What’s Really Behind Your Anxiety?

You know the feeling

It’s three in the morning and your mind won’t stop. It keeps replaying the same scenes: the meeting, the message you still haven’t answered, the thing you said yesterday that might have come out wrong. Your chest is tight and your jaw is clenched. You tell yourself to calm down, and somehow that makes it worse.

Or you’re standing in a supermarket queue, or sitting in the car outside somewhere you’re meant to go in, and your heart starts doing something it has no business doing. Your breathing goes shallow. A thought arrives that feels completely true: something is wrong with me. You start looking for the exits, and before long you’ve found a reason to leave.

Or you’re at work, or at dinner, or on a call, and the voice in your head is commenting on everything. It sounds like you, but it never has anything kind to say. You look ridiculous. They’re going to notice. Don’t say that. Don’t mess this up. You smile and nod, and inside you’re braced for impact.

Afterwards you feel drained and a little ashamed, and you start planning tomorrow around the chance that it’ll happen again. You say no to invitations. You leave early. You make excuses that sound reasonable to everyone else and hollow to you. The people who love you say they’re worried, so you reassure them, then go home and feel the worry settle straight back into your chest. Some days you function so well that nobody would guess. Other days, getting through the morning is the achievement.

Maybe you’ve lived like this for months, or years, or for as long as you can remember. You’ve tried breathing exercises. You’ve tried thinking differently. You’ve read the books, done the courses and talked it through. Some of it helped for a while, and then the anxiety came back, as if it had been waiting politely for you to finish.

If any of that sounds like you, you aren’t broken. And you’re a long way from being the only one.

What this essay is for

This isn’t a list of tips to try tonight, and it isn’t a self-help programme for you to work through on your own. My aim is to explain how I understand anxiety and how I work with it, clearly enough that you can judge for yourself whether it makes sense.

Most approaches to anxiety focus on calming the symptoms when they flare up. The approach I describe here works on where the anxiety comes from. In my experience anxiety is learned, and whatever was learned can be found and worked with.

By the end you’ll know where I think anxiety comes from, and you’ll have seen the three steps I work through with clients. You’ll understand why panic attacks feel the way they do, and you’ll know what working with me actually involves.

In their own words

Before I explain anything, I’d like you to hear from a few of the people I’ve worked with. Something I’ve noticed over the years is that people rarely describe themselves as brave afterwards. They tend to say they feel normal again.

Katie:

Katharine had tried a lot of other things first:

Stephen talked about bravery, or rather about no longer needing it:

And Jamie was surprised by how quickly things moved:

Who I am

Then I’d catch sight of myself in the boat’s mirrored glass, and the little voice that was always lurking in my mind would jump out: You look like such a total loser. You look ridiculous. You look like a little boy dressed up in big person’s clothes. No one takes you seriously. And that job you’ve got? You can’t do that.

I tried everything I could think of to shut that voice up, and nothing lasted. It was waiting for me on the boat every morning. I had the life I’d set out to build, and I’d never been more unhappy. I knew something had to change.

What I chose was hypnosis. I went to a seminar, got on well, and kept going. In 2013 I graduated as a master practitioner of hypnotherapy, and straight afterwards I opened my practice, Unchain Your Mind, in Central London, in the old Bupa headquarters. The BBC came to interview me there. I also set up my own training college to certify the next generation of hypnotherapists.

It all went well until Covid. Lockdown meant I had to close the doors of that practice for the last time.

So I had to find another way to work. The result is the model I still use with every client today, and I’ll walk you through it shortly.

What it’s like to work with me

First, though, here’s how people describe the experience of working with me, not only how things turned out. Anxiety already leaves people feeling exposed, so the work has to feel safe.

Rebecca Schwartz wrote:

“Lotus is the most professional, genuine and caring therapist. Lotus’ knowledge and understanding has shown me that there are things we can do to help retrain and change the negative thought patterns which can take over everyday life - That there is always a solution. Thanks Lotus”

Pauline admits she arrived sceptical:

“Lotus reassured me and made me feel completely at ease within each session. Though at first I was sceptical, I can honestly say it was one of the best decisions in my life.”

Bhavini Vekaria:

“Lotus explained and told me what was right for me. He immediately put me at ease and we started booking my sessions.”

Gail J:

“I can’t thank Lotus enough for being so patient with me. He has improved my lifestyle and showed me how to stop my anxiety”

And Virginio Lima:

“I want to say thank you to my therapist, Lotus – a lovely person who made feel safe and understood.”

That’s the tone I aim for in every session: patient, steady and unhurried.

