And although at some level they are aware of it such as the constant hypervigilance, the overthinking, the inability to switch off, they are still functioning. Still going to work. Still showing up. Still getting through the day.

So they’ve normalised it.

Which is why I’m always curious, when somebody finally seeks my help, about what the straw was that broke the camel’s back. What was it that led them to the decision to finally get help?

The answers vary. A lot of the time it’s sheer exhaustion. They’re exhausted of feeling this way. Exhausted of living constantly in their head.

For others, it’s because their relationship or their marriage is breaking down, because although they’re functioning on the surface, they’re never fully present with their partner. For some, it’s when their own children start to display signs of anxiety, and they recognise the pattern being passed on. And for others, they simply reach a point where they recognise the signs of high functioning anxiety and know that something has got to change.

Whatever brings someone to my door, the thing they all have in common is this. They’ve usually already tried to manage it. And it hasn’t been enough.

Why Managing High Functioning Anxiety Isn’t the Same as Treating It

By the time most people seek my help, they’ve already explored the obvious routes. Meditation. Cutting out caffeine. Breathing techniques. Some have gone as far as cognitive behavioural therapy, counselling, or psychology.

And while some of these approaches have given temporary relief, they still find themselves highly anxious.

I’ve had conversations with psychiatrists and psychologists who understand anxiety intimately, who understand the way the brain works, and who still find themselves struggling with it personally. And the reason is this.

Talking therapy keeps us in our thinking. It can send us round and round in circles, exploring all the reasons we feel anxious. But it keeps us on that treadmill of anxious thinking. It never really gets to the root.

Because anxiety doesn’t just live in our thoughts. It also lives in the nervous system.

Which is why you can experience feeling anxious even when there’s no rational reason for it. Even when everything in your life looks fine on paper. It’s like you’re walking around in a constant state of contraction. Living on high alert. And for a lot of people I’ve worked with, they didn’t fully appreciate just how much they were living in that heightened state until they finally felt safe and relaxed in their body, many of them for the first time in their adult lives.

Why High Functioning Anxiety Lives in the Nervous System, Not Just the Mind

One of my clients, Mike, came to me in his late thirties. But he described how he first started to feel anxious when he was around five years old. At that age, his parents had split up. And for a five year old, that creates a huge amount of uncertainty, which can lead to feelings of not feeling safe.

At just five years old, Mike started to develop obsessive compulsive disorder. In very simple terms, this was a way for him to emotionally regulate. When we do things that make us feel better, we experience a settling in the nervous system. So the next time we need to feel better, we remember what we did last time. What starts as a simple coping mechanism turns into compulsive behaviour.

He’d spent over thirty years of his life in a state of high functioning anxiety. He had an amazing career. He was married. He had a great social life. He still did things, still went places. But he was always on high alert. He never really felt safe in his body. And he was always catastrophising, always jumping to the worst case scenario.

And all of this created a very vicious circle. Because when we spend significant periods of time in a high state of alert, our sleep becomes compromised. We wake up tired and depleted. And when we’re tired, the repetitive anxious thoughts just loop, because the brain is always trying to conserve energy. It defaults to the thoughts it’s always thought because they take less effort.

The nervous system, you see, doesn’t know that the original threat has passed. It keeps responding the way it learned to respond because, as far as it’s concerned, it’s still in it. Like a smoke alarm that was triggered years ago and nobody ever turned it off.

Why Coping Strategies Eventually Stop Working

There’s a reason that the meditation app stops working. That the magnesium stops making a difference. That the CBT techniques you learned three years ago aren’t touching it anymore.

Coping strategies work at the level of the symptom. They give the nervous system temporary relief. But if the underlying pattern, the emotional blueprint that’s been wired into the body, hasn’t been addressed, the anxiety always comes back.

And often it escalates. Because the longer we manage rather than resolve, the more the nervous system cements that state of high alert as its baseline. The more it treats anxiety as normal. As safe.

I had another client who came to me in his early thirties who was very successful on paper. He shared that when he was nine, his parents had separated. His mum had relocated with him and his siblings, and he’d had to change schools. In his early thirties, he dismissed the idea that this was connected to his anxiety at all. He said, ‘yeah, but I was just a boy then’.

But when I explained how these experiences create emotional blueprints in the body and the nervous system and how so many of his reactions weren’t the reactions of a man of thirty one, but of the nine year old boy as far as his nervous system was concerned he started to join the dots.

This is why coping strategies plateau. They’re managing the man of thirty one. But the nervous system is still responding as the nine year old, something which Gabe Mate speaks about when it comes to trauma.

The Role of Limiting Beliefs in Keeping Anxiety Stuck

Alongside what’s held in the nervous system, there’s usually a layer of beliefs that are quietly keeping the anxiety in place.

It’s very common that even when people are actively looking for help, they arrive carrying some very firm beliefs. That they can’t change. That they’re always going to be anxious. That this is just who they are.

Many of my clients come to me looking for ways to cope with their anxiety and are genuinely surprised when I ask them: do you want to cope with it, or do you want to completely overcome it?

One client, a fifty two year old man who’d been living in a high state of anxiety for most of his life, came to me because his wife had given him an ultimatum. He turned up, but he was very clear that he didn’t believe he could change. He’d grown up with a highly critical father, had never felt good enough in his dad’s eyes, had experienced significant childhood bullying. He had a very deep belief that he wasn’t good enough. That he wasn’t worthy.

So I invited him to just take the pressure off having to believe that change was possible and simply stay open to whatever did happen.

The man I said goodbye to nine sessions later was like talking to a completely different person. He was calmer within himself and with his children. He could see when old habitual thinking was pulling at him and he could see it for just that, without letting it hijack him. He experienced a sense of worth that he recognised he’d never really felt before. And he told me he was actually experiencing feeling happy.

I’d go as far as to say it saved his marriage.

What Does Treat High Functioning Anxiety?

Treating high functioning anxiety effectively means working at three levels simultaneously.

The nervous system. The unconscious mind. And the beliefs that have been built up over years about who you are and what’s possible for you.

This is why I use a combination of approaches in my work including hypnotherapy, which allows us to work directly with the unconscious mind and the nervous system in a way that talking simply can’t reach. We’re not doing an archaeological dig into your past.

We’re not spending session after session going over everything that’s ever happened to you. But we are letting the body, specifically the nervous system, know that those events have passed. That it’s safe. Because up until that point, the nervous system keeps responding the way it learned to respond, as if those events are still happening.

Combined with processing the emotion around the anxiety, working with the limiting beliefs that are driving the thinking, and helping you understand the nature of thought itself, not positive thinking, not replacing anxious thoughts with better ones, but genuinely seeing thoughts for what they are it becomes possible to stop living with high functioning anxiety altogether.

Not manage it. Resolve it.

The feelings of calm, safety, peace, and security that my clients discover aren’t new. They’re your natural state. It’s just that you’ve been living in mental and emotional loops that have been taking you away from it.

How Long Does It Take to Treat High Functioning Anxiety?

This is one of the questions I’m asked most often. And the assumption is almost always the same, that because someone has had high functioning anxiety for twenty or thirty years, it’s going to take a very long time to treat.

Having been working with people with anxiety for 14 years, that’s not been my experience.

Because we’re working at the level of the unconscious mind and the nervous system, retraining old habitual thought patterns, processing stored emotional responses, rewiring beliefs results can come surprisingly quickly. People often report feeling a significant shift after even just one session.

In most cases I work with clients over eight to twelve sessions. Which means that within literally three months, people can be experiencing a completely different state of mind and a completely different state of being.

The reason for this comes down to neuroplasticity. The brain is malleable. Even after decades of high alert, the nervous system can be rewired. The patterns that took years to build can be dismantled far more quickly than most people expect because we’re not working through them consciously, layer by layer. We’re working with the part of the mind that created them.

You don’t even need to fully believe that change is possible. You just need to be open to it.

When Is the Right Time to Get Help?

If you’ve been managing high functioning anxiety for years and you’re reading this, the honest answer is probably: sooner than you think.

The nature of high functioning anxiety is that it convinces you you’re coping. That you’re fine. That other people have it worse. That you just need to push through.

But functioning isn’t the same as thriving. And the anxiety has been costing you, in your sleep, in your relationships, in your ability to be present, in the quiet exhaustion of always being on.

You don’t need to have hit rock bottom. You don’t need to be signed off work or unable to get out of bed. You just need to have reached the point where you know, at some level, that this isn’t how it’s supposed to feel.

That’s enough.

If you’re ready to explore what it would mean to actually resolve your high functioning anxiety, not cope with it, but resolve it I’d invite you to book a free consultation. We’ll talk about what you’ve been experiencing, what you’ve already tried, and how you can join the other people I’ve worked with who have broken the cycle of anxiety.

The post How to Treat High Functioning Anxiety appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

When they reach out, they’re more likely to tell me they’re tired of constantly overthinking everything. Of second-guessing themselves. They’re exhausted from living in a state of hypervigilance. They can’t switch off after work. They’re constantly in their head.

They’re never really present when they’re at home with their partner and their children.

They’re struggling with insomnia, lying awake going over and over things that happened at work, things they’ve got to do, problems they’re facing in their job.

