UK’s Freedom Day and Social Anxiety
I am noticing more and more people reporting feeling extreme levels of anxiety, whether it be concerns about going back to work in an office, or young people returning to school, or anxiety about mixing with more people again. Some levels of anxiety bearing in mind that we are in a global pandemic would be entirely rational and normal, but for some people the anxiety levels are much higher.
Freedom day as it has been coined is not universally liked and many people are looking for the government to make stricter rules about when and where we should be able to gather with others.
There are different ways that anxiety can show itself in the body, whether it be a racing heart, sweating or breathing rapidly. Social anxiety is usually where you are anticipating feeling afraid or anxious, and you get the symptoms of anxiety while you are simply anticipating the situation, not actually even experiencing it and this would make you avoid a social situation. Usually it’s a persistent fear, not just related to one situation, but lasting over many months or longer.
The fear and worry is out of proportion to the actual threat. Sufferers start to feel anxious when there is no threat at all, and worried about how that will feel. It becomes a vicious circle.
One reason I really like the RTT Method therapy for anxiety is that it goes to the root cause of the anxious thoughts. I regress clients to the point when they first became disproportionately anxious and we look at what happened which caused the present problems. We can then reframe those thoughts deep in the subconscious mind.
When you understand that you are not your thoughts you will have a breakthrough. Your thoughts are what control your feelings. Through therapy you can understand that you control your thoughts and you can therefore have a happy and calm life that you choose.
There is nothing else in life that you can control, and tough times will happen. Horrible situations, nasty and mean people, death and disease. But none of that is anything that you can control and the only thing that you have control over is your thoughts. When you take control of your thinking, you stop being anxious.