One of the more frustrating forms of anxiety is not simply being anxious about something happening in your life. It is becoming anxious about anxiety itself. You begin worrying about how you might feel in a particular situation, whether you will be able to control your anxiety, whether other people will notice it, or whether uncomfortable physical sensations will become overwhelming. Before anything has actually happened, you are already anticipating your own emotional response.
This is sometimes called anxiety about anxiety, and it can become remarkably disruptive. You may worry about becoming anxious while driving, flying, speaking in public, attending a social event, going on a date, sitting in an important meeting, having a medical procedure, or traveling far from home. Someone who has experienced panic attacks may become afraid of having another one. Someone with health anxiety may become frightened by the physical sensations anxiety creates. Someone struggling with insomnia may become anxious in the evening because they are afraid they will not sleep. The circumstances vary, but the pattern has something important in common: the anticipated emotional or physical response becomes part of what you fear.
After more than 10 years specializing in anxiety and subconscious change at Geauga Mind Body Hypnosis in the Cleveland area, I have seen how easily this secondary layer of fear can complicate anxiety. I also understand it personally. Before becoming a hypnotherapist, I experienced severe panic disorder that eventually progressed into agoraphobia. I know what it is like when you are no longer simply responding to an uncomfortable feeling in the moment. You begin anticipating that feeling before it happens, monitoring yourself for signs of it, and changing your behavior in an effort to make certain you never have to experience it again.
The problem is that the harder you work to guarantee that you will never feel anxious, the more important anxiety can become to your brain.
What Does “Anxiety About Anxiety” Mean?
Anxiety is a normal human emotion. It is impossible, and unnecessary, to eliminate every moment of nervousness, uncertainty, apprehension, or physiological arousal from your life. A healthy nervous system responds to circumstances. You may feel nervous before an important presentation, apprehensive while waiting for medical results, uncertain on a first date, or activated before doing something challenging. None of these reactions automatically indicate that anything is wrong.
The problem begins when the experience of anxiety itself acquires an exaggerated meaning. Instead of thinking, “I feel nervous because this matters to me,” you may begin thinking, “I can’t feel this way. What if this gets worse? What if I can’t control it? What if everyone notices? What if I panic? What if I can’t get out of here?” The original anxiety now has a second layer sitting on top of it: fear of the anxiety response itself.
This can create a self-reinforcing pattern. You anticipate anxiety, so you monitor yourself more closely. Because you are monitoring yourself, you notice sensations and thoughts that you might otherwise have ignored. Those sensations concern you, so your anxiety increases. The increased anxiety produces additional physical and emotional sensations, which seem to confirm that your original fear was justified.
Eventually, the person may conclude, “I knew I couldn’t handle this,” when in reality much of the escalation came from becoming frightened by the anxiety itself.
Why Fear of Anxiety Can Make Anxiety Stronger
Your brain pays attention to what it believes is important. If you have learned that feeling anxious is dangerous, intolerable, embarrassing, or evidence that you are losing control, your mind naturally begins looking for signs that anxiety is approaching.
You may check your heart rate before walking into a meeting. You may assess how you feel as you approach the freeway. You may monitor your breathing while waiting for an airplane to take off. Before a social event, you may wonder whether you feel nervous yet. At bedtime, you may check whether you feel sleepy enough to fall asleep. Someone with health anxiety may continually scan the body for unfamiliar sensations and then try to determine whether those sensations are anxiety or evidence of illness.
All of this monitoring has an unintended consequence: it keeps your attention focused on precisely the experience you are afraid of having.
Anxiety also produces real physical sensations. Heart rate can increase, breathing can change, muscles can tighten, the stomach can feel unsettled, the mouth may become dry, and you may feel warm, shaky, lightheaded, or restless. If you interpret those sensations as evidence that anxiety is getting out of control, the interpretation creates additional fear. Your body responds to that fear, producing stronger sensations, which then provide additional evidence that something is wrong.
The original anxiety may have been relatively manageable. Fear of the anxiety amplifies it.