And whilst they might say they feel anxious, they often describe it as a physical sensation. A permanent knot in the stomach. A heart that races. An inability to really relax.

It’s like they feel like they’re constantly living life on the edge.

So What Is High Functioning Anxiety?

High functioning anxiety isn’t a clinical diagnosis. It’s a term that started to make an appearance around 2010, where a lot of people recognised that they were still functioning to an extent, still getting up, going to work every day, living what looks like a normal life, but underneath the surface, they were in a consistent state of high anxiety.

And one of the biggest challenges with high functioning anxiety, and in fact most forms of anxiety, is the longer that somebody has existed in that anxious state, the more it’s become the norm instead of the exception.

With high achievers and type A personalities, this often means accepting that this is just part of who they are. That maybe they just need to learn to cope with the symptoms. Or even believing that because they are ‘functioning’ that they don’t need help.

People can spend years in a state of high functioning anxiety before finally, like a switch being flicked on, they decide ‘enough’.

Seven Signs of High Functioning Anxiety

1. You can’t switch off Your body is home, but your mind is still at work. You’re going through the motions of your evening whilst mentally running through every conversation, every decision, every thing on tomorrow’s list.

2. Insomnia that no supplement can fix You might be doing all the right things such as a weighted blanket, magnesium, no screens before bed, no alcohol, meditation apps. But night after night, like clockwork, you’re lying wide awake tossing and turning and watching the time.

3. A physical sensation you can’t explain Not always racing thoughts. Sometimes it’s a permanent knot in the stomach. A tightness in the chest. Tension in the jaw or the shoulders. A feeling of being permanently braced for something.

4. Overthinking and second-guessing everything Decisions that should take minutes take hours. You replay conversations. You anticipate what might go wrong. You prepare for every possible outcome. It feels like diligence but it’s also exhausting.

5. Perfectionism and people-pleasing Saying yes when you’re already at full capacity. Setting standards that nobody, including you, could consistently meet. Ticking every box not because you want to, but because somewhere underneath, you’re trying to prove something.

6. Never really being present You’re there, but you’re not there. At dinner. At the weekend. In conversations. Part of you is always somewhere else, managing something, worrying about something, preparing for something.

7. The feeling that something is just wrong Not always something you can point to. Just a low-grade sense of unease. A baseline of anxiety that’s been there so long you’ve stopped questioning whether it should be.

Why Anxiety Becomes the Baseline

Here’s what happens over time.

The amygdala, part of the limbic brain, creates a baseline where anxiety is experienced as familiarity. So even when high functioning anxiety isn’t serving you, if you’ve been living in that state for a long time, the brain and the nervous system have learnt that this is normal. This is familiar.

And as crazy as it might sound, familiar equals = it feels safe.

Think of anxiety on a scale of nought to ten. Some people experience generalised low-grade anxiety, hovering around a three or a four. People with high functioning anxiety are often at the other end of that spectrum. And the longer they’ve been there, the more the nervous system has accepted that as its set point.

This is why somebody with high functioning anxiety will spend most of their time in a high-range beta brainwave state, the survival response. It might not feel like survival, because you’re still functioning. But if you are constantly on high alert, hypervigilant, always on edge, struggling to really switch off, you are living life from the hormones of stress.

The Link Between High Functioning Anxiety and Insomnia

In order to experience real, deep, restorative sleep, the body needs to feel safe.

If the body is on emergency alert, always worrying about what might happen, always preparing for the worst, it’s natural that it’s going to struggle to just relax, switch off, and go to sleep.

But there’s something else that keeps people with high functioning anxiety awake that rarely gets talked about.

The beliefs they’ve built up about their own ability to sleep.

One client I worked with recently could list, almost automatically, every thought she had at bedtime. She was already telling herself she wasn’t going to sleep. That she’d wake up around 1am and not be able to get back off. She’d been running that story for years. Decades.

When I invited her to see these as beliefs, thoughts she’d been repeating so consistently that her subconscious had simply accepted them as truth, something shifted. It was like the penny dropped, because she’d never seen that’s what was happening.

I often joke with my clients that they are master hypnotherapists. Because they’ve hypnotised themselves into believing something so deeply!

But here’s the thing about sleep. You can’t do sleep. Sleep is something we came into the world intuitively knowing how to do. The less we interfere with the process, the less we get involved, the more we can let the body do what it knows how to do.

What’s The Root Cause of High Functioning Anxiety?

The same client had come to me aged 46, having spent most of her life in a state of anxiety. But she recognised it got significantly worse when she took her first job at just sixteen, at a major bank in the UK.

At sixteen, she suddenly had a role that came with responsibility. She was put into a world where she had lots of brand new things to learn. And what she recognised, as we worked together, was that any time she felt out of her comfort zone, any time she felt she didn’t have all the answers, the anxiety really cranked up.

She’d continued to work for the same organisation for over thirty years. And any time she moved up, any time she got a promotion, the anxiety and the insomnia got worse. Because each new role meant new things to learn. And not having all the answers felt unbearable.

When we explored what it was about not having all the answers, what emerged was a belief that had been quietly running the show for three decades.

If I don’t have all the answers, I’ll be seen as inadequate.

She’d also developed coping strategies to try and prove her adequacy. Perfectionism. Overdelivering. Saying yes when she was already at full capacity. And underneath all of it was the fear of shame and humiliation, not just of being seen as inadequate, but of the world finding out and her loosing her job.

She wasn’t just trying to outrun a core identity of inadequacy. She was trying to outrun the feelings she was terrified of experiencing if that identity was ever exposed.

From my professional viewpoint, there isn’t necessarily one single root cause.

What there is, is a constant flow of anxious thinking that has become conditioned. Automatic. Habitual.

For some people, that began in childhood, feeling vulnerable, not feeling safe at home or around their parents, carrying in the nervous system the trauma of that experience. For others, it might have been bullying at school. Or learning that the world isn’t a safe place if they saw a parent that was always anxious.

But whatever the origin, what it leads to is lots and lots of anxious, worrying thinking. And when we’re thinking lots of thoughts, whether they’re anxious thoughts, stressful thoughts, worrying thoughts that creates the stress response in the body.

Most people experience overthinking. The difference with high functioning anxiety is that the thinking has become so automatic, so ingrained, that it barely registers as thinking anymore. It just feels like reality.

Can High Functioning Anxiety Be Treated?

Yes. Completely.

But here’s what’s important to understand. High functioning anxiety doesn’t just exist in the brain. It exists in the nervous system. Which is why apps and breathing techniques and positive thinking often don’t deliver the results at the level of the unconscious mind and body. They manage the symptoms. They don’t resolve what’s driving them.

One of the biggest breakthroughs I see with my anxiety clients, time and time again, is what I’d describe as seeing through the illusion of thought.

Thoughts are just mental activity in the mind. They come and they go. The problem isn’t that we have anxious thoughts. The problem is that we believe them. We give our power away to our thinking. And our thinking creates our experience.

This isn’t about positive thinking. It’s not about trying to control your thoughts or replace them with better-feeling ones. It’s about learning to see thoughts for what they are, temporary mental interference. It’s only when we believe them, when we identify with them, that they make our experience look real and permanent.

Combined with processing any trauma and the emotion around anxiety and fear, working with the limiting beliefs that are driving those thoughts, and regulating the nervous system, it’s possible for anybody to stop living with high functioning anxiety.

The client I mentioned earlier? After our work together, she was feeling calmer than she’d ever experienced. She felt empowered to handle situations without letting them consume her. She started sleeping through the night. And because she was getting good quality sleep, she had the energy she hadn’t had in years.

If a client who’d been experiencing high functioning anxiety for thirty years can get there, can navigate life feeling calm, feeling relaxed, sleeping through the night, finally recognising that she is good enough then that’s possible for anybody.

Including you.

How to Treat High Functioning Anxiety

If you recognise yourself in any of this, the first thing I want you to know is that there is nothing wrong with you.

You are not just an anxious person. You haven’t got a broken brain. What you have is a nervous system that learned, at some point, that being on high alert was the safest way to be. And a mind that’s been running the same anxious thoughts for so long it’s forgotten they were ever just thoughts.

That can change.

If you’re ready to explore what that could look like for you, I’d love to invite you to book a free consultation. We’ll talk about what you’re experiencing, what you’ve already tried, and how we might work together to break the cycle of anxiety for good.

Book your free consultation here.

The post 7 Signs of High Functioning Anxiety appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

Perimenopause is not just a hormonal event. It is profoundly connected to your autonomic nervous system. And if you are moving through this transition from a place of chronic stress, from a nervous system that has been running on high alert for years, the experience is likely to be considerably harder than it needs to be.

What Are the Symptoms of Perimenopause Anxiety?

Anxiety and insomnia are one of the most common symptoms of perimenopause and menopause, and for many women it is also the first sign that something hormonal is changing, arriving before hot flushes, before missed periods, and often before menopause feels like a relevant word.

Perimenopause anxiety can feel different from generalised anxiety. Many women describe it as biological: a persistent sense of dread or unease that has no clear cause. Some notice a sudden loss of confidence in situations where they previously felt entirely at ease, such as driving, public speaking, or managing tasks that once felt straightforward.

