sound is vibration it will vibrate through the entire body and the energy systems of the body, such as the human energy field and chakras. It helps to break up “stuck” emotion as it vibrates. These “stuck” emotions are repressed and supressed emotions.
Check out these lectures by Eileen Mckusik a prominent sound healing practitioner and Dr. Jerry Tenant a highly influential medical doctor, ophthalmologist and naturopathic doctor for more information on how we hold on to emotions in our bodies and the effects that has.
Jerry Tennant: Healing is Voltage -- The Physics of Emotions | EU2017
Eileen McKusick: Human Bioelectricity and the EU Model | EU2017
HM Bio-Energy therapy also works at this level because it is a bio-electrical therapy and effects the nervous system and can correct the transmission of electrical impulse through the nerves as there is often an electrical fault where the nervous system itself is malfunctioning, therefore the signals received by glands will be compromised and this can in turn affect the output of those glands, which are the peptides, neurotransmitters and hormones.
It also works because we store emotions in the energy field, HM Bio-Energy therapists work around the body to clear the Energy field that surrounds every person.
HM therapy has helped many people suffering with anxiety, it is one of the most frequent ailments we deal with in our clinics. Please read our client testimonial section for some of those people’s stories and their experience of the therapy and the benefits they gained from it.