The Difference Between Anxiety and Panic
Anxiety about anxiety becomes especially important when someone has experienced panic attacks. A severe panic attack can be so physically intense and frightening that the person becomes determined never to experience another one. The brain begins monitoring for the earliest signs that panic might be returning.
This is central to the work I do with panic through my Panic2Calm™ protocol. Panic2Calm is a structured educational process that teaches clients what is actually happening during panic, how the subconscious fear loop develops, and how to stop reinforcing that cycle. After the client learns the process, the new response is reinforced through subconscious reprogramming so it can become increasingly natural and automatic.
The panic cycle deserves its own targeted approach because fear of panic can become extraordinarily powerful. A person notices a familiar physical sensation, interprets it as the beginning of another attack, becomes frightened, experiences additional physiological arousal, and then interprets the stronger sensations as proof that panic is escalating. The fear response is feeding the very experience the person desperately wants to prevent.
Once that cycle is understood and interrupted, we can turn our attention to a different question: What anxiety remains underneath it?
This is where my individualized Transformational Hypnosis process becomes important.
Anticipatory Anxiety: Suffering Before Anything Has Happened
Anxiety about anxiety frequently appears as anticipatory anxiety, which means the emotional response begins long before the feared situation actually occurs. A presentation scheduled for Friday may begin affecting you on Monday. A flight next month may already be producing anxiety. A social event on Saturday can occupy your thoughts for days. Someone who had difficulty sleeping one night may begin worrying about bedtime before dinner.
The mind begins rehearsing a future experience that has not occurred. You imagine yourself becoming anxious, uncomfortable, embarrassed, trapped, unable to perform, unable to sleep, or unable to cope. Your body can respond to that imagined future as though something threatening is happening now.
This is one of the paradoxes of chronic anxiety. The mind believes it is helping by preparing for every possibility, but repeated mental rehearsal can strengthen the expectation of danger. Instead of simply dealing with a situation when it arrives, you may experience versions of it mentally dozens or hundreds of times beforehand.
The anticipated experience can eventually become more difficult than the event itself.
“What If I Get Anxious While Driving?”
Driving anxiety is an excellent example of anxiety about anxiety. Some people are primarily afraid of an accident or another external danger. For others, the central concern is what might happen inside themselves while they are driving.
- What if I get dizzy?
- What if my heart starts racing?
- What if I panic in traffic?
- What if I am on a bridge and cannot pull over?
- What if I am on the freeway and there is no exit?
- What if I am too far from home?
Once those questions become established, driving is no longer simply transportation. It becomes a test of whether you can remain sufficiently calm.
This can lead to increasingly restrictive behavior. Someone stops using one highway, then another. Bridges become difficult. Heavy traffic is avoided. Driving alone becomes uncomfortable. The person begins taking longer routes because they feel safer or asks someone else to drive.
The relief created by avoidance can make the strategy feel effective in the short term. Unfortunately, the underlying message can become, “I was safe because I avoided the thing I couldn’t handle.” The person’s confidence in their own ability to experience and move through anxiety may decrease rather than increase.
Fear of Flying and Fear of Feeling Trapped
Fear of flying can involve many different anxieties, but one pattern I frequently encounter is fear of experiencing anxiety or panic while unable to leave the situation. The person may not primarily be afraid that the airplane will crash. They may be afraid of being thousands of feet in the air and suddenly feeling trapped inside their own anxiety.
The anticipation often begins well before the trip. The person imagines boarding the plane, the doors closing, sitting on the runway, feeling the first physical signs of anxiety, and realizing they cannot simply get off. By the time the flight arrives, they may have mentally rehearsed the feared experience repeatedly.
This is why understanding the actual source of anxiety matters. If someone is afraid of aviation safety, that is one problem. If someone is afraid of losing control of their internal response while on the airplane, that is another. Effective work with anxiety requires understanding what the individual is actually afraid will happen, rather than assuming everyone with the same situational fear has the same underlying pattern.