Physical symptoms are part of this too, sudden panic attacks in familiar situations, social anxiety that seems to come from nowhere, or physical sensations like heart palpitations, sweating, or feeling short of breath.

Many women say that up to that point they had always been fairly laid back and had never experienced anything like this before. When perimenopause anxiety arrives for the first time, there are no established coping tools to reach for. That sense of being out of control creates more anxiety, and the cycle tightens.

The Adrenal Connection Nobody Talks About

Most women know that oestrogen and progesterone decline during perimenopause. What most women don’t know is what the body does in response.

During perimenopause, the adrenal glands gradually take over the role of producing oestrogen. But here is the problem: if those adrenal glands are already occupied making stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, they don’t have the capacity to produce oestrogen and progesterone effectively.

A body that has been running on stress hormones for years and operating from a dysregulated nervous system enters this transition already compromised. The very glands that are supposed to pick up the hormonal slack are depleted. And the symptoms of perimenopause, the anxiety, the disrupted sleep, the mood swings, the hot flushes, the weight gain, and the brain fog can intensify as a result.

Cortisol also becomes harder to regulate when oestrogen starts to decline. That means everyday stress hits harder, takes longer to recover from, and directly worsens many of the symptoms you are already experiencing.

Why Does Perimenopause Anxiety Disorder Feel So Out of Proportion?

Declining oestrogen makes the brain more sensitive to stress, causing cortisol to spike more easily and remain elevated for longer. Progesterone has a naturally calming effect on the brain, working similarly to anti-anxiety medications by enhancing GABA, a neurotransmitter that promotes relaxation. As progesterone levels decline during perimenopause, many women lose this natural anxiety buffer, leaving them feeling more on edge and stressed than ever before.

This is important to name, because so many women in this season of life are told, or tell themselves, that they are “losing it.” That they are overreacting. That they can’t cope the way they used to. Many women describe midlife as a time when their usual coping tools simply no longer seem to work. A bad night’s sleep hits harder. A busy day feels more overwhelming. Small stressors produce a bigger physical response.

The nervous system is dealing with multiple overlapping pressures at once: hormonal change, disrupted sleep, and the demands of daily life. And the body’s ability to buffer that load has genuinely reduced.

Perimenopause Anxiety and Depression: Understanding the Overlap

For many women, anxiety and low mood arrive together, and the distinction between them can blur. When oestrogen and progesterone levels drop, serotonin levels can also be affected, contributing to depression, anxiety, and irritability. The physical symptoms create further stress and fatigue, which intensifies everything.

The emotional flatness, the tearfulness that seems to come from nowhere, the loss of motivation, these are not character failings. They have a physiological basis, and they are part of the same hormonal picture as the anxiety.

If you are experiencing both anxiety and persistent low mood, you are not alone, and you are not “going mad.” You are in a hormonal transition that directly affects brain and body chemistry.

Perimenopause Anxiety and Insomnia: The 3am Wake-Up

Cortisol dysregulation during perimenopause tends to spike in the 2 to 4am window, which is exactly when so many women find themselves wide awake, mind racing, unable to get back to sleep.

What follows is usually a spiral. You lie awake thinking about work, replaying the day before, catastrophising about the day ahead. The overthinking generates more cortisol. The cortisol makes sleep impossible. And in the morning you begin a new day already depleted.

Poor sleep worsens anxiety, and anxiety makes sleep harder to achieve. This is not a sleep problem in isolation. It is a cortisol and hormonal regulation problem, and it is one that can be addressed.

Can Hot Flushes Be Made Worse By Anxiety?

Yes. High cortisol essentially makes the body’s internal thermostat more sensitive, which can increase both the frequency and intensity of hot flushes. Hot flushes can also trigger panic-like symptoms, making it difficult to distinguish between a menopausal symptom and an anxiety response.

So when you are experiencing a hot flush in a meeting, waking in the night drenched in sweat, or feeling that sudden wave of heat and dread, your nervous system is part of that picture. Which means calming the nervous system is not a nice-to-have addition to managing perimenopause. It is central to it.

Natural Remedies for Perimenopause Anxiety: What Actually Works?

There are a range of approaches women turn to from lifestyle changes and supplements to therapy and HRT. Hypnotherapy can help identify and shift negative thought patterns, and exercise, sleep hygiene, and reducing caffeine all have a genuine role to play.

But one of the most clinically impressive and least discussed options for perimenopause anxiety disorder is EFT tapping.

What Is EFT Tapping and Why Does It Matter During Perimenopause?

EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques, though most people know it simply as tapping. It combines elements of cognitive therapy with the gentle stimulation of acupressure points on the face and body, using your fingertips. It takes a few minutes, you can do it anywhere, and the research behind it is extraordinary.

Neurobiological research shows that tapping generates electrochemical signals which modulate both the limbic system and executive brain regions, producing measurable shifts in biomarkers including reduced cortisol, enhanced immune function, and changes in gene expression, all of which correspond with genuine clinical improvement.

For women in perimenopause, this matters at a very specific physiological level.

Dr Peta Stapleton of Bond University achieved a 43% reduction in cortisol in a single one-hour EFT group session, published in an American Psychological Association journal. When cortisol is the hormone dysregulating your sleep, amplifying your hot flushes, depleting your adrenal capacity, and driving anxiety, reducing it by that magnitude is not a small thing.

When cortisol levels fall and the nervous system moves out of survival mode, the adrenal glands are no longer entirely occupied with producing stress hormones. This matters during perimenopause because the adrenal glands are the body’s backup source of oestrogen, and their ability to perform that role depends on them not being overwhelmed by chronic stress.

A meta-analysis of 14 randomised controlled trials found that EFT produced a significant decrease in anxiety scores even after accounting for control treatments. For women whose anxiety has spiked during perimenopause, often for the first time in their lives, this is directly relevant.

You Don’t Have to White-Knuckle Your Way Through Perimenopause

The experience of perimenopause in a full and pressured life is one of the most under-acknowledged challenges women face. You are navigating significant physical and hormonal change while remaining fully present, fully functional, and often fully responsible for the wellbeing of others.

What we know from working with women through this transition is that those who move through it with more ease are the women who have learned to regulate their nervous system regularly.

EFT tapping is one of the most accessible, evidence-based, and immediately effective tools available for exactly this. A few minutes a day can reduce the cortisol that is amplifying your symptoms, calm the nervous system that is keeping you awake, and begin to create the internal conditions in which your body can navigate this transition with far more ease.

If you would like to explore how EFT and hypnotherapy can support you through perimenopause, I work with women one to one from my Edinburgh practice and online across the UK. Get in touch here or book a free consultation.

The post Perimenopause Anxiety Disorder: What’s Really Happening in Your Body and What Can Help appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

If you’re like most of the clients who’ve sought my help for hypnotherapy for the fear of public speaking, I’m willing to guess that the words “presentation,” “best man’s speech,” or even “speaking up in a team meeting” are enough to set your heart racing, give you a dry mouth, and create an overwhelming sense of anxiety.

Having worked extensively over the last 14 years to help people overcome the fear of public speaking, I’m always curious to see what’s really at the heart of that fear, and to help people understand why the fear of public speaking isn’t always coming from a place of logic.

Why Is the Fear of Public Speaking So Common?

The fear of public speaking is one of the most widely shared human experiences. Studies suggest it affects the majority of the population at some level, yet most people suffer in silence, quietly avoiding situations that trigger it, or white-knuckling their way through them. What makes it so universal is that it touches something deeply personal, our need to be seen, accepted, and valued by others. But as common as it is, the reasons behind it are far more individual than most people realise.

Why Do People Fear Public Speaking? It’s Rarely What They Think

When I first chat to someone looking for help to conquer this fear, to discover what it feels like to be calm and confident speaking in public, whatever that scenario looks like for them, one of the first questions I ask is: what are you afraid will happen when you speak in public?

The answers are always revealing. Because while people often present with the same symptoms, the racing heart, the shaky voice, the mind going blank, the root of the fear is almost never what it appears to be on the surface.

Where Does the Fear of Public Speaking Come From?

One of the most common answers I hear is the fear of being judged. But even that is rarely the full picture. I’ve worked with commercial directors who, having spent years avoiding public speaking, reached a point in their career where they knew they had to get help, because they could no longer perform in their role without it.

In those situations, the commonality I see is a fear of being judged by more senior members of the organisation. A fear of being seen as not good enough, not competent, not adequate. And while there can be a surface-level fear of losing their job, what I most often find sitting beneath that is something far more painful, the shame that would create.

The Fear of Being Judged: Where It Really Comes From

The fear of being judged isn’t just a professional concern. It’s a deeply human one. And when we start to look at where it originates, we often find it has very little to do with the boardroom, the conference stage, or the team meeting, and everything to do with much earlier experiences that have quietly shaped how a person sees themselves.

This is what makes working with the fear of public speaking so fascinating to me. The presenting issue is never really the real issue. It’s like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and when the full picture comes into view, everything starts to make sense.

