Do you suffer from anxiety, fear or panic attacks?

Why is it that so many people suffer from anxiety? The majority of my clients come to me to resolve issues directly or indirectly related to fear, anxiety and some times panic attacks. Whether it is worrying about an upcoming presentation or exam, getting on a plane, performing on stage or at an interview, giving birth, dying and leaving a family behind, getting the next promotion, failing to meet Mr Right or like me thinking that harm would befall my children if we were separated for a lengthy period of time, feeling anxious is normal and every one of us has felt anxious or afraid every now and then. It is when the anxiety is so intense and chronic that it cripples you and prevents you from leading a normal life that it becomes a problem that needs to be addressed.

For as far as I can remember, my dad, was an overly anxious man. He worried constantly and was mostly in an agitated state of mind. So  when in turn I suffered from anxiety I didn’t really give it much attention and just thought that it was genetic. I worried about everything and anything and spent sleepless nights tossing and turning in my bed churning all kinds of negative thoughts about future events. I used to envy people around me that looked calm and relaxed and wished that I was born with such a gene.

Then at the age of seventeen something terrible happened. I said goodbye to my cousin, who was also my best friend, as she was going on a holiday to London with her parents the next day. The next morning my cousin was dead. I was in shock. No one had prepared me for such a catastrophe. One-day life was normal; the next day life for me came to a standstill. I found it difficult to make sense of this new reality. So I buried my feelings deep within the crevices of my unconscious mind and somehow found a way to move on.

When I became a parent for the first time, a new kind of anxiety was added to my previous lists of anxieties: separation anxiety. I found the prospect of being separated from my child extremely unbearable. I felt anxious and afraid that something terrible would happen to her and I won’t be present to save her. This anxiety not only affected me personally but also had a great negative impact on our family life and stood in the way of my husband having the chance to naturally bond with his daughter, as I felt terrified leaving her even with him. It was insane! I first assumed that the way I felt was part and parcel of motherhood. However as I listened to other mums I realised that something was seriously wrong with the way I felt and behaved. I needed to do something about this and fast.

I dealt with this fear the way I have dealt with all my other fears and anxieties, I took a plunge. At first I started slowly to do the very thing I feared the most. I allowed my husband to take my child for a stroll in the pram and I stayed home. I allowed my neighbour, who had been offering countless times, to babysit my child while my husband and I went out for a meal one evening. And when my daughter was two I dared to send her to nursery for three mornings a week.  There was one problem with this solution. I suffered immensely in those few hours when I was away from my daughter and didn’t really have any quality time. I wanted to find a way to be comfortable in those situations. I wanted to be anxiety free. The real solution to my problem came much later when I came across NLP.

According to Dr David Burns, there are many forms of anxieties: fears/phobias, performance related anxieties, obsessive-compulsive behaviours, social anxieties and post-traumatic disorders. And there are also many theories and therefore treatments relating to anxieties. Many people prefer taking a pill to get rid of their anxieties. But since anxiety relates to our thoughts about a future event, it makes more sense and perhaps a more lasting and empowering solution if we were to change those thoughts about those upcoming events in order to get rid of our anxieties once and for all. That is exactly what NLP offered me.

Discover your strategy

If you take my case for example, my anxiety came as a result of my having thoughts of all kinds about horrible events that might happen to my daughter while she was away from me. I was extremely creative in this respect and my over active imagination served me well by giving me the most horrific scenarios. I felt that as long as she was with me she would be safe as I would be able to save her. Through NLP I became first and foremost aware of these thoughts and images that I made inside my head. Awareness is the first real step to change. It might seem obvious, but in reality these processes that took place in my brain were very fast and outside my conscious awareness. The process we do in our brain to produce a behaviour is referred to in NLP as a strategy.

This strategy is very common in cases of extreme fear and panic attacks. In most cases the strategy is played so fast in our brain that the only thing we are aware of is the fear or panic, which is the final step in the strategy- the end result. Using NLP the client can discover the strategy that they make in their head to produce the fear.  By discovering the individual steps and sequence in this process, the client is then aided to change it. By changing it, we change the end result. In other words, anxiety, fear or panic disappears. The easiest way to understand this is if you think of it like the recipe for a cake. There are certain ingredients, and they need to be added in a certain sequence to get the perfect cake. If one ingredient is missed or the sequence of steps jumbled, the end result will be different.

The brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined thoughts and therefore, my body reacted physiologically to my imagined thoughts as though they were real.  So changing my thought pattern ultimately had an effect on my physiology.

