Announcing My New Course: Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems

Image by Giulia Bertelli

I am pleased to announce the launch of my second Premium Audio Course for Insight Timer – Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems. If you sign up to this six-day course today you will learn why you feel so anxious, starting with the evolutionary and neurological roots of anxiety, explaining why it’s a crucial emotion for us all to feel, because it alerts us to threats and helps us react to them, quickly if need be.

Understanding why you feel so anxious is a key step in learning to accept it, because anxiety is something we all feel and is an important alarm signal when things need our attention. And then helping you ease it over time – this course will help you start to feel calmer, safer, and more at peace, step by step.

Over the six days you will also learn about internal family systems therapy, which is one of the fastest growing and most popular models of therapy in the world right now. As an Internal Family Systems Therapist, I use this warm, compassionate, and highly effective treatment approach with my clients and in my teaching, because it offers a revolutionary way of understanding problems like chronic anxiety.

Meeting your young, anxious part

You will learn that this anxiety comes from an anxious young part of you, holding painful thoughts, feelings, and memories of difficult experiences in your childhood. To ease your anxiety, you need to learn how to connect with, understand and soothe this anxious little boy or girl inside.

I will also teach you that worry comes from another part of you, called the Worrier. Again, you will learn how to accept and even value this protective part, because it’s just trying to help, even if the way it does so can be stressful and exhausting at times.

I hope you join me on this transformative six-day journey, which includes theories and techniques drawn from my many years of helping clients better manage their anxiety. As well as trauma-informed teaching about the mind-body source of problematic anxiety, I will lead you through powerful calming techniques including breathwork and guided-imagery exercises, drawn from IFS and other trauma-informed therapy models.

The course is free if you become a Member Plus Supporter. This costs just $60 for 12 months of high-quality content like this on the Insight Timer app from me and thousands of other leading teachers. ⁠

Try it now by visiting my Insight Timer collection or clicking on the button below. ⁠

I hope you find it insightful and healing. ⁠

Love ❤️⁠

Dan

Why Do We Worry? And is it Always a Problem?

Would you call yourself a worrier? And if so, what kinds of things do you habitually worry about? Let me take a guess… My hunch is that your worries take the form of ‘what if…’ thoughts, like ‘What if I lost my job? How would I cope? Would we lose our home? Would my wife leave me?’

Or, ‘What if I make a fool of myself giving that speech at my daughter’s wedding? What if my mind just goes blank and I can’t remember what to say? Everyone would think I’m a pathetic loser. That would be horrendous – I would never live it down.’

Our worries commonly show up as these ‘what if…’ thoughts for a few reasons:

1. Worries are always future-focused. We never worry about things that have already happened. And that’s why worry (a cognitive process) is linked with anxiety (a feeling), which is also future/threat-focused. So we worry about bad stuff that could happen, imminently or further down the line.

2. Worries are often catastrophic. Not always, of course – worries range from mild to severe. But they often involve ‘catastrophising’, because that’s what worry is for – imagining worst-case scenarios and how we could cope with them. So in the above example, losing his job led to losing the house and potentially divorce, rather than simply having to downsize or rent for a while.

3. Worry involves ‘bridge-crossing’. This links to the future-focused idea, because when we worry we are crossing every potential bridge on the road ahead, seeing where they all lead and how best to cross them. Some of those bridges we may well have to cross, but probably 99% of them we won’t, which is one reason that worry can be stressful, exhausting and potentially very unhelpful. We live through a vast number of horrible imagined situations, most of which never actually happen.

Worry is not a bad thing, per se

I have had many clients who worry in an obsessional, relentless and exhausting way – so for them, worry is definitely unhelpful. But I tell even these people that worry is not a bad thing, per se – it’s the way we worry that’s tricky.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that a team of scientists could miraculously stop your brain from worrying, ever again. Pow! No more worry. Would that be helpful? Not so much.

Imagine you now have to plan your daughter’s wedding (and write that damned speech). But you can’t do any future-focused problem solving because you have lost the ability to worry. And remember that this is what worry is for – imagining challenges in your future so your brain can think and think (and think!) about them until it has come up with a solution.

Which part of you does the worrying?

Looking at this through an internal family systems lens, as I increasingly do, it’s helpful to understand that there’s a part of you who feels anxious (a young part, probably) and another, protector part, who starts worrying to try and help the little one feel calmer, safer and less stressed. This is what protectors do, inside your head – try to make sure that hurt parts of you never get hurt again.

We usually call this part, unsurprisingly, the Worrier. And Worrier parts are busy little bees. They are super-hard working, hypervigilant, relentless (when you ask them they will tell you they never switch off, 24/7, every day of your life). They work so hard to protect you – and especially those young, anxious parts of you – from being criticised, attacked, shamed, rejected, or hurt in any other way. They’re kind of heroic, in my opinion.

But of course all this worry is exhausting. It often leads to insomnia, as you lie there at 3am going over and over that tricky morning meeting. Excessive worry can lead to chronic stress, burnout, being constantly on edge and never able to switch off. It’s not much fun.

So if you worry in this unhelpful way, we clearly need to help you worry less, altogether, and worry in a less catastrophic, more helpful/problem-solving way. Luckily, internal family systems gives us a clear, concrete road map of how to make these internal changes – one of the many things I love about this incredibly creative, highly compassionate model.

If you would like to find out more, do come along to my next workshop – Overcoming Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace, on Saturday 10th December 2022. This is an online workshop, so you can join from anywhere in the world. As with all our Heal Your Trauma events, it offers a limited number of free places, as well as a Low-Income Ticket and Supporter Ticket, if you are able to support the project.

So money should be no barrier, if you need help, even if you are struggling financially right now.

I hope to see you there!

Warm wishes,

Dan

Don't Miss My Overcoming Anxiety Workshop on 10th December

Can’t Stop Worrying? If So, This Simple Technique Will Help

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Why do we worry? It’s an important question and – if you struggle with worry and anxiety – one we need to answer before thinking about how to help you. One way to think about worry is anticipating stressful, threatening, upsetting or even dangerous events that might occur in the future. This is known as ‘bridge-crossing’. Your brain knows there is a challenge up ahead, so crosses every possible bridge that might lie in your path, to try and help you manage the challenge as best you can.

You could also say that worry is a wired-in, evolutionary response to threats and dangers. Let’s say you were a hunter-gatherer, walking through long grass on the savannah, 10,000 years ago. The threat system in your brain would have been (rightly) highly sensitive and hypervigilant, using all your senses to scan for predators lurking in the grass. You might even have imagined a lion leaping out and how you would try and fight them off, or make your escape. In doing so, you would have visualised the whole scenario, as if playing a video in your mind’s eye.

