When many people think of anxiety, they consider it to be a bad thing. However, anxiety is useful in small doses, and this likely is the reason we have developed to have a capacity for anxiety. A feeling of fear or apprehension is very useful if you are about to climb a cliff with narrow paths, since a worry that you might fall helps you be more careful. Mild anxiety about performing well on a test or during an athletic activity helps push you to prepare more intensively. Mild anxiety about driving helps you keep a closer eye on other drivers and road conditions, which can prevent accidents. Some anxiety about your children’s well-being also is useful for a parent as it helps us question when we are doing our best for our kids. Finally, a child’s anxiety about being separated from their parent helps them stay nearby their parent so that they can be watched.
Anxiety becomes a disorder when it interferes, rather than helps, with life. When anxiety becomes overwhelming you may choose to avoid climbing a mountain, taking a test, participating in sports, driving, or leaving your child alone. Treatment is appropriate and can be very helpful in the case of an anxiety disorder. Sometimes, as an aid for the avoidance, the body develops physical symptoms such as headaches, racing heart, stomachaches, shortness of breath or chest pain. This is helpful because the symptoms can give a socially acceptable excuse for not participating in an activity. The affected person and their health care provider might not even realize at first that the physical symptoms are the result of the anxiety, and that the way to overcome these is to deal with the underlying anxiety.
An anxiety disorder might develop when we become overwhelmed by life events, as a way of helping us avoid such situations. Some of us are more likely to become overwhelmed because of our genetic make-up, how we have seen our parents react, when we are tired because of insufficient sleep, or we are not thinking properly as a result of drug or alcohol use.
Hypnosis can be used to treat anxiety disorder by helping children deal better with the issues that are triggering it. For example, a child who is overwhelmed by his schoolwork can be taught to relax with hypnotic imagery, focus on one assignment at a time, and offered help from a tutor. A child who was traumatized because of a past event can be taught how to use hypnosis to reconstruct her memory so that she could feel calmer while thinking of the traumatic event. This can help her better process it and ultimately let go of some of the anxiety-causing feelings that were triggered by the event.
Sometimes anxiety is irrational, such as a belief that the sun is likely to explode tomorrow, not touching something properly can cause a family member to fall ill (a common thought for patients with obsessive compulsive disorder) or that if a child does not fall asleep something bad will happen the following day. To deal with irrational anxiety it can be useful to discuss the likelihood of the feared event. For example, the sun has not exploded in 4 billion years. What are the chances it will explode tomorrow?
Children need to understand that in order to overcome their anxiety disorder they need to learn to deal with it calmly. Avoiding the cause of their anxiety helps only temporarily, and actually serves to increase the anxiety as the child becomes even less capable of facing the underlying issue. For example, during the pandemic quarantine, some of my patients with anxiety about social interactions experienced worsening anxiety because their social isolation decreased the amount of practice they had in interacting with others.
As children consistently use hypnotic techniques to remain calm while dealing with their fears, their anxiety can improve gradually. Since some anxiety is useful, as discussed earlier, the goal of therapy is not to eliminate anxiety, but rather to reduce it to a level that it becomes helpful.
Hypnosis and counseling can help overcome anxiety by teaching children coping skills to remain calm while they deal constructively with the trigger of their anxiety.
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