If you are looking for a quicker way to winnow away your piled-up stress, anxiety, and other unpleasant feelings, you've come to the right place!

Most people have an innate tendency to think logically and rationally and to behave thoughtfully, as long as  strong feelings  do not interfere. Whether emotional or somatic (physical), when they manifest, feelings tend to alter the state of mind, which can disrupt or even take control of thinking and decision-making processes.

This is how you can find yourself unwittingly ruminating on negative or absurd thoughts and end up being overwhelmed by these thoughts. So, you can easily slip into a vicious circle where your rebellious negative thoughts will trigger even more unpleasant feelings, which, if neglected, can end up altering your thoughtful line of thinking and decision-making, taking control of your life, and end up poisoning your existence and pushing you to despair.

However, there is nothing wrong with experiencing intense emotions as long as your emotional responses are well-anchored in reality! According to contemporary conceptual conventions, the fearful feeling one experiences when facing a real danger that occurs in real-time, and as long as the induced reaction is proportional to the threat, is called "fear" When fears are unreasonable, time-shifted (triggered by past events or future projections), disproportionate, or outright irrational, they are called stress, anxiety, phobias, trauma, and many other academic concepts describing various negative emotional feelings.

When they occur occasionally, stress, anxiety, trauma, or other negative emotions are neither normative concepts nor disorders per se. Theese negative emotional feelings are personal experiences, and you are in the best position to define the boundaries of what is and what is not normal, appropriate, acceptable, or harmful in terms of experience per se. However, whatever the nature of your emotional reaction, when you perceive it as an overwhelming or lasting experience, it strongly indicates that you are dealing with more than stress or anxiety as a regular, adaptive emotional response. It's time to do an online self-assessment and look for the best options available or, better yet, talk to your doctor.

Although academic definitions of stress, anxiety, trauma, and other emotions vary widely from a psychiatric, psychological, and naturopathic perspective, the common perception is that the above concepts describe states of mind due to unpleasant emotional feelings reflected by the brain's cognitive functions. Stress, anxiety and emotional trauma do not reside in the intentionally and directly controllable areas of your brain! When you feel emotionally hurt, what is hurt are most likely those non-cognitive aspects of your mind stored and managged by your limbic system, not your rational brain! Your brain's cognitive function analyzes the traumas embedded in your subconscious mind as bodily feelings, gives them cognitive meaning, and reflects them as mental perceptions of your emotional feelings - commonly called emotions.

The common perception is that stress and anxiety are inevitable parts of everyday life, caused by external factors and events that happen to you; such as health issues, aging, family, career, financial matters, social ties, loneliness, life’s purpose, self-esteem, etc. However, you do not passively experience any of these events. You give meaning to these facts of daily life and perceive them as stressful, anxious, traumatic, emotionally neutral, or joyful events. Your emotions are not necessarily the direct and inevitable consequences of what happens to you. Stress, anxiety, and other unpleasant feelings are your patterns of reactions to what you perceive in your environment!

Although in everyday conversations, the words “fear,” “stress,” and “anxiety” seem to be interchangeable, these words do not have the same semantic or academic value. For clarity and academic rigor, I must say that even though they all describe fearful feelings,  “fear,” “stress,” and “anxiety” are different emotions with significantly different neurobiologies. Your brain knows perfectly well if you are afraid as a reaction to a real danger or if your fear is induced by recalling a bad memory or imagining a future threat. You will feel afraid when you recall a traumatic unhealed event, not because a sudden mental confusion will make you mistakenly assume that those past events are happening in the present, but because evoking the memories of a disturbing past event will trigger the emotional feelings related to that moment, feelings that you experience at the very moment you recall your past event.