That would have required a uniquely human capacity: the ability to use a kind of virtual-reality simulator in your brain to imagine the future – sensing it, visualising it and even living through it – to help protect you from potential threats. When you worry, you are using these high-tech neural capacities to anticipate bad stuff on the horizon and how to protect yourself.

More simply, we can also say that worry is a kind of problem-solving thinking, helping you anticipate upcoming problems and then helping you find solutions by running through a whole host of possible options, until you find one that could work.

How anxiety leads to worry

Another key thing to understand about worry is that it’s the cognitive response to the emotion of anxiety. It’s important to emphasise this, because people often get the two mixed up. They say, ‘I feel worried,’ when what they mean is, ‘I feel anxious and am worrying to try and deal with that.’ (I’m sure my clients get fed up with me reminding them of this, but it’s important, so I brave their eye-rolling and say it anyway.)

If we add to this puzzle the fact that anxiety is a threat-focused emotion, triggered by your brain as an alarm call to let you know a person or situation is threatening and you should do something – right now! – to deal with it, you can see why anxiety is designed to feel so bad; and how it’s intended to provoke some kind of urgent, problem-solving action. And we’re back to worry – the urgent, problem-solving action that your brain takes when you feel uncomfortably anxious.

Getting to know the worrier

Yet another way of thinking about worry (last one, I promise) involves understanding that your personality is made up of a number of different parts. I have written about this extensively in previous posts and pages on my site, so if you need to know more I will just point you to either this page on ‘modes’ in schema therapy or this one on internal family systems.

One of the most effective ways of managing unhelpful worry is to speak to the part of you that does the worrying when you’re feeling anxious (usually named the Worrier, for obvious reasons). Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing just that…

The practice

Having a dialogue with your worrier

1. You can try this in two ways. One way is to use these guidelines just to have an internal dialogue with your Worrier part – this can happen many times throughout the day, whenever you find yourself worrying about something. But if you have time – and especially when you’re starting out with this talking-to-parts approach – I recommend trying this longer method first.

2. Start by switching your phone to silent and carving 10 minutes out of your busy day. If you are plagued by constant worry, which as you know can be very stressful and unpleasant, you should be highly motivated to find the time.

3. Now take two chairs and place them so they are facing each other. One chair is for the Worrier, the other your Healthy Adult. First sit on the Worrier chair and let rip about something you have been worrying about recently. It could be a problem at work, with your partner or kids, losing weight, health issues, or more global stuff like the cost of living crisis or climate change. Any subject will do, as long as it has been bothering you lately.

4. Now be the Worrier. Just act as if you are this part of yourself and (here’s the slightly weird bit) imagine that you are sitting on the other chair. So, if this was me, as the Worrier I would say: ‘Dan, I’m really worried about this post you’re writing. Honestly, it doesn’t seem that great. What if nobody reads it? What if they all think it’s crap and unsubscribe? And what if this whole Heal Your Trauma thing just crashes and burns? You’re not working hard enough on it, this is not your best work, so I think you should just scrap it and start again.’

5. Spend a couple of minutes being the Worrier, telling James or Jenny (you) in the other chair all the things he/she needs to worry about right now.

6. Then switch to the Healthy Adult chair. Plant your feet, roll your shoulders back and lengthen your spine. Close your eyes and breathe deeply, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Let your belly rise and fall with each breath. Keep breathing until you feel a little calmer, then open your eyes and respond to the Worrier from your (calm, strong, wise, compassionate) Healthy Adult.

7. Using myself as an example again, I would say, ‘Worrier, I know you mean well and you’re just freaking out right now. But I am working hard on this post – I always do. My writing is really important to me, so I try to make every post informative and interesting. And even if a couple of people unsubscribe, that’s OK, it’s not the end of the world.

   ‘It’s good to work hard but not helpful to have my whole self-worth riding on one post, that doesn’t make sense. So it’s all good – you can just relax and let me handle it. Thanks again for looking out for me.’

8. Notice that on the Worrier chair I say ‘you’ and on the Healthy Adult chair it’s ‘I’. This is important, because I want you to own what you’re saying on the HA chair more, for obvious reasons.

9. Try this, many times, until you feel the Worrier start to calm down. Make sure the way you speak to this poor, frazzled part of you is friendly and kind. It’s not a bad, or mean part – it is trying to help. But the way it’s helping is not very helpful! So you just need to learn how to empathise with, then reassure the Worrier. As ever, practice makes perfect so repeat, repeat, repeat until this is working for you…

I very much hope that’s useful for you. And if you would like some help with your worry and anxiety, do come along to my new one-day workshop: Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace. This powerful, highly experiential workshop takes place from 10.30am-4.30pm on Saturday 10th September 2022. It costs just £99 for the full day, including refreshments – there are also a limited number of reduced-fee places available.

Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace will be held at the Gestalt Centre, a short walk from King’s Cross Station in central London. Don’t miss this chance to learn from and spend a day with me – places are limited, so find out more and book using the button below:

I look forward to seeing you in September or at one of my upcoming workshops.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Would You Like Help With Your Worry and Anxiety?

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled. If you were interested in attending, do book the online version of this workshop, which will run on 10th December 2022. Bookings for that workshop open in November. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

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Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace features teaching, powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed, and the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, a leading expert on trauma and mental health.

In this powerful, highly experiential webinar you will learn:

• Why high levels of anxiety are a common problem for people with a trauma history – and how that’s linked to a ‘dysregulated’ nervous system, as well as elevated levels of ‘stress hormones’ like adrenaline and cortisol in your bloodstream

• How anxiety is the brain’s ‘alarm’ emotion, warning you that something bad is about to happen and that you should do something, immediately, to keep yourself safe

• Why anxiety is linked to the fight-flight-freeze self-protection responses – useful for escaping from a hungry lion, but not if you’re sitting at your desk in a quiet, safe office

• Simple, evidence-based strategies to calm your anxious inner child, quickly and effectively

• Why anxiety (an emotion) and worry (a thinking process) are inextricably linked – and how to reduce both overwhelming emotions and unhelpful thinking

• Key experiential exercises – such as Compassionate Breathing and 4-7-8 Breathing, guided meditations and imagery – you will learn to help you cope with your anxiety, reduce unhelpful worry and feel calmer and more in control

• And throughout the day, you will get the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, Founder of Heal Your Trauma and an expert on trauma healing and managing anxiety

Don’t miss this chance to learn from a leading trauma therapist and expert on mental health and wellbeing – watch the video for more information and book your place now using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Come to My New Heal Your Trauma Workshop – Coping with Anxiety

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My first one-day Heal Your Trauma workshop will take place from 10.30am-4.30pm on Saturday 10th September 2022, at the Gestalt Centre, near King’s Cross in Central London. Our first workshop will be Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace with Dan Roberts, Advanced Accredited Schema Therapist, Trainer & Supervisor and Founder of Heal Your Trauma.