When the Fear of Public Speaking Is Rooted in Trauma

One client who particularly stays with me was a remarkable 29-year-old woman who wanted to release what was holding her back when it came to public speaking. She worked in a corporate investment management organisation, managing a team of 40 people. In situations where she had to speak in public, her heart would race, her voice would change, and becoming aware of that change made everything worse.

She identified with the fear of being judged. But as she told me more about her life, something else came into focus. She had grown up in Bosnia, living through the war. Separated from her family at a young age, at just five years old she had hidden in meadows from snipers. Her father had been taken to a concentration camp.

What became clear was that the trauma of those experiences had conditioned her nervous system to be on permanent high alert. And the belief that had been created, I will always be scared, was running the show. Our beliefs operate 95 to 99% of the time beneath our conscious awareness. In situations where she felt vulnerable, that belief was doing exactly what it had been formed to do: protect her.

The beautiful thing was that we didn’t need to dig into the trauma to resolve it. In fact, talking about trauma in depth can retraumatise, because the mind doesn’t distinguish between imagination and reality, and the body will re-experience what the mind revisits. It’s one of the reasons why CBT or counselling alone often doesn’t deliver the results people are hoping for with this kind of deep-rooted fear.

Using a combination of hypnotherapy, EFT tapping, and Havening, a powerful psychosomatic technique, we were able to process the trauma, teach her body that she was safe now, and change the belief that she would always be scared. She went on to climb through the ranks of her career. And perhaps more profoundly, she realised just how much of her life her body had been operating from a survival-based response, and finally got to let that go.

Why I Have a Fear of Public Speaking: The Nervous System Connection

The link with the nervous system is a vital one, and it shows up in different ways. Another wonderful client came to me with a fear of public speaking that was central to her role at a university. She described feeling like a rabbit in headlights, robotic, frozen, terrified of what people would think.

As we worked together, she recognised that she had grown up in a tense household with a father who was mentally abusive and volatile. She had learned, very early, to never put a foot wrong. That survival structure, the hypervigilance, the need for perfection, the terror of being seen to fail, had followed her into every professional environment she’d ever been in.

She began to let go of the idea that she had to be perfect. The fear of looking stupid. The need to be seen as flawless at all times.

Shortly after, she delivered a presentation at a Women in Tech conference. It went brilliantly, and when an unplanned discussion group followed, she took it completely in her stride. Her confidence blossomed. She started to see that she was enough.

Does Hypnotherapy Work for Fear of Public Speaking?

Yes, and in my experience, it works particularly well when combined with other modalities. Hypnotherapy has always been at the core of my practice, alongside solution-focused psychotherapy. Both create powerful shifts. But six years ago I trained in The MAP Method, Make Anything Possible, and it has taken the results I see to another level entirely.

What MAP does that hypnotherapy alone doesn’t is work across every layer of the human psyche simultaneously: memories, beliefs, thought patterns, and the body’s stored responses. And crucially, it does this without requiring the client to talk about any of it in depth. For people carrying trauma beneath their fear of public speaking, that is transformational.

How to Overcome the Fear of Public Speaking From the Inside Out

What I see again and again is that resolving the fear of public speaking is never just about the fear itself. It ripples out. Clients who came to me because they couldn’t get through a presentation without their hands shaking leave with a fundamentally different relationship with themselves. Their self-belief shifts. Their sense of who they are shifts.

We don’t have to do an archaeological dig through everything that’s ever happened. We don’t have to relive the past. What we do is reset the nervous system, update the beliefs that have been running the show, and create new neural pathways, so that the person standing up to speak is no longer being driven by an experience from decades ago.

If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. Because what feels like a fear of public speaking is very often the beginning of something much bigger, and much more freeing than you might imagine.

The post Why Do I have a Fear of Public Speaking? appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

Michael Neill started out as an NLP practitioner, became a master practitioner, then a trainer, then a master trainer. He went on to become one of the leaders of the largest NLP training organisations in the world, working alongside one of NLP’s founders. He and his colleagues were doing extraordinary things with people, helping them overcome phobias in half an hour or less, addressing habits, teaching people to work with their own thinking in ways that far surpassed anything he’d come across in the self-help world.

And yet something was off.

Not because what they were doing wasn’t working. But because the scope of it wasn’t what it seemed like it should be. As Michael put it, if NLP really was the secret to everything, if learning to control your thinking in just the right way was the key to an optimal experience of life almost all of the time, then the people who knew it best should have been the happiest, most successful people in any room they walked into.

They weren’t.

They did fine. They were pretty successful. Kind of happy some of the time. But in other ways they kept bumping up against their thinking.

That observation, from someone at the very top of the NLP world, is one of the most honest and illuminating things I’ve come across about what NLP therapy is, what it can do, and where it has its limits.

What Is NLP Therapy?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the study of the structure of subjective experience. In straightforward terms it’s a behavioural approach that explores how language and thought patterns shape our experience of life, and how changing those patterns can change how we feel and behave.

NLP therapy uses techniques like anchoring, visualisation, parts integration and submodalities to help people overcome phobias, break habits, manage anxiety and shift limiting beliefs. It tends to be future-focused and goal-oriented, often making it shorter-term than traditional therapeutic approaches.

How Does NLP Therapy Work?

NLP works primarily at the level of conscious and subconscious thought patterns and behaviour. It gives you tools to reframe how your brain processes information, to change the structure of a memory, interrupt a habitual pattern, or associate a different feeling with a particular trigger.

But the real leverage for change in human beings lies in an understanding of thought, not from trying to control your thinking, as Michael Neill himself arrived at that conclusion after years at the top of the NLP field.

What Are the Criticisms of NLP?

The most significant criticism of NLP, and the one that Michael Neill identified from the inside, is that it focuses on managing and manipulating thinking rather than understanding the nature of thought itself.

There’s a difference between those two things. Managing your thinking assumes that your thoughts are the problem and that the solution is to get better at controlling them. Understanding the nature of thought points to something deeper, that thought is a system, that it is always in motion, that it is the mechanism through which we experience everything, and that our relationship with thought matters more than the content of any particular thought.

This is something I recognise deeply from my own journey. I came at it from a different direction, as a hypnotherapist and solution focused psychotherapist, I was already working at the unconscious level rather than the behavioural level. I went on to train in EFT, theta healing and the MAP Method.

Each of these approaches is powerful in its own right. Each one goes deeper than NLP in the sense that they work with the body, the nervous system and the unconscious mind rather than purely with conscious thought patterns.

But when I came across the Three Principles, the understanding developed by Sydney Banks, something fundamentally shifted for me too.

What Are the Drawbacks of NLP?

Michael Neill found his answer to the limitations of NLP when he came across the work of Sydney Banks, a Scottish welder who had a spontaneous insight into the nature of mind, consciousness and thought, and whose understanding became the foundation of what is variously known as the Three Principles, the Inside Out Understanding, or Psychology of Mind.

What Banks pointed to was simple but profound. We are not insecure. We just think we are. Our experience of life, all of it, including anxiety, our limiting beliefs, our sense of who we are and what’s possible for us, is being created in the moment by thought taking form through consciousness.

Not by our past. Not by our circumstances. Not by the content of our thinking. By the fact that we are thinking beings, and thought is always creating our experience.

This isn’t the same as positive thinking. It isn’t about changing your thoughts or learning to think differently. It’s about understanding what thought actually is, and when that understanding lands, something shifts that no technique can produce.

I see this with my clients regularly. One client came to me with high anxiety, a deep belief that he wasn’t good enough, a conviction that he couldn’t change, and a history of trauma and bullying that had shaped how he saw himself for decades. We worked together using hypnotherapy, EFT and MAP, processing the trauma his nervous system was holding, loosening the survival-based thinking that had become his identity.

But what also shifted was his understanding of thought itself. I remember him telling me he’d been out walking his dog, tangled up in the same old repetitive habitual thoughts, when suddenly he had an insight. He saw, really saw, that this was just his thinking. And in that moment the thoughts simply vanished.

That’s not a technique. That’s insight and realisation.

Why Is NLP Obsolete | Is There Something Better?

I wouldn’t say NLP is obsolete. I would say it’s incomplete.

It points in the right direction, toward thought as the source of our experience. But it stops short of the deeper understanding that makes the difference between managing your experience and genuinely transforming it.

What I’ve found in over a decade of working with clients is that the most profound and lasting change happens when we work at multiple levels simultaneously. Processing what the body and nervous system are holding through approaches like hypnotherapy, EFT and MAP.

And at the same time pointing clients toward a deeper understanding of the nature of thought, so that the insights they have in sessions don’t just produce temporary relief but a genuinely different relationship with their own minds.

This is what NLP, in my view, doesn’t do. And it’s what Michael Neill, having spent years at the very top of the NLP world, ultimately found was missing too.

Which Is Better – NLP or CBT?

This is a question many people ask when they’re trying to decide on a therapeutic approach. Both NLP and CBT work at the level of thought and behaviour. CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, helps people identify and challenge unhelpful thought patterns and replace them with more helpful ones. NLP works with the structure of subjective experience to shift patterns more rapidly.

Both have their merits. Both also share a fundamental limitation, they approach thought as something to be managed, challenged or restructured rather than understood at a deeper level.