Health Anxiety: When Anxiety Symptoms Become Evidence of Illness
Health anxiety creates another particularly difficult version of anxiety about anxiety because anxiety itself produces physical symptoms. A person who is already worried about health may notice palpitations, chest tightness, dizziness, tingling, nausea, breath changes, muscle tension, visual disturbances, or other physical sensations associated with stress and immediately wonder whether something medically serious is happening.
The fear increases physiological arousal, which can intensify the symptoms. The stronger symptoms then appear to validate the original fear. Someone may begin checking their pulse, blood pressure, oxygen level, skin, pupils, lymph nodes, or other parts of the body. They may repeatedly search symptoms online or seek reassurance from other people.
Appropriate medical evaluation is important for new or concerning symptoms, and anxiety should not automatically be assumed to explain every physical complaint. The problem occurs when someone has been appropriately evaluated yet remains trapped in a repetitive pattern of monitoring, catastrophic interpretation, reassurance, temporary relief, and renewed fear.
In those circumstances, the person may not only be afraid of illness. They can become afraid of the bodily sensations produced by their own anxiety, because those sensations continually reopen the question of whether something is wrong.
Social Anxiety: “What If People Notice I’m Anxious?”
For someone with social anxiety, the fear may extend beyond being judged for what they say or do. They may become afraid that other people will see their anxiety.
What if my face turns red? What if my hands shake? What if my voice sounds nervous? What if I can’t think of anything to say? What if I start sweating? What if someone notices that I am uncomfortable?
This creates an extraordinary amount of self-monitoring. Instead of participating naturally in the conversation, part of the person’s attention remains turned inward, evaluating how they appear and whether signs of anxiety are visible.
That internal surveillance makes it much harder to be genuinely present with other people. It can also distort perception. Someone may interpret an ordinary pause in conversation as evidence that they are socially failing or assume another person’s neutral expression means they are being judged.
The anxiety then becomes self-referential. You are no longer simply nervous about the social interaction. You are anxious about appearing anxious during the social interaction.
Public Speaking and Performance Anxiety
Public speaking provides an especially clear example of why fearing anxiety can magnify it. Most people experience some physiological activation before speaking to an audience. The body understands that something important is happening. Heart rate may increase, adrenaline rises, the mouth may become dry, and there may be butterflies in the stomach.
Those sensations do not necessarily interfere with performance. In fact, some degree of activation can accompany focus and engagement.
Problems arise when the person interprets the sensations as evidence that something is going wrong. A faster heartbeat becomes, “I’m losing control.” A slight tremor becomes, “Everyone can see how nervous I am.” A momentary lapse in concentration becomes, “My mind is going blank.”
The person is now trying to deliver the presentation while simultaneously monitoring and suppressing every sign of nervousness. This creates far more cognitive and emotional strain than simply allowing normal performance activation to exist.
The same pattern can occur during interviews, auditions, examinations, business presentations, athletic competition, important meetings, or any situation in which someone believes they must feel perfectly calm in order to perform well.
Dating Anxiety and the Pressure to Feel Confident
Dating can create a similar pattern. Someone may believe they need to feel confident before they can appear attractive, interesting, or socially competent. The first sign of nervousness therefore becomes evidence that the date is going badly.
Instead of paying attention to the person sitting across from them, they begin evaluating themselves. Am I talking too much? Am I not talking enough? Do I look nervous? Was that awkward? Does this person like me? Why is my heart beating so fast?
Normal uncertainty becomes threatening because the person is trying to control both the outcome of the date and their internal emotional state.
Underlying beliefs about rejection, attractiveness, self-worth, vulnerability, or being good enough can make this anxiety considerably stronger. These are precisely the kinds of individualized subconscious patterns that may become relevant when I work with anxiety through Transformational Hypnosis.
Anxiety About Sleep: “What If I Can’t Fall Asleep?”
Insomnia can create one of the clearest examples of becoming anxious about an internal state. After several difficult nights, someone may begin worrying about sleep hours before bedtime. They calculate how much sleep they need, how badly they will feel tomorrow, whether they are tired enough yet, and how many hours remain before the alarm goes off.
