Stress
About
Stress is a natural response to external pressures or demands, referred to as stressors. These are often situational and usually temporary, such as work deadlines, financial pressures, relationship issues, or major life changes. Stress is a normal part of life and can even be beneficial in small amounts, as it can motivate and energise individuals to take action or face challenges. Stress triggers the body’s “fight, flight freeze” response, which involves releasing hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, preparing the body to react to perceived threats.
Too much or prolonged stress can have significant negative effects on your overall well-being, affecting your physical, emotional and mental health. Physically it can lead to high blood pressure, a weakened immune system, digestive problems like irritable bowel and disrupt your eating habits leading to weight loss or gain. Emotionally, chronic stress is a risk factor for developing anxiety disorders and depression, it can lead to mood swings, and irritable behaviour and it can dimmish your ability to experience pleasure in daily life. Mentally, excessive stress can affect memory, concentration and decision-making, it can impact your sleep pattern and cause burnout. Behaviourally, people under stress may turn to unhealthy coping strategies like overeating, substance misuse, engaging in risky behaviour or withdrawing socially.
How I can help
I blend coaching, NLP and hypnotherapy to provide a personalised approach that is aimed at helping you to better understand and cope with the stressors in your life. As a coach, I can support you to identify the specific triggers of stress, considering options and strategies for managing and reducing stress and thinking about how you will implement those options and strategies in a way that is realistic and sustainable. To support this, I may also use techniques to explore how you think about and respond to stressful situations, encourage you to notice how you use language to catch and reframe negative self-talk, notice your emotional states so you can shift to more positive states and visualise yourself successfully handling stressful situations. Finally using hypnotherapy to induce a state of deep relaxation, provide hypnotic suggestions based on our work together that embed new learning and thinking, and teach you techniques to manage physical responses to stress and self-hypnosis that you can use outside of sessions with me.
These are just some examples of what is in my toolkit. The techniques and approaches will be tailored to your experiences and issues. Generally, people find the approaches of coaching, NLP and hypnotherapy helpful for managing stress, however, results will vary from person to person and cannot be guaranteed.
