Hypnotherapy for Work Stress:Work Anxiety Alarm Has Outlived the Emergency

The Three Words That Spiral

0:21 This great story teaches us something. I'm Charles Paris. When you two budget sitting at your desk together, let's nothing particularly always dramatic story to help us navigate. Got a few modern email tokens. Perhaps you've even got a meeting a bit later on in the morning. Something on your to-do list that you really should have dealt with yesterday, but let's not start judging ourselves before we've even started going, right? And then an email arrives. Three words. Can we talk? And before you know anything else, your stomach has started dropping, your shoulders feel tighter, your mind is already six corridors ahead of the facts.

1:15 What have I done? Is there a problem? Have I missed something? Is this about that meeting? Are they unhappy with me? And the slightest inconvenient detail is you haven't actually opened the conversation yet. Nothing has happened. Those three words have arrived in your inbox, and your mind has already commissioned what full disaster mode. That's what I want to explore today. Not how to force yourself to calm down, not how to tell yourself that everything is absolutely fine when you don't know that, but something I think which is much more useful.

2:08 What happens when your internal alarm is responding not only to what is happening now, but what it has learnt to expect. And perhaps even more importantly than that, what becomes possible when you can begin telling the difference? Anyway, before we go any further, I want to say hello and thank you to someone listening in Melbourne, Australia, who recently listened to an older episode in Workstress Anxiety. Why I charge for a discovery session, respect clarity, and not wasting your time. I think that's a good episode.

2:55 I always find it really fascinating seeing which older episodes people discover because sometimes something that was recorded a while ago, maybe even months ago, suddenly meets someone at exactly the right moment they need it. So, Melbourne, thank you for spending some of your time with me. Now, let's get back to that email.

Why The Alarm Learns Early

3:20 So, yeah, picture Jane. If you've been listening, you kind of know who Jane is. She's capable, she gets things done. So from the outside, there's a very little evidence that she's fallen apart. And that imp that's important, I think, because stress doesn't always announce itself, does it? It quite often you're functioning, you're answering the emails, you're turning up to meetings. You remember everybody's birthday. You produced the spreadsheet, no one else wanted to produce, and somewhere underneath all of that, your system is behaving as though everything requires some sort of emergency level attention.

4:06 Jane sees, can we talk? And something happens very quickly, her body reacts, then her mind gives that reaction of meaning, something is wrong, and only once that thought arrives, evidence starts being recruited. There was that look from her manager that yesterday. That report wasn't quite as good as she wanted it to be. Perhaps she shouldn't have challenged that point in the last meeting. Perhaps someone's complained. Perhaps this is the beginning of something. And notice what has happened. Jane has moved from my manager wants to speak to me to I am in trouble.

4:52 Those are not the same words, they're not the same sentence. And this is where I think understanding our responses can become very powerful. Because one of the principles I find useful in my work is the possibility that a response may have developed because, well, at some point your mind believed it was useful, protective, or even necessary. Maybe Jane once worked somewhere where being called into a manager's office usually meant bad news. Maybe she learned that mistakes had consequences far beyond the size of the mistake.

5:38 Maybe she discovered that keeping one step ahead, spotting problems early, anticipating other people's reaction helped her cope. We don't need to invent her history to understand that principle, I don't think. If something has happened repeatedly and it felt threatening, uncertain, or costly, it makes sense that your mind may begin trying to predict it earlier. The problem I think comes when prediction quietly starts dressing itself up as fact. And yes, I think that's an important distinction. I'm not saying it's all in your head, and I'm not saying your workplace is perfectly safe and you're simply overreacting.

6:29 Absolutely not. Sometimes the alarm is sounding because there's smoke, or the workload is unreasonable, or somebody is behaving badly, or your concern contains very useful information. You know me, reality first. But there are also times when the alarm has become so sensitive that burnt toast sets off the fire alarm, right? And if you've ever lived with an enthusiastic smoke alarm like I've got, you know how spectacularly irritating it can be. You make one slice of toast slightly too brown, and it's the entire house is needs evacuating.

7:18 You know, the answer, I believe, isn't to smash the alarm off the ceiling, even though sometimes you feel like doing it, because let's face it, alarms are useful, and the answer isn't to stand on the earth and say stop it, stop it, stop it, which I've seen other people do. You know, the I think a useful question is what is the alarm responding to?

Smoke Or Burnt Toast

7:45 And does that level of alarm match what's actually happening? This is one of the reasons I don't approach hypnotherapy by thinking, right, okay, stress. Which technique shall I get off the shelf? No, I don't do that because people are not broken appliances. I am far more interested in the person sitting in front of me. What are they experiencing? What meaning has their mind attached to this? What resources can they access? Are they so emotionally close to the situation that they can't see anything?

8:29 Those are the sorts of things that go through my mind when I'm talking um to clients, you know, and for Jane, with this little email sitting on her screen, the most useful question might simply be: is this reaction information about the present, or is it some, you know, some sort of overdiction that's arriving early? The way that I see it, because if Jane immediately tries to get rid of that anxiety, she might miss something really useful. The anxiety, the way that I see it, the anxiety is telling her something here matters to me, and that's okay.