Bedtime becomes a performance.
The person is trying to make themselves sleep, while simultaneously checking whether sleep is happening.
The more important falling asleep becomes, the more activated the mind can become. A normal period of wakefulness that once would have meant nothing now becomes evidence of another terrible night ahead. The thought creates anxiety, and anxiety makes sleep more difficult.
Once again, the secondary fear has become part of the problem.
The Impossible Goal of Never Feeling Anxious
One of the most important things I want clients to understand is that the objective is not to eliminate every uncomfortable emotion from life.
Human beings experience uncertainty, disappointment, nervousness, grief, frustration, apprehension, excitement, embarrassment, and fear. Emotional health does not mean never experiencing an unpleasant feeling.
Trying to guarantee that you will never feel anxious can actually give anxiety more importance.
Imagine going into every meaningful situation with one requirement: I must not feel anxious. You now have to monitor yourself continuously to determine whether you are succeeding. The first hint of nervousness means the plan is failing, which creates additional concern.
A much healthier internal position is understanding that an uncomfortable feeling is not automatically dangerous and does not determine what you are capable of doing.
You can feel nervous and still give an excellent presentation. You can experience uncertainty and still make a good decision. You can feel butterflies and still enjoy a date. You can notice your heart beating faster and continue driving. You can experience an anxious thought without treating it as a prediction.
When anxiety no longer has to be eliminated immediately, it often loses much of its power.
Why Reassurance Doesn’t Always Solve Anxiety
People with chronic anxiety frequently understand their fears intellectually. Someone with health anxiety may know they have already been medically evaluated. Someone with fear of flying may understand aviation statistics. Someone with social anxiety may know that other people are not scrutinizing them nearly as much as they imagine. Someone with driving anxiety may have driven safely for decades.
Yet the automatic response continues.
This is because knowing something consciously and responding to it automatically are not always the same process. You can understand perfectly well that something is safe while another part of your mind continues reacting according to an older learned association, belief, expectation, or protective pattern.
This is one reason people sometimes become frustrated after years of analyzing their anxiety. They understand where it came from. They understand that it is disproportionate. They may even recognize exactly which thoughts are irrational. Yet their body and emotions continue responding in the same familiar way.
Insight is valuable, but understanding a pattern and changing an automatic pattern are not necessarily the same thing.
Where Transformational Hypnosis Fits
When I work with underlying anxiety at Geauga Mind Body Hypnosis, I use an individualized Transformational Hypnosis process rather than giving every anxious client the same generic suggestions to relax.
Anxiety is not identical from person to person. Two clients may both say they are afraid of flying, yet one fears dying in a crash while the other fears being trapped with panic. Two people may both have social anxiety, yet one fears rejection while another believes making a mistake will expose them as inadequate. Two people may both have health anxiety, while the beliefs and experiences driving that anxiety are entirely different.
My work therefore begins with understanding the individual’s pattern. We look at the situations that activate anxiety, the thoughts and predictions associated with it, the beliefs the person holds about themselves and the world, and the experiences that may have contributed to those automatic responses.
Transformational Hypnosis then allows us to work with the subconscious beliefs, associations, emotional learning, and automatic patterns contributing to the anxiety. The objective is not simply to tell the conscious mind something it already knows. It is to change the underlying response so the person is no longer continually fighting against the same automatic pattern.
This is consistent with the way I have structured my Transformational Hypnosis work for more than a decade: identify the subconscious pattern, neutralize and reframe what is no longer useful, and reinforce a healthier response.
Panic2Calm™ and Transformational Hypnosis Address Different Parts of the Problem
When anxiety about anxiety has developed specifically around recurring panic attacks, I use my Panic2Calm™ protocol to address the panic cycle. Panic2Calm teaches the person how panic works, how the subconscious fear loop develops, and how to interrupt that loop. The new response is then reinforced through subconscious reprogramming.