This event, which will be both highly informative and experiential, costs just £99 for the full day, including refreshments. There are also a limited number of reduced-fee places available.

Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace features five hours of teaching and powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed. You will also get to ask questions throughout the day to Dan Roberts, a leading expert on trauma, mental health and working with anxiety.

In this powerful, highly experiential workshop you will learn:

• Why high levels of anxiety are a common problem for people with a trauma history – and how that’s linked to a ‘dysregulated’ nervous system, as well as elevated levels of ‘stress hormones’ like adrenaline and cortisol in your bloodstream

• How anxiety is the brain’s ‘alarm’ emotion, warning you that something bad is about to happen and that you should do something, immediately, to keep yourself safe

• Why anxiety is linked to the fight-flight-freeze self-protection responses – useful for escaping from a hungry lion, but not if you’re sitting at your desk in a quiet, safe office

• Simple, evidence-based strategies to calm your anxious inner child, quickly and effectively

• Why anxiety (an emotion) and worry (a thinking process) are inextricably linked – and how to reduce both overwhelming emotions and unhelpful thinking

• Key experiential exercises – such as Compassionate Breathing and 4-7-8 Breathing, guided meditations and imagery – you will learn to help you cope with your anxiety, reduce unhelpful worry and feel calmer and more in control

• And you will get the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, Founder of Heal Your Trauma and an expert on trauma healing and managing anxiety

Don’t miss this chance to learn from a leading trauma therapist and expert on mental health and wellbeing. Book your place now using the button below for just £99 – a limited number of places are also available for those on a low income (email info@danroberts.com for details).

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Comfort and Reassure the Anxious Child Inside You

Image by Joseph Gonzalez

Whenever my clients tell me they are feeling anxious, after validating their feelings, my favourite question is, ‘Which I is feeling that way?’ Sometimes (especially if they are new) they look at me with a baffled expression, so I clarify by saying, ‘I’m wondering which part of you is feeling anxious? I know it’s not your Healthy Adult, because she just stood up to your boss when he was shouting at you. So who is it?’

And then they get it, so they say, ‘Oh right, it’s little me who’s scared.’

This may seem a bit pedantic, but it’s so important. When we say, ‘I’m scared/worried/stressed/panicky/lonely/overwhelmed’ we are saying that every part of us feels that way. Problem one: this isn’t true. And problem two: it means we are ignoring or missing the part of us that is not feeling any of that stuff, or perhaps just mild discomfort rather than huge and overwhelming feelings. In schema therapy we call this part the Healthy Adult. Freud called it the ego. In internal family systems it’s the Self, compassion-focused therapists would name this part the Compassionate Self, Buddhists speak of Buddha Nature, and so on.

In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter, as long as we are aware that we are not just one homogenous blob of a personality – just Dan, or David, or Daisy. Research by neuroscientists has proved beyond doubt that there are many parts of us – it’s just how your brain forms your personality, starting from birth.

And we also need to grasp the idea that there is a rich, powerful, healing resource, somewhere inside, that we can develop over our lifetime to heal from trauma or any other painful experiences in childhood – and that this inner resource can calm, soothe and comfort the anxious, hurt, depressed or angry young parts of us.

What is your vulnerable child?

The idea that there is an inner child somewhere inside us is not a new one. But Dr Jeffrey Young, the founder of schema therapy, took this idea and developed it with great wisdom and skill. Dr Young saw this part (or ‘mode’, in schema therapy language) in all of his clients, especially those with a history of complex trauma, whose young part was incredibly sensitive, easily triggered and highly emotional.

You have a Vulnerable Child inside you, as do I. And schema therapists like me call that part Little X, so I have a Little Dan inside me. This part of me is small, young, emotional, vulnerable and highly sensitive. He also holds all the painful thoughts, beliefs, memories and emotions from my childhood, which was not always easy. So he holds memories of me being bullied when I was 11, with all the painful thoughts and feelings associated with that extremely hard time in my life.

If you’re feeling anxious right now, it’s little you feeling that anxiety. He or she is probably scared that something bad is about to happen – perhaps that you will be criticised, shouted at, hurt, rejected or abandoned by someone important to you. Or you feel threatened about something you have to do, or somewhere you have to go (anxiety is always threat-focused, because the function of this emotion is to warn us about bad stuff that’s about to happen).

The practice

Comforting your anxious child

Next time you’re feeling anxious or are worrying about something, try this simple practice, which should help you feel calmer and more at peace.

1. Start by switching your phone to silent, so you won’t be disturbed. Then sit on a comfortable chair, with your feet grounded on the floor, gently roll your shoulders back and lengthen your spine.

   Close your eyes and take some slow, deep breaths, in through your nose and out through your mouth, roughly four seconds in and four seconds out. Just breathe for at least a minute, allowing yourself to settle.

2. Now locate the anxious feeling in your body. Anxiety often shows up in the stomach, or it might be your chest, especially around the solar plexus (between and just below your pectoral muscles). You might notice butterflies, tension or a knot in your stomach, a feeling of nervous energy, or tightness/tension in your chest.

3. Now send some breaths into this part of your body. Don’t try and switch off or get rid of the feelings and sensations, just breathe into them. Keep sending warm, friendly, compassionate breath into your throat, shoulders, chest or belly.

   Sit with that for a minute – and see if you notice those parts of your body soften, just a little.

4. Place a hand on your body wherever you feel the uncomfortable sensations of anxiety in a warm, soft, supportive manner – like you would place your hand on the shoulder of a friend who was upset. Feel the warmth from your hand begin to spread into the skin and muscles. Send that warmth, along with the breath, into the tense, anxious places in your body.

5. Now I want you to visualise yourself as a child. It can help to have a photo of yourself, especially at a young age and one you feel warmly towards (it’s common for us to have complicated feelings towards our Vulnerable Child, especially if we experienced trauma in our childhood).