Fear is an innate, short-lived fearful emotional response to a clear cause, such as facing real danger in real time - as long as the induced reaction is proportional to the threat. When intense, fear response can disrupt the rational mind and give a surge of energy, thus triggering the well-known "fight or flight" response. When your feeling of fear is an unreasonable or long-lasting emotional response to an imprecise, vague, diffuse, unknown, past, future, or irrational threat, it is called stress, anxiety, trauma, and many other names describing various irrational negative feelings. These time-shifted, irrational, or unreasonable fears are learned patterns of poor emotional response that disrupt the rational mind and drain your energy, thus triggering a crippling "freeze in place" reaction.

When you feel in danger, all your senses are exacerbated, time collapses, your energy soars, and in the blink of an eye, your subconscious will make the decision that gives you the best chance of survival. As soon as you perceive a danger, be it real, imagined, or recalled from a past experience, the two branches of the autonomic nervous system are activated simultaneously, and your body is ready to fight, flee or freeze in place. When the danger seems real, your subconscious will favor the decision to fight or flee. When your fearful feelings are disproportionate or time-shifted - and therefore, the fight or flight response is not an option, your body will most likely react instinctively by freezing in place. Unhealthy emotional responses are very difficult to control by the rational mind alone because they arise from patterns stored in your subconscious mind and not from your intentional though.

Legitimate fear induced by real threats, genuin excitement, or enthusiasm - known as "positive stress" - is an innate emotional response that, through its ability to boost energy, is essential to survival and life fulfillment. However, persistent or intense stress and anxiety are negative, toxic, and energy-consuming feelings. Whether you call a disproportionate or time-shifted emotional reaction stress, anxiety, trauma, anger, shame, grief, painful sadness, or any other name describing negative feelings, they are toxic as long as they are intense, lasting, or overwhelming! Fatigue, sleeplessness, and pain are often some of their first fallouts, as toxic emotions drain energy and vitality. In the long run, the cumulative effect of stress and anxiety can wreak havoc on your mind and body.

Even though the experience of your fearful emotional feelings happens in the present, the stress is still related to past events, and the anxiety is associated with the anticipation of negative future outcomes. Since stress and anxiety are always time-shifted, most stress and anxiety coping strategies revolve around being grounded in the present. All these "anchoring" strategies aim to divert attention to keep it focused on an intentionally created happy present for as long as possible. Unfortunately, as soon as you finish your trick to dealing with stress and anxiety - whether it's practicing yoga, mindfulness, art therapy, pet therapy, physical training, jogging, fishing, hunting, or any other relaxing activity, you will start your descent back into your initial stressful and anxious state of mind.

I hope you have better things to do than seek temporary refuge from your toxic feelings because they always have a cumulative effect; they will pile up unless you find an effective way to relieve them. So your stress, anxiety, and other negative feelings that build up during the day and don't go away overnight become your stress for the next morning, on which you will continue to build up new stress, and so on. Since your ability to cope with stress and anxiety is limited, unless you find an effective way to avoid or relieve it, the accumulated stress and anxiety will ruin your well-being and your health.

One of the pillars of this approach is the fact that what has the power to fulfill or haunt your life is not the cognitive memory of past events, but the perception of those past events. This perception has the power to arouse the associated emotional feelings. Perception occurs in the sensory system as physical manifestations that your brain translates into mental representations. It's like when you accidentally hurt yourself; what really bothers you is neither the understanding nor the memory of the accident but the pain you feel. And it will only bother you to the extent and only for as long as you feel the pain!

When they manifest, you feel your emotions as physical sensations in your body. You experience them as heart palpitations, sweating, lightheadedness, shortness of breath, knots in the stomach, chest pressure, body tightness, body aches, choking sensations, restlessness, or feeling of impending doom. You may feel flushed, tired, weak, dizzy, unreal, or out of control. If the causes of these feelings are not addressed timely, your feelings will gradually detach from the initial causal root and become a regular part of your daily life. You will work, sleep, and live with these feelings every day.