The question worth asking isn’t which is better, NLP versus CBT. It’s whether managing your thinking is really the answer, or whether there’s a deeper understanding available that changes your relationship with thought entirely.

In my experience, and in Michael Neill’s, it’s the latter that produces the most profound and lasting change.

Ready to Experience Something Deeper?

If you’ve tried NLP therapy, CBT or other approaches and found that the results didn’t last, or if you’re at the beginning of your journey and want to work with someone who goes to the root rather than the surface, I’d love to talk.

Book your free consultation and let’s explore what’s really possible for you.

The post NLP Therapy: What Is It and What Are the Drawbacks? appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

But behind closed doors?

She is barely sleeping. She is replaying conversations from meetings she had three days ago. She is quietly convinced that one day her managers will finally see what she already believes about herself: that she is not good enough. That she’s an impostor who is inadequate and shouldn’t be in the job role.

This is high-functioning anxiety. And if you recognise yourself in that description, this blog was written for you.

What Is High Functioning Anxiety?

High-functioning anxiety is not a formal clinical diagnosis. You will not find it listed in the medical textbooks. But for the millions of people living with it, that makes the experience no less real and no less exhausting.

High functioning anxiety describes a state in which a person experiences significant anxiety on the inside while continuing to perform, achieve and appear capable on the outside. The anxiety doesn’t stop them from functioning. In many cases, the anxiety drives them to function at a very high level.

The people who come to me with high-functioning anxiety are not falling apart. They are showing up. They are delivering. They go the extra mile, are extra diligent, and care about doing a good job. Many are in leadership roles on great salaries by most external measures, succeeding.

But the internal cost is enormous.

What Are the Symptoms of High-Functioning Anxiety?

Because high functioning anxiety does not look like the conventional image of an anxious person, many people living with it do not recognise what they are experiencing as anxiety at all.

Here are some of the most common symptoms of high-functioning anxiety:

• Persistent overthinking and an inability to switch the mind off
• Replaying conversations, decisions and interactions long after they have happened
• A constant underlying sense that something is wrong, even when nothing is
• Difficulty sleeping, or waking in the early hours with a racing mind
• A deep fear of failure or of being exposed as inadequate
• Perfectionism that feels compulsive rather than chosen
• Difficulty delegating, saying no or asking for help
• Chronic physical tension, particularly in the shoulders, jaw or chest
• Presenting as calm and confident on the outside while feeling the opposite within

That last point is one of the most telling signs. The duck analogy captures high-functioning anxiety perfectly. Gliding smoothly on the surface while paddling furiously underneath.

Many high achievers have spent so long managing their anxiety that they have become extraordinarily skilled at hiding it. Not just from others, but from themselves.

Why High Achievers Are Most at Risk of High Functioning Anxiety

High-functioning anxiety and high achievement often go hand in hand, and there is a reason for that.

For many people, the drive to perform, to prove themselves and to achieve was formed in response to early experiences that felt unsafe. A home where love felt conditional on good behaviour or good results. A school environment where failure brought humiliation. A parent whose approval was never quite freely given.

The unconscious mind forms a belief early on: if I am good enough, successful enough, productive enough, then I will be safe. Then I will be loved. Then I will be enough.

And so the person works. They achieve. They climb. And they hold the anxiety at bay, because as long as they are performing, that unconscious belief is temporarily satisfied.

But the anxiety never resolves. The bar simply keeps moving. Because the root of the problem was never truly about performance.

This is why so many high achievers reach a point of crisis not when things are going badly, but when things are going well. A promotion. A new role. A step up into leadership. Suddenly, the familiar ground is gone. And the unconscious belief, the one that says I am not adequate, becomes louder than ever.

A Client Story: High Functioning Anxiety in Leadership

When Laura came to me, she was 46 years old and had worked for one of the major UK banks since she was sixteen. She had spent three decades building her career, working her way up through the organisation and being recognised consistently as a high performer.

From the outside, she had every reason to feel confident.

But she had spent most of her adult life in an almost constant state of anxiety, without ever fully realising it. She had simply adapted to it so completely that the heightened state had come to feel normal.

What brought her to seek help was a promotion into a new leadership role. The unfamiliarity of the new position, which is entirely normal and natural when anyone moves into a new role, was feeding a powerful and deeply ingrained belief: I am inadequate. I am not competent. I need to prove myself.

The cycle of those thoughts was relentless. To her colleagues and managers, she looked confident and capable. But underneath the surface, the paddling was exhausting. And the consequences were showing up most acutely in her sleep.

She was experiencing chronic insomnia. And when we explored what was happening, she began to recognise the narrative she had been running every single night without realising it. Before she even got into bed, she was already telling herself: I’m not going to sleep tonight.

She had been reinforcing that story, and the identity of someone who cannot sleep, night after night for years.

One of the most significant moments in our work together was when she truly understood just how long she had been living in that heightened state of anxiety. Not weeks or months. Decades. She had climbed an entire career while carrying that weight.

Through a combination of hypnotherapy for anxiety, the MAP Method, EFT Tapping and coaching, we worked on multiple levels. We addressed the deep unconscious beliefs she held about her own adequacy and her sense of identity. We worked on the specific narrative she had built around sleep.

And we explored something that I consider one of the most powerful shifts a person with anxiety can make: understanding the nature of thought itself.

When clients begin to understand that over 90% of their thinking is habitual, recycled and repetitive, and that a thought appearing in the mind does not make that thought true, the change can be profound. She began to see her thoughts for what they were. Not facts. Not instructions. Just thoughts. And she discovered that she did not have to give them her focus or her belief.

She had, as she put it herself, been letting her thoughts rule the roost and hijack her for years. Once she saw that clearly, everything began to shift.

Her sleep transformed. She is now sleeping more deeply and more consistently than she has in years, waking up feeling genuinely restored. Her relationship with her own thinking has changed fundamentally. And that, in turn, is changing how she shows up at work, at home and in herself.

High Functioning Anxiety Does Not Resolve on Its Own

This is one of the most important things to understand about high-functioning anxiety. Left unaddressed, the pattern tends to deepen. The nervous system stays locked in a low-grade state of threat. The beliefs about inadequacy continue to be reinforced. The body keeps carrying a cost that grows heavier over time.

Approaches that work at the conscious level, such as CBT or talking therapy, can offer useful insights and coping strategies. But because the roots of high functioning anxiety live in the unconscious mind, in early conditioning, in deeply held beliefs about safety and self-worth, lasting change requires working at a deeper level.

In my practice, I use a combination of hypnotherapy for anxiety, EFT Tapping and the MAP Method alongside Three Principles Coaching. This approach works with the unconscious mind, the nervous system and the body together. The goal is not simply to feel less anxious. The goal is to transform the relationship you have with yourself.

Because when that changes, everything changes.

Book Your Free Consultation

If you recognise yourself in this blog and you are ready to explore what is possible, I would love to hear from you.

Book a free consultation today and we will look at what has been keeping you in this cycle, and what it would take to genuinely change it.

The post What Is High Functioning Anxiety and Why High Achievers Are Most at Risk appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

And if part of you is sceptical, that’s completely understandable.

Hypnotherapy has been surrounded by myths for decades. Stage shows, swinging pocket watches, people clucking like chickens. It’s no wonder so many people aren’t sure whether it’s a legitimate anxiety therapy or something closer to a magic trick.

But here’s what I want you to know: the science is compelling, the results are real, and if you’re struggling with anxiety, hypnotherapy might be the missing piece you’ve been looking for.

So let’s look at what the research says and why it works when so many other approaches with counselling an d CBT don’t.

First, Let’s Talk About What Anxiety Really Is

Before we look at the science of hypnotherapy, it helps to understand what anxiety actually is because most people have been given an incomplete picture.

Anxiety is not a personality flaw.

You are not “just a natural worrier” or even “an anxious person”. And it is not something you simply need to think your way out of, which is what CBT tries to encourage you to do with anxious thoughts.

Anxiety is a habitual conditioned response in the brain and the nervous system. This is one of the reasons you can instantly feel anxious even when there doesn’t seem to be a rational reason for feeling anxious.

In most cases, anxiety begins with an experience (or a series of experiences) that taught your nervous system the world was unsafe. This could be a single significant event, or something more subtle, such as a critical parent, an environment where you were humiliated, or years of walking on eggshells at home.

Your subconscious mind stored that experience as a survival programme: stay alert, watch for danger, expect the worst.

The problem is, once that programme is running, it doesn’t switch off just because you want it to. Anxiety doesn’t respond to logic, willpower, or positive thinking. Anxiety runs beneath your conscious awareness, which is exactly why so many people find that CBT, talking therapies, and self-help books only take them so far.

To change anxiety at the root, you have to work at the level of the unconscious mind.

And that’s precisely what hypnotherapy does.

What Does the Research on Hypnotherapy for Anxiety Say?

Let’s talk about the science.

A widely referenced study published in the American Health Magazine found that hypnotherapy had a 93% recovery rate after just six sessions compared to 72% for behaviour therapy and 38% for psychoanalysis. Those aren’t small differences. They are striking.