The model I use

It starts from a simple idea. When you’re anxious, your fight or flight response is switched on. That’s your body’s built-in alarm system, the one that speeds up your heart, tightens your muscles and puts your mind on high alert so you can deal with danger. Anxiety is that alarm going off when there’s no real danger in front of you. And it stands to reason that if something switched it on, it must be possible to switch it off. Here’s how I do that.

The model has three steps:

Identify the part of your mind that holds the fear.

Connect with that part through hypnosis.

Transform the fear, using a technique I call flip the switch.

I’ll take them in order.

Step 1: Identify

Before we can find the part that holds the fear, I need to explain what I mean by a part.

Your phone runs on apps. So does your computer, and probably your car. Anything complicated enough tends to be organised into smaller systems that each look after one job, and your mind is no exception. It has something like apps too, though they’re far more sophisticated than anything on your phone.

Another (better) comparison is people. Each part is an aspect of your personality, with its own concerns, its own way of talking to you, and its own idea of what’s good for you. They sit in your unconscious mind, which is everything your mind does without you consciously deciding to do it. Working with parts in this way comes from an established approach called ego state therapy.

You already talk about parts, even if you’ve never noticed. There’s a part of me that wants more money, but there’s a part of me that wants to spend more time with my children. There’s a part of me that can’t stop eating chocolate biscuits. There’s a part of me that’s terribly afraid people are going to think I’m an idiot.

Here are a few you might recognise. They’re examples of the kind of thing that lives in the mind, not a fixed list. Everyone’s parts are their own, and yours won’t look exactly like these.

The rule follower is the part that says don’t make a nuisance of yourself. That’s a sensible rule for a small child. It’s less helpful when you’re an adult hovering at the edge of a conversation at work, unable to interrupt. And because you know the rule won’t let you break it, you can start dreading work before you’ve even left the house.

The catastrophiser skips straight past logic to the worst-case scenario and stays there all day. It may even accept that the disaster probably won’t happen. Its argument is: but if it did happen, it would be a disaster. So you should think about it. Go over it. Keep going over it.

The inner critic is always putting you down, keeping you in your place and telling you you’re not good enough. I had a very loud one; it was the voice on the boat. You probably can’t stand yours. But it has a job. Somewhere along the way it decided its task was to keep your standards high, or to stop you getting too big for your boots.

The perfectionist can be genuinely useful. If you write computer code, every line has to be exactly right or the program won’t run, so a perfectionist streak helps. An email doesn’t need to be perfect. The trouble is that the perfectionist doesn’t know when to stop, so you end up reading the same email fifteen times while everyone waits. In a relationship it can fix on tiny flaws and drive your partner mad.

The control freak is the one who hires a team and then does everyone’s job for them, or the person in the family who can’t quite trust anyone to look after themselves and keeps nagging, even knowing it pushes people away.

The “Identify” step of the process happens mainly in conversation. I’m listening for the exact fear a part is holding, and I’m listening for it in the kind of words a child would use, because most of these fears were learned when we were young. Not a grown-up word like inadequate, but something simple that lands: looking soft, stupid, alone, in trouble.

The best clues are in a part’s self-talk, meaning the things it says to you inside your head. Don’t make a fuss. If you get this wrong, they’ll see who you really are. Something terrible is about to happen, and you need to keep thinking about it until you find a way to stop it. These aren’t random thoughts. They’re a part trying to protect you in the only way it knows.

When we’ve named the fear correctly, the part usually responds. Sometimes it’s a feeling in the body, sometimes a memory surfaces, and sometimes there’s just a quiet sense of yes, that’s it. If it isn’t quite right, we keep listening. By the end of this step, we know which part holds the fear and what it’s afraid of.

Step 2: Connect

The second step is to connect with that part, and for that I use hypnosis.

Hypnosis is widely misunderstood, so let me be clear about what it is. It isn’t mind control and it isn’t sleep. You stay aware, you remember everything, and you can come out of it whenever you want; if a fire alarm went off, you’d get up and leave the building. It’s a focused, relaxed state that does two useful things. It sharpens your imagination, and it opens a channel to the unconscious mind, which is where the parts are. That lets you talk to the part directly instead of wrestling with it.

Once we’ve connected with the part, the work is to change your relationship with it. That starts with how you talk to yourself.

Think about what you usually do when anxiety turns up. Most people do one of four things. They ignore it. They distract themselves with their phone, the television, or keeping busy. They reason with it: there’s no reason to feel like this, nothing bad is going to happen, it’s ridiculous. And when that doesn’t work, they get angry with it: get out of my head, I don’t need you, you’re ruining my life.

Now look at it from the part’s point of view. It’s doing its best to warn you about something it genuinely believes is dangerous, and in return it gets ignored, talked over, argued with and shouted at.