Once the panic cycle has been addressed, we can work with the broader anxiety patterns that remain through Transformational Hypnosis.
This distinction matters because someone may stop fearing panic yet still struggle with chronic worry, health anxiety, social anxiety, perfectionism, fear of uncertainty, or another longstanding pattern. Conversely, trying to address every aspect of someone’s anxiety without specifically addressing their fear of panic can leave an important part of the problem untouched.
My approach is therefore individualized rather than forcing every client into one technique. We identify what is actually happening and address the appropriate pattern.
What Are You Actually Afraid Will Happen?
One of the most useful questions in understanding anxiety is deceptively simple: What are you actually afraid will happen?
Not “What makes you anxious?” but what do you believe the anxiety means?
If your heart races while driving, what are you afraid will happen next? If you become nervous during a presentation, what do you believe that nervousness will cause? If you feel anxious on an airplane, are you afraid of the aircraft or afraid you will panic and be unable to escape? If you notice a physical symptom, are you afraid of the sensation itself or what you believe it signifies?
The answer often reveals that the obvious situation is only part of the problem.
Someone may say they are afraid of public speaking when they are actually afraid of humiliation. Someone may say they fear driving when they actually fear becoming trapped with panic. Someone may say they fear dating when the deeper fear involves rejection. Someone may say they cannot tolerate uncertainty when what they truly fear is discovering they cannot cope with an unwanted outcome.
Once we understand the underlying fear, we can stop treating the surface situation as though it tells us everything.
You Do Not Have to Feel Perfectly Calm to Be Safe
This may be one of the most important shifts for someone who has become afraid of anxiety.
You do not need to feel perfectly calm every moment in order to be safe, competent, capable, or in control of your life.
Anxiety is uncomfortable. It can sometimes be intensely uncomfortable. But discomfort and danger are not synonymous.
When the brain has learned to interpret anxiety itself as a threat, every uncomfortable sensation becomes something that must immediately be controlled. The person begins fighting an internal battle that can occupy enormous amounts of attention and energy.
When that interpretation changes, the experience changes with it.
The question becomes less, “How do I guarantee that I never feel anxious?” and more, “Why does my brain believe this particular situation, sensation, or uncertainty requires this response?”
That is a much more useful question because it gives us something specific to change.
Frequently Asked Questions About Anxiety About Anxiety
Why am I anxious about being anxious?
Being anxious about anxiety happens when your brain begins treating the anxiety response itself as something threatening. Instead of simply experiencing nervousness or physical arousal, you begin worrying about what the anxiety might do: What if it gets worse? What if I panic? What if I can’t control it? What if I embarrass myself? What if I can’t escape? This secondary fear can create additional anxiety, which is why anxiety about anxiety can become a self-reinforcing cycle.
What is anxiety about anxiety called?
Anxiety about anxiety is sometimes described as fear of anxiety, fear of fear, meta-anxiety, anxiety sensitivity, or anticipatory anxiety, depending on the specific pattern involved. The terms are not completely interchangeable, but they describe related experiences in which a person becomes frightened by anxiety itself, the physical sensations associated with anxiety, or the possibility of becoming anxious in the future.
What is anticipatory anxiety?
Anticipatory anxiety is anxiety that occurs before something has actually happened. You may spend hours, days, or even weeks imagining an upcoming flight, presentation, social event, medical appointment, trip, meeting, or other situation and worrying about how you will feel when it occurs. Sometimes you are not primarily afraid of the event itself. You are afraid that you will become anxious during it and will not be able to handle the feeling.
Why do I get anxiety thinking about something that hasn’t happened yet?
The brain does not have to wait for an event to occur before responding to it emotionally. Imagining a threatening future situation can activate many of the same emotional and physiological responses associated with experiencing a threat in the present. If you repeatedly imagine yourself panicking, failing, becoming trapped, losing control, or being unable to cope, your body may begin responding to the prediction rather than to anything that is actually happening.
Why does thinking about anxiety make me more anxious?