At this point, if you want to regain control over your life, you can invest yourself in a long process of re-educating your rational brain on better negotiating your decisions with your emotional brain or taking the Somatic Hypnotherapy shortcut, with quick results. Unlike conventional hypnotherapy approaches that focus on adding a fresh layer of positive emotions on top of your lasting fears and traumas, Somatic Hypnotherapy is all about releasing the past by rearranging the emotional reading of the past stressful or traumatic experiences. This therapy works with your world model and actively involves you in your change process so that changes are easily accepted and sustainable.

My approach is based on contemporary models of behavioral responses. From this updated perspective, when emotions arise, they cause a coordinated shift in your mental state, body, and physiology. Since these changes are always coherent, you can regulate an unpleasant emotion by regulating any of its manifestations. This explains how - despite the very complex nature of emotions - psychiatric treatments can control unwanted emotions by controlling brain physiology (through psychoactive drugs), psychological treatments by controlling the mental manifestations of emotions, while Somatic Hypnotherapy controls unwanted emotions by controlling their somatic manifestations (emotional feelings).

With my approach, you won't undergo a passive scripted therapy; instead, you'll be in charge of your therapy. Your overwhelming negative or painful emotions that you identify, quantify, and body map at the beginning of your therapy session will gradually cease following my therapy. Once you release the negative emotional feelings you piled up during your past experiences, you can change your perception of those experiences, which, in turn, will re-adjust your behavior. As soon as you no longer feel fearful, your once fearful thoughts and behavior will instantly change and follow your new emotional reality.

Right after your session, you will feel as if your heart has significantly diminished - if not completely forgotten - the stressful, anxious, traumatic, or painful component of the unpleasant events we worked on - while your cognitive memory keeps intact the factual details. At the end of your therapy, you will be able to review the images and memories associated with your once unpleasant events, and you will be surprised to find that neither the images nor the thoughts can any longer arouse your once unpleasant feelings. Like magic, your once disturbing emotional experiences are nothing but distant, serene memories.*

Forget the lump in your throat, your stomach knots, your muscle tension, your hesitant voice, your confused ideas when you speak in public, and many other things. As soon as the unpleasant bodily sensations associated with your negative emotions have uprooted, your anxiety, grief, stress, sorrow, jealousy, guilt, rage, or other negative emotions will be significantly eased, as if by magic! You will feel that something inside of you has already changed or is about to change as you have wished.*

Right after your therapy session, you will feel different. Somatic Hypnotherapy can help you think, feel and live the way you want by significantly alleviating the negative emotions that prevented you from thinking, feeling or living the way you wanted. Following your therapy, you will be able to think about whatever you want, and your thoughts will no longer have the power to awaken your formerly painful or unpleasant feelings.*

However, even if you feel free of your once unpleasant feelings at the end of your session, you will not start to act awkwardly or recklessly. Your personality won't change! You will keep your memories, instincts, and cognitive abilities intact. You will objectively assess situations and react appropriately. From now on, you can focus all your energy on living your life!

Free yourself from the burden that prevents you from revealing your talents, and allow yourself to be more charismatic and confident. Whatever the nature of your stress, anxiety, or any other emotional issue, don't let it ruin your life.

The "No Results - No Pay" principle guarantees my integrity and applies to all my therapies.

Contact me and book your appointment today!

As stress and anxiety are most likely the leading cause of your issues, before filling in the appointment request, please self-assess your anxiety online and make an informed choice.

You can reach me by filling out the contact form below.

Disclaimer: The above article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author. It is intended for general informational purposes and does not constitute psychological or medical professional advice. I don't diagnose medical conditions, nor do I interfere with any treatments given by your medical professional.

If you already are under the care of a doctor or under medical treatment, follow the advice and treatment recommended by your doctor. For any medical emergency, call the Info-Santé service by dialing 8-1-1

*The results may vary from person to person.

Somatic Hypnotherapy - 186 Sutton Pl, suite 104, Beaconsfield, Montréal, Qc, H9W5S3