Research published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis has consistently shown hypnotherapy to be effective in reducing symptoms of anxiety including generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety, and panic disorder.

And then there’s the neuroscience.

A 2019 Stanford University study using brain imaging found that during hypnosis, measurable changes occur in the brain, specifically in the areas linked to attention, emotional regulation, and self-consciousness. This is not a placebo effect. These are observable, neurological changes happening in real time.

We also know, thanks to decades of research into neuroplasticity, that the brain is not fixed. It can be rewired. New neural pathways can be built, and old ones can be weakened. Hypnotherapy is one of the most effective tools we have for doing exactly that.

Why Hypnotherapy Works When Other Approaches Don’t

Here’s something I explain to almost every client I work with.

The conscious mind, the part of you that reads self-help books, attends CBT sessions, and tries to reason its way out of anxiety, represents only around 5–10% of your total mind.

The other 90–95%? That’s the unconscious.

And your anxiety? Anxiety lives in the unconscious in the form of lots of anxious thinking and conditioned responses in the nervous system.

This is why you can know, rationally, that your fears aren’t reality and still feel them anyway. The conscious mind is aware of the problem. But it doesn’t have access to the room where the problem is actually stored.

Hypnotherapy can resolve the root of the anxiety, such as past events and trauma, update the old survival programmes, and create new, more supportive patterns of thinking and feeling.

This is not magic. This is neuroscience.

What Hypnotherapy Does for Anxiety

Here is what changes in your brain and body during hypnotherapy for anxiety.

It calms the nervous system. Hypnotherapy activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the “rest and digest” response, helping your body move out of the chronic fight-or-flight state that underlies anxiety.

It accesses and updates the root cause. Rather than managing symptoms at the surface, hypnotherapy works at the subconscious level to identify and shift the original experiences and beliefs that are generating the anxiety in the first place.

It rewires habitual thought patterns. Anxiety is essentially a collection of habitual, automatic thoughts that have become deeply grooved neural pathways. Hypnotherapy weakens those pathways and creates new ones, new ways of thinking, feeling, and responding.

It works with the body, not just the mind. Anxiety isn’t only in the head. It lives in the body too, the tight chest, the racing heart, the jaw that won’t unclench. Hypnotherapy helps the body release the stored tension that keeps anxiety alive long after the original trigger has passed.

Meet Mike

Mike came to me at 37. He works in computer programming for a large bank, capable, intelligent, and getting on with life on the outside.

But inside, anxiety had been running the show for most of his life.

When Mike was just three years old, his grandparents passed away. He has no conscious memory of this, which is completely normal when we experience what we call preverbal trauma. But the imprint it left was profound. His nervous system had learned, at the deepest level, that the world was not a safe place.

When he was five, his parents separated. That compounded everything. And it was around this time that Mike began to develop OCD.

His OCD became a coping mechanism, a way of trying to manage the unmanageable feeling of not being safe. And whilst it offered some relief initially, it quickly created its own layer of anxiety. The intrusive thoughts multiplied. The hypervigilance deepened. His nervous system spent decades in a constant state of scanning for danger.

By the time Mike found me, he had reached a point where he simply could not sustain living this way. He also knew that he and his wife wanted children, and he wanted to be in a genuinely healthy place, mentally and emotionally, before that chapter began.

Over nine sessions, using a combination of hypnotherapy, the MAP Method, EFT Tapping, and my skills as a psychotherapist and three principles coach, we worked to peel away the layers, the beliefs about safety that had formed before he even had words for them, the survival patterns his body had been running on autopilot for over three decades.

He learned that he was safe. And his nervous system, finally, began to believe it.

As Mike put it himself:

“It’s genuinely the best I’ve felt in the last five years since the anxious thoughts began.”

That is what’s possible.

What Is the Success Rate of Hypnotherapy for Anxiety?

This is one of the questions I get asked most often.

The honest answer is this: success depends on a number of factors, including the skill and experience of the therapist, the approach they use, and the client’s willingness to engage with the process.

In my own practice, working with a combination of hypnotherapy, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping, The MAP Method and solution-focused psychotherapy, the vast majority of my clients experience a significant and lasting change, where many find anxiety ‘vanishes’. Many describe it as life-changing.

I typically work with clients over an 8–12 session programme, which allows us to go deep enough to create real, lasting change rather than offering temporary relief that fades once the sessions end.

What I can say with certainty is this: anxiety is not permanent. It is not who you are. And with the right approach, it can genuinely shift.

So, Does Hypnotherapy Work for Anxiety?

Yes.

When it’s delivered by a trained, experienced therapist and when it’s combined with the right complementary approaches, hypnotherapy is one of the most powerful tools available for transforming anxiety.

Not managing it. Not coping with it. Transforming it.

If you’ve been living with anxiety and you’re ready to try something that works at the root, I would love to help.

Book Your Free Consultation

Take the first step towards lasting freedom from anxiety.

The post Does Hypnotherapy Work for Anxiety? What the Science Says appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

It starts innocently enough. A thought pops up that sounds like it’s just being “helpful”.

They think you’re not up to the job.
You should have been more prepared.
They heard your voice shaking.
You’ve made yourself look incompetent.

Then your body joins in. A tight chest. A drop in the stomach. A rush of heat. Suddenly the thought doesn’t feel like a thought anymore, it feels like a fact. And because it feels like a fact, your mind doubles down, replaying the moment, scanning for danger, trying to regain control.

This is the thought-feeling loop in action. And it’s one of the main reasons anxiety can feel so convincing, even when, logically, you know you’re probably fine.

Metacognition is the skill that interrupts that loop.

It means becoming aware of what your mind is doing while it’s doing it, so you can respond with more clarity rather than getting pulled into automatic reactions.

The thought-feeling loop (and why it can hijack you)

Most people don’t realise how quickly the mind creates a full internal “reality” from a single thought.

A thought triggers a feeling. That feeling then becomes evidence that the thought must be true. The mind reads the feeling as a signal, and starts building a story around it. Before you know it, you’re no longer responding to the meeting, the presentation, or the conversation. You’re responding to your mind’s commentary about it.

This is why two people can experience the exact same situation and have completely different reactions. One person shrugs it off. Another person lies awake at 2am replaying every detail.

It isn’t because one person is more capable or more resilient.

It’s because their mind is running a different pattern.

What metacognition looks like in real life

Metacognition isn’t about trying to “stop thoughts”. It’s about noticing them earlier, and not treating them like instructions.

Here are a few everyday examples:

You get asked a question in a meeting and you feel yourself stumble slightly. Your mind quickly offers: That sounded stupid. Metacognition is catching that moment and realising, Ah. There’s the old self-criticism loop. You don’t have to follow it. You can come back to the conversation instead of disappearing into your head.

Or you see “presentation” in your calendar and you feel that familiar dread. Your mind starts forecasting embarrassment, shaking hands, mind going blank, everyone watching you. This is where hypnotherapy for public speaking can be incredibly effective, because it works directly with the subconscious threat response. But metacognition adds something powerful on top: it helps you spot the story your mind is spinning, so you don’t get dragged into it as if it’s inevitable.

Or you find yourself scrolling job posts after a wobbly week, not because you truly want to leave, but because your mind is whispering: Maybe you’re not cut out for this. That can look like “being realistic,” but it’s often anxiety wearing a smarter outfit.

Metacognition gives you the ability to pause and recognise what’s happening, without judging yourself for it. The goal isn’t to be perfectly calm all the time. It’s to stop living at the mercy of whatever thought happens to show up with the loudest voice.

Why this matters at work (and beyond)

I work privately with individuals who are looking for anxiety therapy, and I also deliver mental health training in organisations. What’s striking is how similar the patterns are, whether someone is a senior leader, a new manager, or a high-performing professional who looks confident on paper.

Anxiety doesn’t only show up as panic attacks. Often it’s subtler.

Over-preparing. Avoiding. People-pleasing. Perfectionism. Overthinking. Going quiet in meetings. Over-explaining to sound competent. Replaying conversations. Second-guessing decisions.

When you understand the mind, these behaviours stop feeling like “who you are” and start looking more like patterns your nervous system has learned over time.

That’s why, alongside tools like hypnotherapy for anxiety, I teach people how their experience is being created moment to moment. Because when you stop believing every thought your mind produces, everything changes. You don’t have to wrestle your thinking into submission. You simply stop treating it as absolute truth.

Watch the video: metacognition and resilience

I created a video that explains metacognition in a practical way, including how habitual cycles of thought form, how the thought-feeling loop fuels anxiety, and how you can start developing this skill for yourself.

It’s called:

The Surprising Truth That Stops Teams From Quietly Cracking

Want support with this?

If you’ve read this and recognised yourself, whether it’s work anxiety, chronic overthinking, or that familiar dread around speaking up, you don’t have to figure it out alone.

If you’re looking for hypnotherapy for anxiety, or you want support with anxiety that shows up around performance and visibility (including hypnotherapy for public speaking), you can book a consultation with me and we’ll talk through what’s happening and what will help.

Book a consultation here.