Change your belief

The second thing that I needed to work on was to challenge the validity of my thoughts, the beliefs I had surrounding the issue of what might happen when I am separated from my daughter. Often anxiety results from unrealistic and distorted thoughts or beliefs. And some of my thoughts were certainly just that! This is done by what is referred to as Meta programming. These are simply questions that are designed to challenge your perceptions and beliefs. In his book, When Panic Attacks, Dr. Burns uses what he calls Truth-based techniques to examine the evidence for our negative thoughts. What was the probability that something terrible would happen to my daughter when she was away from me, and was it really true that I am the only person in the world able to protect and save her? Sometimes this work can hint at an underlying root cause or past trauma that might be linked to one’s anxiety. If this is indeed the case then Time Line Therapy can be used to heal such a trauma.

Time Line Therapy

The root cause of my separation anxiety was of course the death of my cousin when I was 17 years of age. I just buried my feelings instead of processing my emotions and making some sense of this tragedy. My traumatic experience made me think of doom and gloom every time a loved one was late, or for some reason didn’t answer their phone. In such a situation I would conjure up in my mind the worst possible disasters, when in reality there could be so many innocent, non-sinister reasons to explain the situation. I believed that I needed to be always prepared for disaster. Fate will not catch me unaware again!

Through Time Line Therapy I was able to mentally travel back in time and view the past with a fresh perspective, learn what I needed to learn to heal and come back to the present with new skills and more empowering coping mechanisms.

NLP simply changed my life. This doesn’t mean that I do not feel anxious. It means that my anxiety is normal, realistic, transient and  appropriate to the situation. It meant I was a more relaxed and calm parent the second time round and when the time came for my eldest daughter to leave home and go to university I was able to cope well with this separation. Although emotional, I was able to let her go and have my mind conjure up all the wonderful and positive experiences awaiting her in the years to come.

Recommended reading: When Panic Attacks by David D. Burns M.D.

Fear Of Flying

Are you afraid to fly? I certainly was. I don’t quite remember at what age I developed this fear of flying but I did notice that it got progressively worse after having children.

Becoming a mother made me think more about this fear as I didn’t want any of my children to inherit my fear of flying or anything else that might hold them back from living life to the full.

Although I am able to manage this fear while on a plane journey, it did influence my choice of destination when we were planning our family holidays. Any destination that would involve a long flight was out of the question. The only long flights that I have taken were those of the necessary kind like a new work posting, a wedding or visiting a sick loved one. I often envied people who always said that the best part of the journey for them was the time they spent on a plane.

“It is so exciting!” they would say to me, “Don’t you think so?”

“Definitely not!” would come my shocked answer.

I always thought that there isn’t much I could do about this fear until I learnt about NLP. NLP has made it possible for me to be able to have a reasonably relaxed plane journey, to stop fretting and worrying weeks before the upcoming journey and to be comfortable with the fact that I have techniques at my disposal that will instantly calm my nerves should I experience any signs of panic.

The interesting thing about fear is that it is quite personal. What I mean by that is this:

Not everyone who is afraid of flying experiences this fear in the same way. This becomes evident when we use NLP questions designed to get to the root of the fear.

For example, the root of my fear of flying was linked to a fear of heights. The awareness that I am suspended in mid air, thousands of kilometres above ground, was extremely unnerving. Even a simple NLP technique that involved replacing this negative image that I held in my minds’ eye was enough to make me instantly calmer. It is really the thought here that counts.

For some people, like my sister, the underlying fear is being in small closed spaces where, it is not possible for them to get out at will. They feel the same way in a lift as in a plane.

Some individuals become afraid of flying following a negative experience while on a plane. A client of mine developed fear of flying after she heard the news about 9/11 while flying back home from a holiday in Turkey. That was when she experienced her first fear. Since then her fear got so much worse that she needed tranquilizers before she could board a plane. In this case playing around with the submodalities of the images she created in her head in relation to flying was helpful.

Another client I worked with experienced fear of flying for a completely different reason. His had trust issues. He had a problem with placing his life in the hands of a complete stranger, the pilot.

“Are you afraid of riding on the train?” I remember asking him.

“No” came his quick response.

“Is that because you are friends with the train driver?”

“No, he is a complete stranger to me.” my client said.

“So you are trusting your life in the hands of a complete stranger!” I said with an element of surprise, “why not on a plane?”

“Wow! You are absolutely right!” he said with a smile. “I never realised that I indeed have been trusting strangers with my life on a regular basis and am still alive and well.”

This simple belief change was enough for my client to get rid of his fear of flying, just like replacing the picture in my head of a plane suspended in mid air with that of my living room, was enough for me to fly comfortably and without fear.

What are the reasons underlying your fear of flying? What thoughts, pictures, sounds or feelings do you associate with this fear? Did you  ever stop to consider those? You might find a clue that will help you get rid of this fear or at least control it instead of being controlled by it.

Have a pleasant flight!