Remember that parts are a lot like people. Imagine taking a real worry to your manager. At first they don’t even look up. Then they pick up the phone while you’re still talking, tell you to think positively, and finally tell you to get out because you’re bringing everyone down. Nobody would want to work for that manager. Yet that’s how most of us treat ourselves on the inside.

So in Connect we do the opposite. Instead of fighting the anxious part, we treat it with respect and invite it into a conversation. You listen to what it’s been trying to protect you from. You thank it for the job it’s been doing, even if that job has become exhausting. You take a recording home to listen to, and between sessions you keep the conversation going in your own words. The part needs to hear that things are going to be different from now on, and that it won’t be ignored, argued with or shouted down every time it speaks.

This is also why kindness matters so much in the room. A part that has been on guard for years isn’t going to open up to something that feels like another argument.

Leila came to me looking for help with what she called her inner demons:

Plenty of people describe it that way when they arrive. In this step, the voice that says the terrible things usually turns out to be a part that’s trying to help, and one you can talk to. Salma described what that was like for her:

Step 3: Transform

The third step is where the change happens. This is where we use a technique I call flip the switch.

Every part that holds a fear learned it somewhere, in a particular memory. Under hypnosis, the part can guide us back to that memory. That’s where the switch is.

It’s rarely the memory you’d expect. Big, obvious traumas matter, and they hurt. But I’ve found they’re very rarely where an anxiety problem starts. During a major trauma it’s as if the brain goes into survival mode, and the areas you’d normally use to form new beliefs go quiet. Far more often, the fear is learned in what I call a minor trauma: a moment so small that, looking back, it wouldn’t stand out at all. The adults moved on in seconds. A young part of you learned a lesson, and the fear got stuck there.

Here’s how we fix it without having to relive the trauma: your mind stores memories in sequence, a bit like points along a line running from your past to your future. Time Line Therapy®, another established approach, works with that line. You float above it in your imagination and look down on the memory instead of stepping back into it. From up there, the part can see what it couldn’t see at the time: that it wasn’t really in trouble, that it was still loved, and that the moment passed and everyone moved on.

Those new learnings update the old fear. Once the part has them, it has no reason to keep the alarm switched on for that issue, and it flips the switch off. That’s also why we don’t have to dig through every difficult event of your life. We only need the moment that taught the part to be afraid.

Then we test. We go back to the situations that used to set the fear off, and we look ahead to similar situations in the future, to check whether the switch is still on.

The fuse box: why there can be more than one switch

Once you know a switch can be flipped, the obvious question is how many there are.

Think of anxiety as an electrical current running through you, and of the switches as the things feeding it. For most people with anxiety, that current runs at a low level most of the time. It’s enough to keep you tense, alert and tired, but not enough to overwhelm you.

Anxiety can feel as if it’s running through everything. But when you open the fuse box, there’s usually only a small number of switches. Most people I work with have one or two, and it’s rarely more than four. Each switch is a memory where a part learned to be afraid, and each one carries its own share of the current. That’s why anxiety can have more than one cause.

Flip one switch and there’s a step change, a noticeable drop in the overall level, because that share of the current has gone. Often one is enough. If it isn’t, we find the next switch and flip that one too, working through them until the whole fuse box is off.

Panic attacks: when the fuse blows

If you’ve had panic attacks, there’s one more piece to add.

Picture someone holding a microphone too close to a speaker. The microphone picks up a little sound, sends it through the system, and out it comes again, louder. Round and round it goes, louder each time, until there’s a screech that fills the room.

A panic attack works in much the same way. The current of anxiety is already running in the background. A small feeling of it shows up in your body and you notice it, and because it’s a feeling of anxiety, noticing it makes you more anxious. That makes the feeling stronger, which makes you more anxious still. Within moments a flutter has become a screech. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the fear of panic is what drives the panic.

Unlike the low background current, that surge can’t keep going for ever. Your body can’t hold fight or flight at that peak for long (in my experience it’s usually somewhere around fifteen minutes) and then the ‘fuse’ blows. It’s why people so often feel shaky, drained and exhausted afterwards.

But the fuse only stops the surge. It does nothing about the switches feeding the current in the first place, and while they’re still on, the next surge is always possible. Breathing and distraction can take the edge off the loop, but they were never meant to reach the switch. What I do is go after the current itself. Flip the switches feeding it, and the loop has less and less to feed on.

The kinds of anxiety I see most

The model is the same whatever form the anxiety takes, but what you live with day to day can look very different. These are the patterns I see most often.

Generalised anxiety and overthinking

This is the mind that never rests. The worry jumps from one thing to the next, and there’s a sense that if you stop scanning for problems, something bad will happen. The rule follower and the catastrophiser are often busy here. The question is what the overthinking is guarding against.