   If you struggle to feel warmth or compassion towards little you, imagine your own child, niece, nephew or friend’s child you are fond of. Just imagine that they are feeling scared and think about how you would respond to them. What words would you use? What would your tone of voice be? You would probably speak a bit more slowly and use a warm, friendly, reassuring voice tone. That’s the tone you need to comfort the child inside you.

6. Now come back to the photo of little you, or just an image of yourself in your mind’s eye. Speak to them from your (warm, wise, compassionate) Healthy Adult. You can do this out loud, or just think the messages to them inside. Let them know you get that they are scared right now. Tell them that is perfectly natural – there is a lot to be scared about in the world, especially at the moment.

   But you can also reassure them, not in a fake ‘everything’s fine!’ way, but rationally and authentically, telling them that, for example, it’s OK if your spouse is angry with you, because adult you can handle a little conflict. Or you might say it’s normal to worry about problems with your health, but adult you will visit the doctor to make sure everything’s fine and most symptoms we experience are perfectly safe and benign.

7. Keep soothing and reassuring them in this calm, friendly, rational way. Then – don’t try and force this, just do what feels natural – let them know you care about or even love them. Sit with that for a few seconds, feeling that internal connection between your Healthy Adult and little you.

8. Finally, see if there are any good feelings inside – you might feel a bit calmer, more relaxed, lighter in your body, or a sense of warmth. If so, just enjoy those feelings for a while. Let them soak into your body for at least 30 seconds.

9. Then take a deep breath and open your eyes.

Try this often, whenever you feel anxious. Once a day is good, five times a day is better. Like all new skills, it will be tricky at first, but get easier with time and especially practice.

I very much hope that helps – sending you love and strength on your healing journey.

Warm wishes,

Dan

The Revolution in Trauma Therapy – and Why Your Trauma Can Be Healed

Image by Frank McKenna

Over the last 30 years, there has been a revolution in the treatment of mental health problems. Gone are the days when some stern, unsympathetic psychiatrist would give you a scary diagnosis and tell you, ‘Sorry, but there’s nothing more we can do for you,’ before showing you out of his office.

We now understand so much more about how the mind, brain, nervous system and body are involved in any kind of mental health problem, whether that’s an anxiety disorder like OCD, a mood disorder like depression, or the deep wounds caused by traumatic experiences in childhood. We also understand how to treat these problems – even the most complex problems people can experience, like dissociative disorders or so-called personality disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder.

There are now a number of trauma-informed therapies such as trauma-focused CBT, schema therapy, internal family systems therapy, compassion-focused therapy, sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing therapy. All, in their different ways, are highly effective at understanding and treating the effects of traumatic experiences on the human mind and body.

The impact of trauma

As an Advanced Accredited Schema Therapist, Trainer & Supervisor, helping people with their mental health is my life’s mission. That’s why I specialise in treating complex trauma, because I believe that the experience of trauma, usually in childhood, is at the root of most psychological problems.

We increasingly understand this, because of research like the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study in the US, which found that traumatic experiences in childhood (like having a parent with a mental health problem or addiction, or witnessing domestic violence in the family) made people vulnerable to both mental and physical illness in later life.

There are 10 ACEs covering all aspects of childhood trauma, abuse and neglect, including socioeconomic issues like growing up in poverty – we know that these can also have a profound impact on young people’s mental health.

Sadly, the more ACEs you experience as a child, the more likely you are to develop mental health problems, have issues with substance abuse, or develop illnesses like multiple sclerosis, stroke, diabetes or cardiovascular disease. That’s because the highly stressful experience of trauma – especially ‘developmental trauma’, which happens at a key developmental stage in your childhood – has a profound and long-lasting effect on every part of your mind-body system.

Reasons to be hopeful

When I explain this to my clients – most of whom have experienced a number of ACEs in childhood – I know it sounds really depressing. So I quickly follow it up with the good news. I passionately believe that, whatever you have been through in your life, however bad it was and whatever wounds it has left you with, you can always heal. It’s never too late to start (I have worked with elderly people and seen them make deep and long-lasting changes) and, however daunting it may seem, you can always heal, change and grow.

One reason for my cast-iron hopefulness is understanding the theory of neuroplasticity. This tells us that your brain is ‘plastic’ (which means it is malleable, like clay). So when you learn anything new, your brain has to create new wiring and even new grey matter to accommodate that knowledge.

The famous example is of London’s black-cab drivers, who have to take an incredibly arduous test called the Knowledge. This means that they have to study around 320 routes and 25,000 London streets and get to know them all by heart.

This is seriously hard! So the would-be cabbies have to store a huge amount of new information their brain. And, when they do this, a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which has a major role in learning and memory, actually increases in size. New wiring. New grey matter.

How the brain heals itself

And exactly the same thing happens when your brain heals from whatever trauma you may have experienced. Whether that is through a trauma-informed therapy like schema therapy, reading self-help books or blogs like this one, or enjoying a loving, supportive relationship with your partner, as you heal from trauma your brain is literally rewiring itself.

This helps you replace negative self-beliefs with more positive and helpful ones. It increases your ability to regulate painful or overwhelming emotions. And it helps you process old trauma memories, so they don’t plague you in the present and can be consigned to history, where they belong.

My desire to help you with this journey is why I created my Heal Your Trauma project and why I write this blog. I aim to share all of my knowledge and experience with you, distilling my 10-plus years of clinical experience, during which I have helped hundreds of people overcome their mental health problems. Pass on everything I have learned from studying with some of the world’s foremost trauma experts. Share with you the incredibly powerful theory and techniques I have learned from cognitive therapy, schema therapy and many more trauma-informed therapy models currently available.

And give you powerful, effective techniques you can start using, right away, to regulate your nervous system, soothe the hurt little boy or girl inside, develop greater self-compassion, and start feeling calmer, happier and more peaceful day by day – do sign up using the form below to read my latest blog posts, hot off the press.

Helping you heal your trauma

When healing any kind of psychological problem, I strongly believe that knowledge is power. So do read my blog posts, where you will find a huge amount of information, available for free, forever. In the future I will be offering a whole host of other resources, like guided meditations, workshops and self-help books. But you should start with my blog, which will be updated regularly and is packed with a wealth of resources to help you on your healing journey.

Whether you experienced trauma as a child or some other painful experience, such as emotional neglect, I look forward to helping you with the most important project of your life – freeing yourself from the painful shackles of your past and embracing a kinder, more compassionate, more meaningful present and future. I will be with you every step of the way.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Is Worry Driving You to Distraction?