9:14 We can listen to that, but listening to her response doesn't mean handing it the keys to the building, you know, and perhaps that's where a little more choice I think begins because two things can be true at once. I'm ridiculous for feeling this, and not because I feel frightened something terrible might happen. My reaction is real, let me find out what it is reacting to. And this matters at work because work stress can gradually narrow the range of possibilities. We even think about considering.

10:00 If Jane already expects criticism, then an ambiguous email may look like criticism. If she's already felt that she's behind, a normal request may feel like evidence that she's failing. If she's been under pressure for months, a small additional demand may land on a system that has very little uh spare capacity. And again, this doesn't make the response imaginary, it means context matters. Because if we label every stress response that we have as irrational, I think we teach people not to trust themselves.

10:46 And I'm interested in helping people trust their instincts. But if we label every single stress response as accurate evidence of danger, then we're also going to the other extreme. We're removing another kind of choice. What I'm interested in is that beautiful bit in the middle: curiosity, accuracy, flexibility.

Facts Versus The Story Added

11:13 What do I actually know? And what has my mind added? So here's a little tiny experiment I want you to give you. If you take it should take about a minute, maybe 90 seconds, and you can use it the next time something at work produces an immediate internal thud. Take a piece of paper or take your notes, app on your phone, it doesn't matter, and write two headings. I prefer pen to paper because there's something interesting when we connect what's going in our head to the actual motion of writing. So the two headings are facts, I have, and beside it, story, my mind added.

12:03 Let's use Jane. Under facts, I have. She's written my manager emailed. Can we talk? That's it. Perhaps these uh there are other genuine facts, but you know, there's a meeting scheduled for two, the report went in yesterday, her manager asks the question about one section. Those can go in the facts column because they actually happened. Uh, then we look at the other column. I'm in trouble. They hated the report, I'm going to be criticized, this is going to become a formal issue. Those may be possibilities, but right now they aren't facts.

12:48 And you're not doing this exercise to prove your mind is wrong here, right? That's a really important concept I want you to understand. The conversation could turn out to be difficult. You may discover there was something you needed to deal with. The purpose is not false reassurance. The purpose is to stop making yourself experience the entire predicted event before you have the requisite information. You're simply asking your mind to label things accurately a fact, prediction question. Fact, prediction, question.

13:35 And perhaps as you practice doing that, you may begin noticing how your mind moves incredibly quickly from one to the other. Because us human beings are we kind of like certainty. Even fairly horrible certainty can sometimes feel more manageable than the not knowing. I definitely I'm definitely in trouble, can strangely feel easier than I don't yet know what this means. But uncertainty isn't the same as danger. Sometimes uncertainty is simply unfinished information. And this is where hypnotherapy can begin, I think, or at least become more much more interesting than an idea or someone merely helping you to relax.

14:29 For me, the work is about helping a person move or at least become more flexible in the way that they respond, right?

Living With Uncertainty At Work

14:41 More flexible. Not imposing a lovely calm feeling over the top of something important, not convincing Jane that she should think her manager is wonderful, not teaching her to tolerate situations she should not tolerate, but helping create enough space for her to notice there is the situation, there is my learned response to that situation, and they are connected, but they are not necessarily identical. Because once Jane can see that, more possibilities become available. Maybe she waits until she hears all the facts, maybe she prepares one sensible question, maybe she notices that her anxiety is telling her to catastrophize and chooses not to spend the next three hours mentally attending a meeting that hasn't happened yet.

15:43 And if that conversation doesn't reveal a genuine problem, then she deals with the genuine problem, not the 15 imaginary versions. That's the difference I want you to take away from this episode. The aim isn't to become somebody who never experiences stress that wouldn't be actually particularly useful to you. Now you may be thinking, why would you say that, Cheryl? You're a stress coach. Stress, I think, can tell us something matters, it mobilizes us, it draws our attention to a problem. But an alarm is most useful when it helps us distinguish between different levels, right?

16:33 Not when everything receives the same siren. And perhaps you may begin to notice this week when your own alarm gets there before the evidence, an email, a Teams message, you know, a Zoom message, a meeting request, someone saying, you know, have you got a minute? You know, a delay in receiving a reply, a change in someone's tone. Just notice, just notice. Not to criticize yourself, not to immediately change it, simply to become more interested in the sequence. What happened? What did I feel? And what conclusion arrived before I had enough evidence.

17:23 Because awareness creates a small but really important gap. And inside that gap, there may be more choice than you initially thought.

The One Minute Challenge

17:38 Cool. And before we go, here's today's tiny challenge. And next time you hear that internal alarm go off, don't immediately argue with it. Remember, give yourself 60 seconds. Write facts I have, story my mind added, and see what belongs where. Because a response can be completely understandable without being the only response available to you now. And remember, every step you take, no matter how small, is a step towards a brighter, more balanced future. Trust your journey and remember progress is progress, no matter the pace.

18:25 Bye for now.