The post Metacognition: Discover What Stops Overthinking and Calms Anxiety appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

The film features a woman who has been granted the legal right for medicinal use of magic mushrooms and features trauma expert Gabe Mate.

In full transparency, I haven’t watched the documentary yet, but given the increased interest in the use of psychedelic drugs, I felt called to write about the potential aftereffects of using them, something which many refer to as ‘the dark night of the soul’.

There are hundreds of people in the world turning to the use of psychedelic drugs to help them with trauma, childhood trauma, chronic depression and other mental health conditions.

Many people describe these experiences as enlightening. They can work through the pain they have been holding, experience emotional purges and are left feeling a beautiful sense of peace and connectedness.

Many people have ‘awakened’ moments where the veil of separation drops, and they can see what the senses normally block – the unified field of consciousness.

Reading this, you might be wondering, what’s not to love about that and have already started to Google the nearest magic mushroom retreat!

I am not at all anti psilocybin! I have experienced the power of what they can do, and my trip allowed me to see things that the brain receptors normally block.

There is, however, another side to the use of psychedelic drugs, which isn’t as widely spoken about, and it’s what can happen to the mind and body after such a profound awakening.

What is the Dark Night of the Soul?

I’ve had several dark nights of the soul, which ironically both took place in the morning while sitting in bed in my PJ’s!

Both came after deep spiritual awakenings, where I’d experienced the veil of separation drop, and there was only oneness.

This after effect is very common, because when we ‘see’ that there is no separation, the ego, which lives from fear and separation, has to die – but it puts up a bloody good fight first!

The first dark night of the soul was on a bright sunny Friday morning. For several months, I’d been experiencing an incredible sense of self, the self that comes from ‘I am’. The I am that knows the truth of being. I felt like I was living Heaven on Earth, which is something spiritual teacher Sarah Landon talks about.

What Sarah doesn’t talk about is what can happen when people have a spiritual awakening.

In the first dark night of the soul, I’d been reflecting on something when my personal mind started arguing back. The thoughts felt aggressive, trying to tell me that this was all made up, that there was no Divine connection and that ‘we’ were on our own.

Thankfully, because I’m a therapist, I knew what was happening and I used EFT Tapping on myself to keep the body regulated and process the emotion coming up in me.

This was the personal mind, also known as the ego, trying to establish authority and keep everything the same. Something I explain to my clients who seek hypnotherapy for anxiety is that our conditioned state is a familiar one.

What this means is that the brain, specifically the amygdala, and the nervous system, are always trying to return to the familiar, even when the familiar keeps in a place of fear, anxiety or self-doubt. Familiar = safe and predictable, even when familiar is ironically creating chaos.

This is one of the big reasons why talking therapy doesn’t achieve the shifts people are looking for, because in order to create change, we need to recondition the nervous system at a somatic level, which is what I do with people.

Back to the dark night of the soul!

I am a therapist, but I am also human, so while I had the awareness of the mind’s activity, it still created waves of emotion in me.

The whole experience lasted a few hours and eventually, I fell asleep exhausted and dreamt I was at a funeral.

I know that sounds dark! But I found the dream a wonderful indicator that what I’d experienced was the old sense of self, the ego, dying.

Rupert Spira, a non-duality teacher, speaks about how the ego can never get what it wants. Because for it to have what it really wants, which is love and connection, the ego has to die. The ego doesn’t literally die, because it’s only an illusion in the first place. But the sense of self will do everything it can to hold onto its identity, which is why, after a big shift or spiritual awakening, things can get hairy.

The second dark night of the soul came around 10 days after taking psilocybin, AKA magic mushrooms. I should say at this point, I didn’t just take a small amount, I ended up taking what’s commonly referred to as a ‘hero’s’ dose – around 6 grams.

The event hadn’t been planned at all. But to me, it felt like Divine intervention. A few weeks earlier, I’d healed a trauma in my body using The MAP Method, that had occurred from my Grandad dying suddenly from a heart attack when I was only 2.

Although I had no conscious memory of him dying, the pre-verbal trauma had impacted me and I was still holding onto a lot of grief.

Trauma and the Nervous System

What I know to be true about trauma, and what Gabe Mate teaches, is that healing happens in stages. The nervous system needs to know it’s safe to release the trauma without the whole system collapsing.

This was one of those classic examples of where we believe we have already worked on something, or healed it, only to find another layer waiting to be healed when we are ready.

This is what I love about the trauma approach of MAP. I’d started the session focused on something entirely different, only to be guided to a pattern of fear around losing things I loved. The MAP session uncovered what was at the heart of the pattern, and afterwards, I experienced a huge shift and a wonderful sense of lightness. I knew that the session had healed an old survival pattern, and I was excited to see what would unfold as a result.

The following week, I’d been lying in the bath doing some heart coherence breathing, listening to Rupert Spira, when I experienced a great sense of awareness of the truth of who I am – of who we all are – pure consciousness. My heart opened, and I had tears of joy rolling down my face. The work from the MAP session allowed me to access that greater sense of awareness, and for that, I felt truly grateful.

What came the following week was an unplanned experience of psilocybin, which led to the most profound spiritual awakening I’ve yet to experience.

What is a Spiritual Awakening?

I don’t identify myself as being a spiritual expert or guru at all! I’ve just been on the path of what many refer to as spirituality for over 20 years. Every book I’ve read, every YouTube clip I’ve listened to, and every bit of inner healing brought me to this point.

I’ve had some beautiful moments of seeing the truth of who ‘I am’. Incredible experiences of surrender, which have led to spending weeks and even months in a bubble of joy and happiness.

So if you’re reading this, I don’t want you to think that every inner shift or extension of awareness of consciousness is going to lead to a dark night of the soul, because it won’t!

For me, a spiritual awakening happens when the veil of illusion drops. Where you can see that there is no separation. That everything is consciousness as a unified field. That’s there is no ‘out there’.

Nothing can give you enlightenment because you are the awareness that is present before every experience. You can only become aware of what’s always been there.

You realise that everything you desire you already have. This state of awareness can be reached through spiritual practice, meditation, but in my case, it was a slightly random Saturday night!

My own experience allowed me to see energy and sacred geometry. To experience divine love that had me sobbing because it was so incredible.

A few days later, insights kept dropping in that allowed me to see that life is meant to be fun and playful, and it’s not meant to be a struggle. These are words I’d heard before, and had even spoken to clients, but there’s a difference between knowing something from the intellectual level and knowing it as the truth.

My heart was overflowing with love and gratitude, and I knew there was nothing that we couldn’t be or do or have.

To put it simply, I was in a state of ecstasy.

If you’re still reading this, you may be wondering again – what’s the problem? And you’d be right to ask. Because what can come next is what isn’t spoken about enough, in my view.

The Symptoms of the Dark Night of the Soul

Welcome to dark night of the soul number two! I’d woken up around 5.30 am and was aware of a feeling of fear building in my body.

My mind was telling me all the reasons I shouldn’t have left my corporate career. Given that I’ve been self-employed for 14 years, these thoughts slightly surprised me.

Instead of trying to do battle with the thoughts, I was able to recognise this was the old protector who was trying to find its way back to the norm. The awakening had flooded my body with oxytocin and serotonin, and I was living in a completely different state of being that the old survival self, the ego, wasn’t fully on board with.

I’m yet to meet anyone who isn’t running some kind of survival pattern, whether they are aware of it or not, is a different matter. Whether it’s a need for control, a fear of abandonment or rejection, a belief that it’s not safe to open the heart, or a victim mentality. Or in my case, a fear that the things I loved would be taken away from me.

This fear response was simply the old survival structure asking, ‘Can we really trust this new state of being?’.

Everyone’s experience can be different. Some people have reported the dark night of the soul lasting months.

The signs can include fatigue, sadness, exhaustion, and doubt. None of it is regression; it’s part of the integration process.

This is why integration is crucial. Ecstasy cracks open the ceiling, and now the body, specifically the nervous system, has to play catch-up.

Mine was only a few hours. I lay there and imagined I was holding fear and soothing it in the same way you would soothe a frightened child. I let the tears fall, and the fear passed through my body.

Later that week, I had a few sessions with a fellow therapist, and as a result my nervous system stabilised, and I’ve been left with the insights psilocybin gave me.

Afterwards, I felt my inner agency come back online. A sense of ‘I’ve got this’ reappeared, and stillness in the mind.

If I were to repeat the experience, I’d do a few things differently!

I wouldn’t have taken 6 grams for a start! No wonder my pal told me to ‘buckle up’ when she walked into the kitchen and saw I’d taken some more! This is a huge amount for your first dose, so the ‘after effect’ with the nervous system doesn’t surprise me.

But if you are reading this and it resonates, here are some suggestions for you.

How to Navigate A Dark Night of The Soul

1. Find a Trauma-Informed Therapist who is trained in energy healing

Having spent over a decade doing deep inner work, my own dark nights of the soul only lasted a few hours. Because of my knowledge of the finite mind and emotions, I had the awareness of what was happening. I was able to self-soothe, to hold the fear and be present with it.

I knew that the fear was the mind and body trying to regain some kind of control. To find its way back to the known state, and I didn’t need to fight it, but give it space to be here. You may have heard the phrase, what ever you resist persists. The more we try to run from fear, numb it, or distract ourselves from it, the more we are saying ‘something is wrong’.