Image by Priscilla Du Preez

My clients often tell me that they feel worried. And, while I understand what they mean, I always tell them that worry is not a feeling – it’s a thinking process linked to the feeling of anxiety. So, really, what they are telling me is that they feel anxious about something and have gone into worry mode to try and think their way out of the anxiety.

In schema therapy, the part that feels anxious is your Vulnerable Child mode – Little Jane or James. This is the emotional part of you, which gets triggered whenever you feel sad, anxious, stressed, hurt, upset, down… It’s also the part of you that holds all your painful memories from childhood and can get triggered when you feel threatened by something – especially if that reminds you of a stressful event from childhood.

Worry is a symptom

Let me give you an example. *Helen comes to see me because she can’t stop worrying. It’s driving her crazy, because she worries about every little thing. ‘If I have a meeting at work, I worry beforehand, about what I’ll say, whether my boss is annoyed with me, whether my colleagues like me, what I’m wearing, what I say in the meeting… You name it, I’m worrying about it,’ she tells me.

And this worry is exhausting for Helen. It makes her feel stressed before, during and after the meeting. She just can’t stop thinking about these problems. It’s like her mind is a vice – it grips on to the problems and won’t let go. ‘The other problem is that it’s driving my husband crazy,’ she adds. ‘He tries to reassure me but it doesn’t work, so I go on and on about these petty things until we’re both ratty and exhausted.’

Of course I feel for Helen – her worry is causing huge problems in her life. It maintains her low self-esteem, because she doesn’t believe she will ever do anything well enough, and that people think she’s rubbish at her job, even that she will get fired because her boss doesn’t rate her. But in our first session, I tell her something surprising and counterintuitive – even though it’s driving her nuts, worry is not the problem. It’s a symptom. And the root cause of her worry is anxious Little Helen.

Anxiety warns us about threats

I ask her to tell me more about her boss, to see if he reminds her of anyone from her past. She thinks about it, then has one of those lightbulb moments. ‘Ohhh,’ she says, ‘He is just like my dad!’ Helen goes on to tell me that her dad was highly critical when she as a child, telling her that nothing was ever good enough. If she got a B on a test, he would ask impatiently why it wasn’t an A. If she came second in a cross-country race, he would berate her for not being first. And so on.

So when she goes for a meeting with her boss, Little Helen feels highly anxious – just like she did around her dad as a child. And that’s what anxiety is for – it’s an alarm-bell emotion that warns us about potential threats. Her Worrier part then kicks in, with lots of ‘what if…’ thoughts to try and problem-solve the threats. ‘What if you say the wrong thing?’ ‘What if your boss criticises you?’ ‘What if you get fired?’

Trying to help. Trying to protect her from this nit-picking, critical, perfectionistic boss who is just like her dad. Not mean, or horrible, but trying to help Helen deal with the anxiety-provoking situation.

Comforting your little self

In order to help Helen, in schema therapy we do a few things. First, we work with the Worrier, helping Helen see where it came from, what its function is, the pros and cons of worrying, and so on until we can help it calm down a bit. Second, we help Little Helen feel safe, comforted and genuinely, deep-down reassured (not the temporary fix of reassurance that worry provides). There are many ways to do this – plenty of which are provided in this blog – but a simple first step is to use this self-compassion practice to help your little self feel calmer and more at peace.

Third, we build up Helen’s Healthy Adult, so she feels stronger, more rational, having better perspective – seeing the big picture rather than obsessing about the details. If you are a worrier by nature, you need to do all three things, rather than just focusing on the worry. Otherwise, you’re treating the symptom, not the cause, so the worry will just keep coming back.

Warm wishes,

Dan

*All of the case studies on this blog are composites of actual people – I would never reveal any personal or identifying information about my clients.

Try this Simple Grounding Technique to Help with Dissociation

Image by David Pisnoy

Dissociation is one of the most confusing, disturbing and often frightening experiences we can have. It is also extremely common – especially, but not only, if you are a trauma survivor. When explaining dissociation to my clients, I often use the analogy of a circuit breaker.

So think about a circuit breaker, which is designed to deal with sudden surges of electricity. When there is a surge, the switches get tripped, shutting down the electrical circuit and protecting all of your devices (kettle, toaster, computer, etc) from burning out.

That’s how dissociation works in your brain. If you experience something completely overwhelming, like any kind of trauma, your brain flips a few switches (metaphorically) and shuts down various circuits, to protect you from lasting damage. At the time of the trauma, this is a helpful, adaptive and potentially lifesaving strategy.

Imagine you are in a bad car crash. If you are injured, your brain flips those switches to, for example, disconnect you from the physical pain in your body. This might help you survive, by allowing you to escape the crash site. Or just to cope with the experience, by protecting you from the pain until you’re in hospital and can get treatment. As with so many of the coping strategies we use for any kind of traumatic experience, this is a good, healthy, protective thing to do.

When dissociation is not helpful

The problem with dissociation is that, over time, it becomes an unconscious and habitual response. Especially if you are a trauma survivor, with a heightened sensitivity to anything that feels scary or threatening, you might dissociate on a daily, or even hourly basis. And it’s clearly not helpful to find parts of your brain shutting down if you are driving a car, in a meeting or speaking to your child’s teacher at school.

A common dissociative experience is when your prefrontal cortex (PFC), or ‘thinking brain’, shuts down. That’s why your mind goes blank when you feel anxious, because anxiety signals threat, so your brain triggers the fight-flight-freeze response to help you survive, and shuts down your (relatively slow, overthinking) PFC so you can act, fast. This is a dissociative response, which can be scary and confusing when the only threat is that teacher telling you that your daughter is a bit naughty in class.

Try this grounding technique

Mindfulness is a wonderful skill, for many reasons, but it’s especially helpful if you’re prone to dissociation. It will help you bring the PFC online; realise that you are here, now and not there, then; and bring you back to the present, to your body, to the safe place you currently inhabit – not the scary memories you might be stuck in when you experience trauma-related dissociation.

1. You can use any of your five senses to help ground you in the present moment, but this technique involves sight. Look around the room and pick three objects (for example, a painting, plant and book). Focus all of your attention on each one in turn, describing them in as much detail as you can.

2. With the painting, that might be something like, ‘I see a large painting in a silver frame. It’s a rectangle, about two feet wide by four feet long. The painting is of a woman with a small dog on her lap. I can see strong greens and reds in the woman’s dress; and the dog is a small pug, with a shiny, dark-grey coat.’