Attention matters. When you begin monitoring yourself for anxiety, ordinary changes in your body and emotions become much more noticeable. You notice your heartbeat, breathing, stomach, thoughts, temperature, balance, or muscle tension and ask yourself whether anxiety is beginning. If those sensations are interpreted as threatening, the interpretation creates more fear. More fear creates more physical arousal, giving you even more sensations to monitor.
Why am I constantly checking to see if I feel anxious?
Constantly checking your body or emotional state can develop when your brain has learned that anxiety is important and potentially dangerous. You may repeatedly ask yourself, Am I anxious? Is my heart beating faster? Am I getting dizzy? Do I feel normal? Is this the beginning of panic? The checking is intended to give you reassurance and control, but it can have the opposite effect by keeping your attention focused on anxiety and making normal physical sensations increasingly significant.
Why am I afraid of having another panic attack?
A frightening panic attack can teach the brain to become highly alert for anything associated with the previous experience. You may begin watching for a racing heart, dizziness, breath changes, tingling, nausea, unreality, warmth, or another sensation that occurred during the original panic attack. The moment you notice something familiar, the thought “What if I’m having another panic attack?” creates fear. That fear produces additional physiological arousal, which can intensify the sensations you were already monitoring.
This fear of having another panic attack can become one of the mechanisms that keeps recurring panic going. It is also why my Panic2Calm™ protocol specifically addresses the fear loop surrounding panic rather than simply teaching someone to relax.
Why do I feel like I’m going to panic even when nothing is wrong?
Panic does not always require an obvious external danger. Once the brain has learned to associate certain physical sensations, thoughts, situations, or environments with panic, those cues can begin triggering an automatic fear response. You may consciously know that you are safe while your body responds as though something dangerous is happening. This difference between conscious knowledge and automatic response is one reason people often say, “I know there’s nothing wrong, so why can’t I stop feeling this way?”
Why does my anxiety get worse when I try to control it?
Trying desperately to prevent anxiety can unintentionally communicate to your brain that anxiety is dangerous and must be stopped. You begin monitoring whether your efforts are working, which means paying even more attention to the anxiety. The first sign that you are still nervous can then feel like failure, producing additional frustration and fear. The objective is not to force yourself never to experience anxiety. It is to stop interpreting every experience of anxiety as something dangerous or intolerable.
Can fear of anxiety turn into panic attacks?
It can contribute to the panic cycle. A person notices an anxiety sensation, becomes frightened by it, experiences increased physiological arousal, notices that the sensation is getting stronger, and interprets that increase as confirmation that something is seriously wrong. The escalating fear can culminate in panic. This is why understanding the difference between the original sensation and the fear attached to that sensation can be so important for people experiencing recurring panic attacks.
Why do I get anxiety when I feel trapped or can’t leave?
Some people are less afraid of a particular place than they are of having anxiety somewhere they cannot immediately escape. Airplanes, highways, bridges, elevators, crowded venues, public transportation, restaurants, medical procedures, meetings, and even sitting in the middle of a row can become difficult because the person thinks, “What if I panic and can’t get out?”
In these situations, the underlying problem may involve fear of feeling trapped with anxiety rather than fear of the environment itself. Identifying that distinction can completely change our understanding of what is driving the anxiety.
Why do I get anxiety while driving on highways or bridges?
Driving anxiety can have several different causes. Some people fear accidents or road conditions. Others fear becoming dizzy, panicking, losing control, or being unable to pull over. Highways, bridges, heavy traffic, unfamiliar roads, and driving far from home can become particularly difficult when the underlying thought is, “What if I become anxious and can’t escape?”
Over time, someone may begin avoiding certain roads, taking longer routes, refusing to drive alone, or staying increasingly close to home. In these cases, understanding the fear underneath the driving anxiety is an important part of addressing the pattern.
Why am I afraid of flying if I’m not afraid the plane will crash?
Not all fear of flying is actually fear of aviation. Some people are afraid of being confined inside an airplane and experiencing panic when they cannot simply leave. They may fear the doors closing, takeoff, being thousands of feet in the air, or realizing that there is no immediate way to escape.
