Stress, anxiety and depression
Stress, anxiety and depression
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Before we start I would like to point out that stress and anxiety normally come hand in hand.
Let’s start with stress… Stress according to the general definition is an added pressure and strain your body. It is a heightened response and unnatural response for a healthy body and mind.
If we go back thousands of years the stress response was triggered by the sense of being alert. For example, if you are put in a dangerous situation like a war or hunting, stress would trigger out to focus your senses, pump up blood to certain parts of your body that needed blood and allow you to have a tunnel vision. It was a normal response to a dangerous situation.
Right now, you normally work in a safe environment where you don’t have that fight or flight response. When this happens your body feels stressed when it should be relaxed and that is unhealthy.
AnxietyAnxiety is one of the things that can cause stress. It is an internal state of confusion and inner battle. It causes very unpleasant and chaotic feelings of not feeling worthy, complaints and overthinking. It can cause fatigue, concentration problems, tension, and restlessness. On a more serious level, it can cause panic and anxiety attacks. These can come in many shapes: restlessness, fear, chest pain, sweating, and many other physical symptoms. Anxiety, in a nutshell, is worrying and overthinking about the future and in many ways creating scenarios and living in your head in a future that might or might not come to fruition. It normally never does.
DepressionDepression is a state of apathy and low mood. You feel like you don’t have the strength, will or energy to do anything. Sometimes, just the simple tasks like tying your shoes or getting out of the house seem daunting. Your brain goes on overdrive and the body simply froze with fear and you can’t do these tasks. The most complicated cases are of clinical depression. There are many symptoms like lack of motivation, feeling guilty, anxious, irritable, intolerant, hopeless, helpless, low self-esteem, among other depression symptoms. Just like anxiety is living in the future, depression is living in the past and dwelling over and over about the past which causes the inability to move on as well as frustration and the sense that all is lost.
One of the most important aspects of overcoming depression and anxiety is to live in the present moment. Of course that telling this to someone that is in the “middle of the storm” seems impossible, but you can and will do it. It is very normal for someone that suffers from stress and anxiety to feeling that they run on an empty tank but I can help you overcome it.
- Past or childhood experiences
- Emotional or physical abuse
- Losing someone you love
- Bullied or socially excluded
- Being neglected
Current Life Situation- Work problems
- Feeling under pressure
- Money problems
- Loss of a loved one
- Relationship problems
- Being bullied
- Feeling lonely or isolated
- Others
Please note that each case is a unique case and will be treated as one. There are different causes and symptoms per person.
Dealing with stress, anxiety or depression is not a 100m run but a marathon run. The only way to have long-lasting effects is to treat it patiently not having any shortcuts.
Each case is unique and it has different experiences, symptoms, and causes.
First I would have to access the patient to understand their current situation and symptoms. After that, we will work on finding the causes and tackle them. In the meantime, it is important to balance and energize the body so that the patient has the strength to carry on with the treatments. It is also vital to create new lifestyles and change old unhealthy patterns.
This can be done by a mix of therapies where it would probably involve different therapies:
Make sure that you have a follow up with your GP and let me know if you are on anti-depressants or have a diagnosed illness. They can help with the symptoms but if you want to overcome all of this a combined treatment will be more effective with long-lasting effects.
Hypnotherapy can help to find out causes and balance them in the subconscious as well as changing unhealthy patterns and helping with motivation.