3. Keep going, finding as much detail as possible (for this exercise, it’s never too much) and then do the same for the plant and the book.

4. After you have described all three objects, notice whether you feel more mindful and present – in your body, mind and moment-to-moment experience. I’m confident that you will be at least a bit more present, but if you still feel a bit spacey or weird pick another three objects and repeat the exercise. Again, check on your phyiscal and mental state – this should help you feel calmer, more grounded and in your body.

I really hope this helps. As ever, when offering you these techniques as part of my Heal Your Trauma project, I want to stress that if you are a trauma survivor, you will need the help of a skilled, trauma-informed professional. And if so, use these techniques alongside, rather than instead of, your treatment.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Listen to this grounding technique on Insight Timer

How to Overcome a Painful Childhood

Image by Modern Afliction

As a therapist, one of my first tasks with new clients is helping them understand why they have developed the problems — such as chronic stress, anxiety or depression — that they are seeking help for. It never ceases to amaze me how many people tell me, in our first session, ‘Actually, I had a happy childhood.’ And I think, But you have been depressed, on and off, for 40 years. Where do you think that depression came from?

As we slowly and gently work through the details of their childhood and family dynamics, it becomes clear where all that unhappiness stems from. Perhaps their mother was an alcoholic, so was unable to be the stable, loving, nurturing caregiver that all children need.

Or their father was narcissistic and harshly critical, constantly undermining them or telling them they were not good enough. If that is your experience, every day of your childhood, of course your self-esteem and self-confidence will be eroded. And, sadly, you will start telling yourself, ‘I’m not good enough,’ ‘I’m stupid’ or ‘I’m unlovable’.

This is often how our negative self-beliefs develop — we internalise the harsh, critical or destructive things that family members tell us. And then, after first hearing and then thinking these things for years, or even decades, we just believe that they are true — ‘I’m not good enough’ is not just an unhelpful idea, or confidence-sapping story we tell ourselves. It’s a fact.

Changing negative self-beliefs

In cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT), these negative ways of thinking about yourself are called ‘core beliefs’. And in schema therapy — the form of psychotherapy I specialise in — we see these beliefs as part of a ‘schema’, a neural network incorporating painful ways of thinking, feeling and sensing in your body that fires up whenever you encounter something stressful or threatening, especially if it reminds you of similar stressful experiences from your past.

For example, if your dad left the family when you were young, you might have (understandably) felt abandoned. This could lead to the formation of an Abandonment schema, which fires up in adulthood whenever a romantic partner seems to be withdrawing, losing interest in you or interested in someone else.

Or, if you were the recipient of that horrible, harsh criticism detailed above, you may form a Defectiveness schema, leading you to feel defective/not good enough/incompetent when you fail an exam, or struggle in a job interview. This is perhaps the most common schema I see in my practice — and is at the root of low self-esteem, as well as problems such as public-speaking anxiety or struggling in your career.

Once I have helped someone understand that their childhood was not so rosy, and identified which schemas they have (there are 18 in total and we all have at least a few), we start work on healing those schemas. That essentially means healing the wounds of a painful past, which usually begin forming in childhood or adolescence. If this is resonating with you, and you are one of the millions of people whose childhood was not a happy one, here are a few powerful insights I have garnered from helping hundreds of people overcome their painful histories.

The negative stories you tell yourself are usually not true

Let’s say you have that negative belief about yourself: ‘I’m not good enough.’ (This is incredibly common, by the way — most of my clients believe this about themselves.) You might think this because someone, often a parent, was highly critical, demanding or dismissive of your best efforts, in school, sports or — in the worst-case scenario — just who you were as a person. They made you feel everything you said or did was somehow stupid or wrong.

But, if that was your experience, it says far more about them than it does you. If a father is criticising his five-year-old son for not having the football skills of Maradona, who really has the problem? Your dad, that’s who. So why do you have to believe the nonsense he told you, 40 years later?

Being harshly self-critical will only deepen your unhappiness

Many of us (myself included) absorbed all that criticism from our parents and started to say those mean, hurtful things to ourselves. After all, we thought they were true, so why wouldn’t we call ourselves ‘Idiot’, ‘Pathetic’ or ‘Stupid’? You may even think that’s a good way to motivate yourself or improve your grades or work performance. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way.

There is a huge body of research now proving the link between harsh self-criticism and depression (in a 2019 study, by Zhang et al, the researchers found that self-criticism triggered depression, while self-compassion reduced it). Research also shows that mindfulness, self-compassion and self-kindness are wonderful antidotes to the toxic, self-destructive critical thoughts that cause mental anguish of all kinds.

You are human, with strengths and weaknesses, like everybody else

Many of my clients struggle with deep-rooted, painful and debilitating problems like substance abuse, anxiety disorders, depression or low self-esteem. Often, they are ashamed of these problems, thinking that they make them weak, or uniquely deserving of judgement or blame. So I tell them (often hundreds of times, until it eventually goes in) that these problems are a direct result of their painful childhoods.

They didn’t choose to be ignored, belittled or shouted at, so how on earth can that depression or debilitating anxiety be their fault? And I help them see that problems like these are normal. Human. We all (again, myself included) have strengths and weaknesses; things we are proud of and others that fill us with shame; behaviours that are healthy and others that are not. No need to beat yourself up.

It is never too late to find happiness

There are billions of people living on our planet. Sadly, most of those people will have experienced a painful childhood, in one way or another and with varying degrees of intensity. But, as Paul Gilbert, eminent psychologist and founder of compassion-focused therapy, teaches: Having a painful childhood is not your fault — but it is your responsibility to do everything you can, as an adult, to heal and change.

And we know this is possible — there are countless forms of therapy, wonderful self-help books, loving friends and family members that can help you overcome a painful past. Take it from someone who has helped hundreds of people do just that — it is never impossible, or too late, to change. And if you can live the rest of your life with greater happiness, confidence and self-worth, surely the hard work needed to change must be worth it.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Manage Your Coronavirus-Related Health Anxiety

Image from CDC

Do you struggle with health anxiety? If so, you’re not alone. Millions of people around the world face a daily battle with this anxiety disorder. I often tell my clients that, if you’re prone to anxiety, your health is one of the easiest things to obsess about, because of course humans are vulnerable to health problems.

We all struggle with our health, dealing with everything from mild problems like the common cold to serious illnesses like diabetes and cancer. And we are all mortal, so have to accept that one day, our life will end. It’s natural — in some ways even logical — to worry about your health.