If your primary thought is “What if I panic on the plane?” rather than “What if the plane crashes?”, the underlying problem may be anticipatory anxiety and fear of panic while feeling trapped. Those are different problems and should not automatically be approached in the same way.
Why does anxiety make me think something is medically wrong with me?
Anxiety can produce genuine physical sensations, including a racing heart, changes in breathing, chest tightness, dizziness, nausea, tingling, sweating, trembling, muscle tension, gastrointestinal symptoms, and feelings of lightheadedness. Someone with health anxiety may interpret these sensations as evidence of a medical problem, become frightened, and experience even greater physiological arousal.
New, unexplained, severe, or concerning physical symptoms should receive appropriate medical evaluation. However, after appropriate evaluation, some people remain caught in a cycle of body checking, catastrophic interpretation, reassurance seeking, temporary relief, and renewed health anxiety.
Why do I get anxious before social situations?
Social anxiety can begin long before you actually enter a social situation. You may mentally rehearse conversations, imagine awkward moments, worry that you will not know what to say, or wonder whether other people will notice that you are nervous. By the time the event arrives, you may already have spent hours or days experiencing anticipatory social anxiety.
For some people, the deeper fear is not simply social interaction. It is rejection, embarrassment, appearing inadequate, or having visible anxiety symptoms in front of other people.
Why am I afraid people will notice that I’m anxious?
When you believe other people might notice your anxiety, your attention can turn inward. You begin monitoring your face, hands, voice, breathing, sweating, posture, or ability to speak naturally. Instead of participating in the conversation, part of your attention is continually evaluating how you appear.
This fear of looking nervous can intensify social anxiety because normal nervousness becomes another thing you believe you must hide.
Why do I get anxiety before public speaking even when I know I’m prepared?
Preparation and anxiety are not opposites. You can be extremely well prepared and still experience physiological activation before speaking in public. The problem often becomes greater when you interpret a faster heartbeat, dry mouth, butterflies, trembling, or temporary difficulty concentrating as evidence that you are about to perform badly.
Public speaking anxiety and performance anxiety can therefore involve two separate concerns: the performance itself and the fear of becoming anxious during the performance.
Why do I get anxious at bedtime because I’m afraid I won’t sleep?
After several difficult nights, the brain can begin associating bedtime with the possibility of another sleepless night. You may start calculating how many hours you have left to sleep, checking whether you feel tired enough, worrying about tomorrow, and trying to make yourself fall asleep.
This creates sleep anxiety or anxiety about insomnia. Instead of allowing sleep to occur automatically, you are monitoring whether it is happening. The fear of not sleeping increases arousal, and increased arousal can make sleep more difficult.
Can avoiding things because of anxiety make the anxiety worse?
Avoidance can provide immediate relief, which is precisely why it can become so reinforcing. If you avoid the highway and feel better, your brain may conclude that avoiding the highway kept you safe. If you cancel the flight and your anxiety disappears, the brain may interpret cancellation as protection from something you could not have handled.
Over time, anxiety avoidance behaviors can reinforce the belief that the situation itself, or the anxiety you might experience within it, is dangerous. The person’s life can gradually become organized around preventing anxiety rather than participating freely in the situations that matter to them.
Why doesn’t reassurance make my anxiety go away?
Reassurance can make anxiety decrease temporarily without changing the underlying pattern that produced it. Someone tells you that everything is fine, you feel better, and then another thought or sensation appears and the uncertainty returns. You seek reassurance again.
This can be especially common with health anxiety, panic attacks, relationship anxiety, fear of flying, and anxiety about uncertainty. Conscious reassurance may answer the immediate question without changing the automatic association or belief that keeps generating the question.
Why do I know my anxiety is irrational but still feel it?
Because intellectual understanding and automatic emotional learning are not identical. You can consciously know that an airplane is statistically safe, that you have successfully driven on highways hundreds of times, that your presentation is well prepared, or that your doctor has already evaluated a physical symptom, yet still experience an automatic anxiety response.