Recommended reading: The Easy Way to Enjoy Flying by Allen Carr

Presenting Magically With NLP

Recently, I was at a Connecting Women meeting www.connectingwomen.nl  
This is an organisation that holds a meeting once a month and gives the opportunity for women from all kinds of backgrounds to come together to share, network and inspire each other. As a member I was given the opportunity to showcase my NLP work. I had ten minutes in which I could provide a glimpse of what I do with NLP. I chose to do a brief mental exercise, which I hoped would simply arouse my audience’s curiosity. I am happy to say that my short presentation went well and conjured the enthusiasm I was hoping for.

Why was this incident so striking? It’s because of the fact that I was relatively calm and actually enjoyed making the presentation. Not long ago, the thought of having to stand and speak in front of people made me almost physically ill. I used to get so nervous that my hands would shake, my breathing would be laboured and my thoughts jumbled — not the best ingredients for a magical presentation. So what changed between then and now? Discovering NLP, of course.

Many people react strongly to the idea of presenting. In fact, when asked to list their biggest fears, most people put fear of presenting at the top of their list. Even some famous actors and performers suffer from attacks of anxiety and fear before going on stage.

So what are the key ingredients that can help you present magically without fear?

1- Being comfortable, being yourself

A lot of people are afraid to be themselves in front of an audience. They feel that they have to adopt a kind of “presentation personality” before they can stand and talk to an audience. Without this armour, they feel exposed, open to criticism and vulnerable.

According to Dr Brene Brown, a researcher at the University of Houston, to establish connection we need to be authentic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Qm9cGRub0

“Let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen”, she says at a presentation for TEDx Houston. “Vulnerability is the birth place of creativity”, she adds.

She defines vulnerability as the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees. In NLP we use the expression wanton experimentation: the willingness to do anything just to find out what would happen if you did it, to keep trying different things until you get the results you want. It’s Ok to make mistakes as long as we learn from those mistakes. This ties in nicely with my next point.

2-There is no failure, only feedback

NLP makes assumptions about how the world works. These assumptions are known aspresuppositions.  This is one of those presuppositions. It is more empowering to believe that when things don’t go the way we expected, we simply haven’t failed, but got some feedback as to how to do it differently next time.

3- The way you feel determines the results you get

The illustration above aims at explaining how the things going on in our heads change our behaviour and therefore our results. State means your emotional state. The way you are feeling at a given moment in time. Two things influence our state: our internal representation and our physiology.

Internal representation refers to what you hold in your mind. Think about something that you did in the past that went horribly wrong and as you think about it notice how you feel. Not so good, right? Now in contrast think about something that you did that was an absolute success and as you think about that notice how you feel. You feel great. Right? The conclusion is that what you hold in your mind determines how you feel.

Physiology on the other hand refers to body language. You would know that someone is feeling low from their posture: slumped shoulders, looking down, walking slowly, sighing heavily and perhaps not smiling. On the other hand the body language of someone who just heard that they won the lottery would be quite different: fully animated, walking fast, head held high and smiling broadly. Therefore the way you feel can change your physiology. The inverse is also true, your physiology can change the way feel. If you don’t believe this then do this: stand upright, with your head held high and with a big grin on your face, and try to feel depressed. Difficult isn’t it?

In other words, if you stride confidently with your head held high into your presentation, and retain positive thoughts and images about the outcome, you are more likely to succeed than if you were to have images and thoughts of the audience hating you and of you forgetting your content. Most people who are afraid of presenting admit when asked that they often imagine the audience hating them, asking them difficult questions that they might not be able to answer. Well, no wonder they feel afraid. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s imagined and what is real, that is why you are able to feel all those fears just from thinking about your presentation. So why not think positively? The audience loves you and will ask you questions that you will answer easily and effortlessly. Now that you know how to put yourself into a positive state then you can use it at will.

4- The brain cannot process negative language

What do you think about when I say to you “Do not think of a blue tree”? That’s right you immediately think of a blue tree. That is because when the human brain is creating an internal representation, it cannot directly represent a negative concept. For you not to think of a blue tree you have to conjure the image of a blue tree first. So when we tell someone “Don’t worry” they will effectively worry. What we should say instead is “ Stay calm and worry free” for example. So from now on say it the way you want it. In your presentation be aware of the thoughts that your language is bringing up in your audience’s mind. If for example you are promoting a new product, the last thing you want to say is “I don’t want you to think that this product is expensive”.

5- Make sure you are communicating with everyone in the room

Be aware of the varied representational systems within your audience. Some persons might be visual, some auditory and some kinaesthetic. As a presenter your language should include predicates from all those representational systems in order to make sure that you are communicating and connecting with all members of your audience. “Do you see what I mean?” is an example of a visual predicate. “I hear what you are saying” is an auditory predicate and “ Get a handle on this” is a kinaesthetic predicate.

6- Practice makes perfect

It is good to prepare well, be familiar with your content and practice before hand to a small group of trusted friends who can give you useful feedback to improve on your presentation before delivering it to a wider audience.   

Recommended reading: Presenting Magically by Tad James and David Shephard