Physical and Mental health are linked?🤸♀️
How Hypnotherapy Can Help
If you suffer from anxiety, you might experience physical symptoms such as a racing heartbeat, IBS, knots in your stomach, sweating etc. Your nervous system can get stuck in ‘fight or flight’ mode even when you’re not stressed or anxious. Likewise, the words and thoughts we tell ourselves can cause physical symptoms and feelings of anxiety. Cortisol is a stress hormone that rises with stress. And it’s important that it does that. It has an anti-inflammatory effect and gives us ‘get up and go’ in the morning. And more. However, chronically raised cortisol can suppress sex hormones, suppress thyroid hormones (weight gain!) and can damage the gut lining leading to food sensitivity, a weakened immune system and more.
Do you allow yourself time for rest and relaxation? Do you give yourself permission to be still so your nervous system can rebalance back to ‘rest and digest?’ Busy people don’t often make time to rest and relax. Do you find yourself trying to multi-task relaxation along with some other activity? Or are you only allowing yourself 5 minutes? Stress management and relaxation are as important as sleep and physical activity and can have a big impact on health and well-being.
In this modern life, one paradox is that we seem to be more sedentary yet many of us do not take time to relax. Relaxation can look different for everyone and I guess I’m talking about mindful relaxation rather than just sitting in front of the tv. Where you just sit and do nothing for a short time, to decompress. In some of my hypnotherapy scripts, I invite clients to ‘do nothing’ and I feel like it gives them permission to do this. With being so busy and on the go, we are in danger of not valuing relaxation, in fact judging it as indulgent, lazy or a waste of time. On the contrary, these periods of relaxation are important and do a lot behind the scenes. Just like sleeping and fasting do! When we relax this affects the physical body and brain. We switch from fight or flight to rest and digest, lowering our cortisol. Cortisol is important for get up and go and it’s anti-inflammatory. But if it stays raised it suppresses hormones and causes a whole lot of other problems in the body. What’s your mindset around daily rest and relaxation? Are you giving yourself permission to do it? Do you value it and prioritise it like you might do sleep, exercise and eating? Are you trying to do too many things at once? Do you ever just take 5-10 mins and just sit and listen to the birds?
If you would like to support your confidence, mood, or anxiety or to get help changing unhelpful habits or beliefs, cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy with a registered hypnotherapist can help. Have a look at my hypnotherapy page. I am a GHR-registered hypnotherapist practising in Cheltenham and I provide a hypnotherapy service in Cheltenham and online on Zoom. If you would like to find out how hypnotherapy for anxiety of IBS or confidence can support you please book a free call with me on 07714340345 and we can have a chat. Please leave me a voice message and I will call you back or you can email me on kate@katedimmer.com to arrange a chat that way. Likewise, we can also combine hypnotherapy with nutritional therapy for a unique and powerful combination.