This is one reason repeatedly trying to reason yourself out of anxiety can become frustrating. The conscious mind may already understand the situation perfectly well while an older subconscious association, expectation, or belief continues generating the response.
Can hypnosis help anxiety about anxiety?
Hypnosis for anxiety can be used to work with the subconscious beliefs, learned associations, expectations, and automatic responses contributing to an individual’s anxiety pattern. In my Transformational Hypnosis process, the objective is not simply to tell you to relax or convince your conscious mind that you should not be anxious. We identify what your brain has learned to fear, what you believe the anxiety means, and what underlying pattern continues generating the response.
Because anxiety is highly individualized, hypnosis for anxiety should not assume that every person is anxious for the same reason.
Can hypnosis help anticipatory anxiety?
Hypnosis can be used to address the learned expectations and subconscious associations that contribute to anticipatory anxiety. If your mind repeatedly rehearses a future flight, drive, presentation, social event, medical procedure, or other situation as though anxiety is inevitable, that expectation itself can become part of the pattern.
My Transformational Hypnosis process focuses on identifying why your brain expects the situation to be threatening and changing the underlying automatic response rather than simply asking you to suppress anxious thoughts.
Can hypnosis help panic attacks and fear of having another panic attack?
When someone experiences recurring panic attacks, I use my Panic2Calm™ protocol specifically to address the panic fear cycle. Panic2Calm teaches you what is actually happening during panic, why fear of another panic attack can reinforce the cycle, and how to stop responding to anxiety sensations in ways that perpetuate that fear. The new response is then reinforced through subconscious reprogramming.
When broader anxiety patterns remain after the panic cycle has been addressed, Transformational Hypnosis can be used separately to work with the individualized beliefs, experiences, and subconscious patterns contributing to the underlying anxiety.
Can hypnosis help driving anxiety, fear of flying, social anxiety, health anxiety, and performance anxiety?
These are all areas in which hypnosis may be used, but the important question is why you are anxious, not simply what situation produces the anxiety. Driving anxiety may involve fear of panic, accidents, bridges, highways, or being far from home. Fear of flying may involve aviation safety, lack of control, claustrophobia, or fear of panic. Social anxiety may involve rejection, humiliation, inadequacy, or visible nervousness.
My approach to hypnosis for anxiety is therefore individualized. Two people can have the same symptom while having very different subconscious patterns driving it.
How do I stop being afraid of anxiety?
An important starting point is recognizing that the goal is not to guarantee that you never experience anxiety again. Nervousness, uncertainty, apprehension, excitement, and occasional fear are normal human emotions. The more important shift is learning that experiencing an uncomfortable feeling does not automatically mean you are unsafe, losing control, or incapable of handling what happens next.
For many people, the more useful question becomes not “How do I make sure I never feel anxious?” but “Why has my brain learned to believe that this feeling or situation is dangerous?”
That question takes us much closer to the pattern that actually needs to change.
Where can I find hypnosis for anxiety in Cleveland, Ohio?
I provide hypnosis for anxiety in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio through Geauga Mind Body Hypnosis, including help with anticipatory anxiety, panic attacks, fear of panic, driving anxiety, fear of flying, health anxiety, social anxiety, public speaking anxiety, performance anxiety, insomnia-related anxiety, and other individualized anxiety patterns. Sessions are available in person as well as through Zoom for clients who prefer to work remotely.
If you have reached the point where you are no longer simply anxious about situations but are afraid of becoming anxious, the anxiety itself may have become part of the problem. Understanding what your brain believes the anxiety means, and why it has learned to respond that way, can give us a much more precise place to begin.
If anxiety has become something you fear, avoid, monitor, or organize your life around, you do not have to remain stuck in that pattern. At Geauga Mind Body Hypnosis, I help clients identify and change the subconscious patterns contributing to anxiety, panic, and anticipatory fear. Schedule a consultation today to learn whether Transformational Hypnosis or Panic2Calm™ may be the right approach for you.