Social anxiety and fear of judgement

This is the fear of being seen: of looking awkward, boring, foolish or too much. Meetings, parties, phone calls, walking into a room where you don’t know anyone. The inner critic usually has a starring role, and the rule follower is rarely far behind: don’t say the wrong thing, stay quiet and you’ll be safe. What we’re looking for is the part that’s afraid of judgement, and the moment it learned that fear.

Panic attacks

The mechanism is covered above. What I’d add is that the detective work is rarely in the panic itself. It’s in the pattern around it: where it happens, where it doesn’t, and what a part of you is actually afraid of. People often arrive saying the panic is the whole problem. Underneath, there’s usually a fear the panic has grown out of.

Health anxiety

Here the mind scans the body for danger. A twinge becomes a catastrophe, and a headline becomes a diagnosis. Often a part learned early on that something was badly wrong, or that nobody would notice until it was too late. Katie’s words about no longer being afraid of dying belong here as much as anywhere. The work goes after that early lesson rather than the scanning itself.

Agoraphobia, driving and going out

This is anxiety that makes your world smaller. Certain roads. Certain shops. Eventually, leaving the house at all. Sometimes there’s panic underneath. Sometimes it’s a specific fear: of being trapped, of not being able to get help, or of having an attack with nowhere private to go.

Annabel had tried plenty of techniques, and some of them helped in the moment, but the pattern kept spreading:

Phobias

A phobia is a focused fear (flying, needles, spiders, lifts, vomiting) that looks irrational from the outside and feels completely real from the inside. Often the part’s fear isn’t quite what you think it is. With flying, for example, many people aren’t mainly afraid that the plane will come down. They’re afraid of having a panic attack with no way off, surrounded by people. That distinction matters, because it tells us which switch to look for. The usual alternative is exposure, which means facing the feared thing again and again until you get used to it. Without finding the real fear first, that often means white-knuckling through the same ordeal every time.

Work and performance anxiety

Presentations. Interviews. Leading a meeting. Sending the email. Speaking up when it matters. The part that dreads getting something wrong in public often runs the show here. A lot of high-functioning people live with this: competent on paper, tense underneath. We’re usually looking for one or two switches, not rebuilding your personality.

Relationship anxiety

The voice that says they’ll leave, they don’t really mean it, you’re too much, you’re not enough. The checking. The need for reassurance. Pulling away to stay safe. Often there’s a frightened part that learned, somewhere along the way, that being close to people wasn’t safe.

Questions people ask me

A few questions come up almost every time someone is thinking about this kind of work, so I’ll answer them plainly.

“I can’t be hypnotised.” Lots of people think that. The hypnosis I use isn’t stage hypnosis, and you’re not “put under”. It’s a cooperative state, closer to daydreaming with a purpose than to losing consciousness. If you can follow a conversation and use your imagination even a little, we have something to work with, and responsiveness builds with practice. The first session includes some hypnosis, so you can find out for yourself what it’s like.

“I’ve tried everything.” Many of my clients had. Talking therapies, medication, apps, books, mindfulness. Those approaches are mostly designed to help you cope day to day, and plenty of people find that useful. But it’s a different job from finding the part that’s switching the anxiety on. (If you’re taking medication, any decision about it is one for you and your doctor.)

“Mine is different.” Everyone’s story is different. The structure usually isn’t: there’s a part that’s afraid, and a switch it keeps turning on. Different is welcome in the conversation. It doesn’t put you outside the model.

“It’s all online.” Everything I do is designed to work over Zoom, and I work with people all over the world. All you need is a quiet space and the device you’re reading this on. You don’t need to arrive relaxed, either. Some people find it easier online: their own chair, their own door, and no commute with an anxious mind.

“What if it doesn’t work for me?” Your mind is unique so I don’t try to give guarantees for personal change (and you should probably run a mile from anyone who does). What I can tell you is how the work is structured. The first session is about understanding what’s going on: identifying the part and getting you familiar with hypnosis. You leave knowing what we think is happening and what the plan is. The rest of the work follows from there.

“Is now the right time?” Perhaps a better question would be to ask yourself what anxiety has already cost you (and how much more it will cost you). The invitations you turned down. The opportunities you let pass because you couldn’t face them. The holidays spent planning escape routes, the evenings lost to going over the same worries, the money spent on things that helped for a week. Add up the last year, then ask yourself what another year like it would cost. That’s worth weighing honestly.

If you’d like to talk

If you’ve read this far, you know more about how anxiety works than most people are ever told.

You don’t need to know what your root cause is before you get in touch. Finding that is my job. You don’t need to be calm when you call, and you don’t need to apologise for everything you’ve already tried.

If you want to find out whether this approach is right for you, book a free 30-minute phone call with me. We’ll talk about what’s going on for you, what you’ve tried so far, and whether working together makes sense. There’s no obligation to book any sessions.

Lotus