Now, of course, we are facing an unprecedented public health crisis. In the UK, as I write this over-70s are encouraged to self-isolate, many businesses have shut down and all schools are closing from tomorrow, we are all being encouraged to adopt social distancing and stay home as much as possible. And I’m sure the restrictions will get more and more severe.

The reality is that Covid-19 is a scary, unpredictable and long-term problem that we are struggling to understand and contain across the globe.

Kryptonite for the health-anxious

So I am anxious. My friends, family, colleagues and neighbours are anxious. Anxiety is a normal, healthy, proportionate response to a global crisis like this. It’s hard for everyone right now.

But I think — as well as the high-risk groups of people who are especially vulnerable to a serious reaction to the virus — this crisis is extremely tough on people with two types of mental-health problem: contamination-focused OCD and those with health anxiety (formerly known as hypochondria). I am going to focus on the latter problem in this story, but there is a huge amount of information about, and help with OCD on the MIND website, if you need it (mind.org.uk).

Health anxiety is one of the anxiety disorders, in which people develop an unhelpful preoccupation with their health. A useful definition I once read is: ‘The catastrophic misinterpretation of benign physical symptoms’.

That means that, if you have health anxiety, you will catastrophise — one of the common forms of unhelpful thinking styles treated with cognitive therapy — about benign physical symptoms. This means that, if you get a tension headache, you start Googling symptoms (always a bad idea!) and become convinced you have a brain tumour.

If your heart rate speeds up, because you’re stressed, anxious or engaging in physical exercise, you are 100 per cent sure you have a heart problem. You notice a tiny mole on your forearm and worry obsessively that it’s skin cancer.

Coronavirus-related anxiety

If this sounds familiar, I feel deeply compassionate for you right now. It must be hell. Every time you look at a newspaper, Twitter or your Facebook feed, you are confronted with frightening, doom-laden headlines about this awful virus that is sweeping through the global population. You, like so many of my clients right now, must be overwhelmed with anxiety.

But you can’t let anxiety dominate your life. This crisis is likely to go on for months, so you need to take swift and decisive action to help yourself. Here are three pieces of advice to get you through this:

1. Engage your rational brain

Because this all feels so threatening, the ancient, emotional parts of your brain have taken over — primarily your ‘threat system’, which is on red alert right now. This system triggers the fight-flight-freeze response to danger. If you’re super-anxious, you are in flight mode much of the time.

One answer to this is to use your rational brain — the frontal cortex — to calm down the parts that are freaking out. This virus is truly awful, but the vast majority of those who contract it will only develop cold- or flu-like symptoms, then make a complete recovery. Many health-anxious clients I have worked with are young, fit, healthy, often vegan and teetotal — some of the healthiest people I have ever met!

If that’s you, remember that it is overwhelmingly likely you will be fine, even if you get it. So stop catastrophising and take sensible precautions to minimise your risk of contracting the virus: social distancing, mask-wearing, regular hand-washing, and so on.

2. Breathe

When the fight-flight-freeze response has kicked in, your breathing goes haywire. Basically, you start breathing like a hot dog panting — rapid, shallow breaths that will make you feel dizzy, tight-chested and breathless. Not good, if you’re already worrying about a virus that targets your lungs.

So you need to slow your breathing right down, breathe abdominally, for roughly four seconds in and four seconds out. Do that for at least a minute, more if possible. I call this ‘compassionate breathing’, but it’s just deep breathing, so you can do it anywhere, any time if you need to calm yourself down.

Trust me: it’s awesome and it really works.

3. Get some help

Please don’t suffer alone. We are all struggling right now and need all the help we can get. There are plenty of charities set up to help with health anxiety and other anxiety disorders. Here are just a few for those living in the UK:

• Young Minds (youngminds.org.uk)

• Anxiety UK (anxietyuk.org.uk)

• OCD Action (ocdaction.org.uk)

If you need more help than this, I would recommend either cognitive or schema therapy. I have helped dozens of health-anxious people with both approaches and they are proven to be the most effective forms of psychotherapy for anxiety disorders. In the UK, you can get cognitive therapy on the NHS, but it will probably be a long wait. If you’re looking for a qualified private cognitive therapist, visit BABCP’s site (babcp.com).

If you would like schema therapy from me, use my contact form to get in touch.

So if you are having a tough time right now, know that help is out there for you. We will get through this. Humans are remarkably resilient. We will develop a vaccine and treatments for Covid-19 are already being trialled.

Wherever you are in the world, sending you love and warm thoughts from London,

Dan

What are Anxiety Disorders?

Image by Nathan Dumlao

In either cognitive or schema therapy we first try to understand exactly what is causing someone’s problems, before going on to help solve them. If someone is struggling with anxiety, part of this understanding is making a diagnosis of exactly which ‘anxiety disorder’ someone is struggling with.

Some people find this idea a little uncomfortable, but it’s just like your GP diagnosing whether you have the common cold or flu, so they can prescribe the right treatment.

There are seven anxiety disorders, which I summarise briefly below – map your symptoms on to the disorder to see whether you might have one. If you are unsure, please get an assessment from a cognitive or schema therapist; and remember that it’s common to suffer from more than one of these disorders at the same time, as well as other problems like depression or low self-esteem.

Panic disorder and agoraphobia

A panic attack involves a sudden increase in anxiety, accompanied by physical symptoms of anxiety, such as a racing heart rate, breathlessness or dizziness. Panic disorder involves recurrent panic attacks and may or may not lead to agoraphobia – anxiety about being in situations in which escape would be embarrassing or help would not be available in the case of a panic attack. People with agoraphobia may struggle to leave the house or be in open or public places, like shopping centres.

Health anxiety

Health anxiety (also called ‘hypochondriasis’) involves a fear of having a serious illness, like cancer or heart disease, and a preoccupation with bodily symptoms. The problem will not go away with medical reassurance and is often extremely distressing – you may be convinced you have a serious health problem but that no-one believes you, which is understandably frustrating and upsetting.

Social phobia

People with social phobia have a fear of social or performance situations, or both; you may feel comfortable with one trusted friend, but become anxious if their friend joins you. You might be fine in small groups, but the bigger the group the more your anxiety grows. And you might struggle in performance situations, like public speaking or university seminars – you may hate being put on the spot or have the feeling that everyone can see how anxious you are and will think badly of you in some way.

Specific phobia

This involves the persistent fear of a particular object of situation – it’s ‘specific’ because you fear that and not a wide range of things. The most common phobias are a fear of heights, public speaking, snakes, spiders, being in enclosed spaces, mice, needles and injections, crowds, clowns, darkness and dogs. Of course, some people struggle with more than one phobia. And it’s worth noting that specific phobias are relatively easy to treat with CBT – in around six sessions or less.

Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD)

GAD is defined as excessive anxiety and worry occurring more days than not for a period of at least six months and about a number of events or activities. The two key features of this disorder are ‘free-floating’ anxiety, which attaches itself to one thing after another; and persistent worry, which is more severe than normal worry, seems hard to control and causes distress and/or makes it difficult to function.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

If you are suffering from OCD, you will experience obsessions (intrusive images, impulses or thoughts) and/or compulsions (repetitive behaviours engaged in to minimise the anxiety or upset caused by the obsessional thought or because of rigid rules). Although the compulsion – which could involve checking, washing, prayers or replacing negative thoughts/images with positive ones – is intended to reduce distress or prevent a feared outcome, like someone you love being harmed. Unfortunately, the compulsion only provides short-term relief and is a key element of what maintains the OCD.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

PTSD occurs as a reaction to a profoundly distressing event that threatened death or serious injury to yourself or other people; a response that involved intense fear, helplessness or horror; and key symptoms of re-experiencing, avoidance and hyperarousal. There is some debate over whether PTSD is an anxiety or stress/trauma disorder, but as it does involve very high levels of anxiety, I have included it here.

Warm wishes,

Dan

What is Thought-Action Fusion?

Image by Roman Bilik

One of the many kinds of unhelpful thinking that can make us stressed, anxious or worried is 'thought-action fusion'. This is especially common in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but is also found in other anxiety disorders such as generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), health anxiety, panic disorder, phobias and social anxiety.

The problem here is that we can confuse thoughts with actions, believing that one has a direct link with the other. Let me give you an example, commonly found in people with OCD (as with the other case studies on this blog, this is a composite of different people and not about any particular client):

Marie has obsessional thoughts (the O in OCD) about running people over when she is driving. As with most OCD sufferers, she worries about this because she is a nice, caring person – it's precisely because the thoughts are so upsetting that she has become obsessive about them. She worries about hurting people before, during and especially after driving from her home to the office.

She thinks, 'Did I just hit someone? I'm sure I did.' Unsurprisingly, this thought makes her very anxious, so she has to engage in compulsions (the C in OCD), like driving back over her route and double-checking there is nobody injured, to 'neutralise' the upsetting thoughts and calm herself down.

One of the reasons Marie gets upset is because she believes the act of thinking about running people over makes it more likely to actually happen. And after her drive she is convinced that because she keeps worrying about hitting people, and even seeing images of that happening in her mind, it means she has actually hit someone. Such is the logic-defying slipperiness of OCD, which makes it challenging to treat.

Generalised anxiety disorder

Another example, of someone who is prone to excessive worry:

Clare has generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), which means she has 'free-floating' anxiety that attaches itself to one thing after the next; she also struggles with chronic worry, lying awake late into the night worrying about her children's safety, their performance at school and countless other things. As with other worriers, Clare has beliefs related to the act of worrying itself that maintain her worry problem. She thinks:

a) 'It's useful to worry – it helps me stay on top of all the family problems I have to deal with every day.'

b) 'If I don't worry about my kids, who will? Worrying about them helps keep them safe.'

You can see how the latter part of her second belief is an example of thought-action fusion. Like many people, Clare thinks there is a causal relationship between worrying (a type of thinking) and her children coming to harm (an action). Logically, although of course it's good to be careful about your children's safety, constantly worrying about them will not keep them safe, especially when they are not with Clare.

But despite the stress and exhaustion that all this worrying causes her, it helps Clare manage her discomfort with uncertainty – another key feature of GAD. Learning to think in a more rational, balanced and helpful way is key to overcoming any anxiety disorder.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Manage Your Anxiety

Image by Faye Cornish

Along with depression, anxiety-related problems are the most common form of psychological difficulty. These problems range from mild to severe and include everything from a tendency to worry too much to potentially crippling problems such as severe health anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder, which can completely dominate someone’s life.

Whatever form of anxiety you struggle with, the first thing to realise is that anxiety is both normal and necessary. Anxiety is an ‘arousal emotion’ which serves as a sort of alarm bell to warn us that something is wrong and we need to take action.

Fight-or-flight response

It is linked to the fight-or-flight response, a vital but primitive self-protection strategy that served humans well when we were surrounded by hungry predators, but is less well-adapted to the complex demands of 21st-century life.

All anxiety-related problems involve some kind of misfiring of this ancient part of our brains and are all linked to two things: overestimating threats and underestimating our capacity to deal with them. Let me give you an example – if someone has a phobia about dogs, they are likely to perceive all dogs as threatening, perhaps vicious and dangerous.

This is clearly an overestimation of the threat presented by the vast majority of (friendly, tail-wagging) dogs. The dog-phobic person is also underestimating their ability to deal with the occasional dog who actually is aggressive, by crossing the street or asking the dog's owner to control them.

Anxiety is felt in the body

One of the other problems with anxiety is that it’s not just a psychological or emotional response – it causes all sorts of changes in our bodies, too. If you think about the fight-or-flight response, which is designed to help us either fight or flee from life-or-death threats, this makes perfect sense.

Our heart rate speeds up and breathing gets faster, oxygenating the blood being pumped to all our major muscles (by the way, this explains the racing heartbeat and the feeling of breathlessness often linked to panic attacks, and the blushing that may worry people with social anxiety).

Breathing in this way also makes you feel dizzy and light-headed, while all the adrenaline pumped into your bloodstream to give you a burst of energy makes you feel hyper, edgy and even more anxious. So one of the simplest ways to help yourself feel less anxious is to work directly with the body. Use a deep breathing technique to calm yourself down; avoid caffeine (which stimulates adrenaline production); go for a walk or do more vigorous exercise to burn off that adrenaline; have a relaxing bath, do some yoga or meditate to help yourself relax.

Changing unhelpful beliefs

The other way to free yourself from anxiety is to tackle the anxiety-provoking thoughts and beliefs that are the root cause of your problem. Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) is proven to be the most effective way to tackle all anxiety-related problems, from social anxiety to phobias and obsessive compulsive disorder.

There is also a wealth of free material on my website to help you tackle your own problems, so do try to find something that works for you. Whether you visit a cognitive therapist like myself, or choose to deal with the problem on your own, please remember that life doesn't have to be such a struggle - with a little effort and determination you do have the power to free yourself from anxiety.

Warm wishes,

Dan