This may sound counterintuitive, but when you can be present with fear, to breathe through it, the quicker it will pass. The feeling of fear is just that, a feeling that’s been activated by the ancient survival system. When you can show the body that in this moment, you are safe, the body starts to climb off emergency alert.

If you are new to inner work, or you are being shown memories or beliefs that need help with being integrated, then find a trauma-informed therapist.

Dark nights of the soul don’t all come from psychedelics. Anything that brings a new awakening to the truth of who we are can create a wobble in the internal infrastructure of the mind and body.

I’ve worked with hundreds of clients who have sought my help for trauma therapy or anxiety therapy, who have made incredible progress in a matter of a few sessions. They have often reported feeling that they have ‘cracked the code’ and don’t know why they need any further sessions! I find myself smiling at this because I know exactly what’s going to happen next.

They rock up to a session and describe a dip. How they have slipped back into old habitual thoughts and beliefs, feel like they have taken two steps forward and three steps back.

As I’ve written about in this post, that’s simply the old way of being, the ego, trying to get back to its old conditioned state. It’s one of the reasons I load my clients up with resources like EFT Tapping Videos personalised to them, or get them doing daily heart coherence breathing, so that they can integrate this new way of being that lets the body know it’s safe.

Dr. Joe Dispenza, one of my favourite thought leaders, demonstrates the vital importance of ‘doing the work’ daily to keep integrating the new self; otherwise, we fall back into old conditioning.

When I work with clients, I use a combination of trauma-informed techniques, which include MAP, EFT Tapping Therapy, Hypnotherapy and Havening, to name a few. These work with both the mind and somatically with the body. Using these, we are able to soothe the nervous system and work at the level of the unconscious mind to continue to process and integrate thoughts, emotions and memories.

2. Daily Journaling

I’m a strong believer in the power of journaling and have been keeping a journal most days for around 15 years. I haven’t worked out what to do with the ever-growing pile of them, but I find it powerful to revisit the most recent one every six months.

When we put pen to paper, the mind slows down. We enter a slower brain wave pattern that allows for contemplation and reflection. Daily journaling also takes pressure off the REM brain, Rapid Eye Movement, which helps us to experience deeper and greater quality sleep.

Even if you’re not sure what to write, the act of getting the tangled web of thoughts onto paper can help you start to regain some semblance of clarity.

Far too often, we are trying to make sense of our thoughts from the level of the thinking mind. But all that does is create more thoughts, which leads to a thought storm and takes us further away from clarity.

The truth is that thoughts do come and go, and with regular journaling, you can start to see the patterns of thought that keep you in a thought loop.

When we’re having a dark night of the soul, or even a dark moment, thoughts can seem very real and believable. But even the sense of separation from the unified field is only a belief.

3. Daily Heart Coherence Practices

The swing between elevated emotional states like joy, love, bliss, versus doubt, worry, and fear, is what happens as old energetic and psychological patterns surface to be integrated. The dark night of the soul is the nervous system adjusting to living without its usual identity anchors.

This is why 10 minutes of heart coherence breathing is so powerful, and something I recommend people do daily, regardless of what’s going on in their life. The more you anchor these emotions, the more you live from that state.

4. The Difference Between Self-Awareness and Consciousness

One of the most popular blogs on my training website – themindsolution.com – is about the difference between self-awareness and consciousness. It’s received over 660,000 impressions on Google!

This is a powerful and insightful video I recorded a few days after my trip, which I’m sharing with you here. Whether you are going through a dark night of the soul or simply want to understand more about ‘how life works’ I encourage you to check it out!

If you’re experiencing dark nights of the soul (mushroom-related or not!) and need help to find the light at the end of the tunnel, then book a free consultation.

The post How to Navigate A Dark Night of The Soul appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.

Anxiety and comparison love to hang out together. The second your brain spots someone “ahead” of you – in their career, relationship, bank balance, parenting, even how calm they look – anxiety is right there whispering, “See? You’re behind. You’re not enough.” If that sounds painfully familiar, your mind is not broken; it’s stuck in a loop that hypnotherapy is brilliant at interrupting.​

Why your brain keeps comparing

Human brains are wired to scan for threat and opportunity. In the past, that meant “Is that rustling in the bushes a tiger?”; now it looks more like “Why is everyone else coping better than me?” or “Why does their life look so together when mine feels like a mess?”.​

When you live with anxiety, this natural comparison switch gets jammed on. Your nervous system is already on high alert, so your brain uses other people as constant measuring sticks:

• Their success means “I’m failing”.
• Their calm means “I’m too much”.
• Their relationship means “I’m unlovable”.

None of those conclusions are facts. They’re habits – rehearsed thoughts your mind has practised for years until they feel like truth.​

How constant comparison feeds anxiety

Every time you compare yourself and come up short, your body reacts as if you’re under threat. Heart rate rises, chest tightens, stomach flips. Over time, this drip‑feed of “not enough” creates a low‑level hum of anxiety in the background of your life.​

Comparison also narrows your world. Instead of noticing your own wins, strengths and progress, your focus is glued to what other people are doing. You become more self‑conscious, less adventurous and more afraid of getting it wrong. That’s when people start saying things like:

• “I feel like everyone else got the manual for life.”
• “I’m always one step behind.”
• “If I was really good enough, I’d be where they are by now.”

When you believe those thoughts, anxiety doesn’t stand a chance of settling. Your system is permanently braced for judgment, from others and from yourself.​

The difference between thinking and Thought

Here’s where the “mechanics of the mind” are helpful. There’s a big difference between fresh thinking and old Thought.

• Thinking is what happens when you’re genuinely present and curious. You might ask, “What can I learn from this person?” or “What tiny step would help me today?”. It’s flexible and often surprisingly kind.
• Thought is the mental equivalent of muscle memory. It’s the old script: “You’re not enough”, “You’re behind”, “You’re a fraud”. It appears instantly, usually without you choosing it, and it always comes with a familiar knot in the body.​

When anxiety is running the show, you’re mostly living inside old Thought. The comparison story pops up so fast that it feels like reality rather than just one option your brain has thrown out. That’s the loop hypnotherapy helps you step out of.

How hypnotherapy helps break the comparison loop

Hypnotherapy for anxiety works by helping you access a calmer, more receptive state where those old stories can finally be updated at the root. In that relaxed state, your mind is less busy defending itself and more open to new perspectives and possibilities.​

Here’s what that can look like in practice:

• Switching off the emergency siren – Guided relaxation and hypnotic techniques help your nervous system move out of fight‑or‑flight and into a state of safety. Once your body isn’t braced for attack, your brain doesn’t need to use comparison to constantly check where you “rank”.​
• Updating the old “I’m not enough” script
  Under hypnosis, you can work directly with the deeper part of your mind that holds long‑standing beliefs about yourself. This is where early experiences (“I’m only valued when I achieve”, “I have to be the best to be loved”) often sit, quietly fuelling comparison and anxiety.​
  Rather than arguing with those beliefs at a surface level, hypnotherapy helps you gently rewrite them into something truer and kinder – and then rehearse that new script until it feels natural.
• Building a new inner reference point
  As those deeper stories soften, you no longer need other people as proof that you’re doing OK. Your sense of worth starts coming from inside: from how you feel, how you show up, what matters to you, rather than from someone else’s highlight reel.​

What can this change day to day

People often notice very practical shifts as the comparison‑anxiety loop loosens:

• Social media stops feeling like a minefield. You can scroll without spiralling into “Everyone else is winning at life”.
• Work becomes less about proving yourself and more about contributing. You feel safer to ask questions, try new things and make mistakes.
• Relationships feel less tense. You’re not constantly looking at your partner, friends or colleagues thinking, “They secretly wish I was more like X.”

Importantly, you don’t turn into someone who never notices other people. You’re still human. You just stop using every bit of information as a stick to beat yourself with.

Is hypnotherapy for anxiety right for you?

If you recognise yourself in any of this, you don’t need to wait until anxiety hits “crisis point” to get help.

Hypnotherapy is suitable for many people living with:

• Generalised anxiety and constant worrying
• Social anxiety and fear of judgement
• Work‑related stress and burnout
• Low self‑esteem and people‑pleasing patterns linked to comparison​

Sessions can take place online or in person, and you remain in control the whole time: aware of what’s happening, able to speak, and able to stop at any point. Research continues to show hypnosis‑based approaches can significantly reduce anxiety symptoms and improve quality of life when delivered by a trained practitioner.​

A gentle next step

If constant comparison is leaving you wired, exhausted and never quite “enough”, it isn’t a personal failure it’s a pattern your mind has practised for a long time. Patterns can change.

Take a moment to notice: what is your most familiar comparison line? “I should be further along”? “Everyone else is coping better than me”? “I’m always behind”?

You might like to write it down, and then, beside it, write one kinder, truer sentence you wish felt real. That small act of noticing is the first step toward a different relationship with your mind.

The post Why Do I Compare Myself? appeared first on Sara Maude | Hypnotherapy and Transformational Coaching.