“I just know it’s going to go wrong.”

“I can’t switch off.” “My mind won't stop running through everything that could happen.” “I know I’m overreacting, but I can’t seem to stop.”

You tell yourself this as you lie awake going over the same conversation for the tenth time. As you reach for the same patterns of behaviour you always reach for, snapping at the people you love, cancelling plans, checking your phone again, even though some part of you knows the situation doesn’t warrant it. You know, logically, that you’re not about to be attacked by a polar bear in the supermarket queue or in a difficult meeting at work. So why does it feel like you are?

In my roles both in education and Solution Focused Hypnotherapy I have watched anxiety take hold of children and adults alike, and I’ve felt it take hold of me. I understand how real it feels in the moment, and how much it can shrink a life when the alarm bell keeps ringing for no real reason.

What is going on?

When our anxiety levels rise, our intellectual, thinking brain quite literally loses control. The part of you that reasons, weighs things up and makes good decisions goes quiet, and a faster part of your brain takes over instead. This is your safety check, sometimes called your primitive or emotional brain, and its only job is to keep you alive. It doesn’t reason. It doesn’t always wait for evidence. It simply reacts, and it reacts by falling back on habit.

That’s why, under stress, you find yourself doing the same things you’ve always done, even when you know they don’t help. Your safety check isn’t being unhelpful on purpose. It’s doing exactly what it evolved to do, scanning for danger and responding fast. The trouble is that it’s often reacting to a work email, a silence in the conversation or an unfamiliar situation as though it were a genuine threat to your survival. It is, quite simply, overreacting to the situation in front of you.

The more this happens, the more your stress bucket fills, and the harder it becomes to tell the difference between real danger and a false alarm.

What can we do about it?

The good news is that this pattern can be retrained. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy helps you understand why your brain is doing this and gives you practical ways to bring your intellectual brain back online when it matters most.

Two things make the biggest difference here. The first is keeping your focus on the positive moments, on what’s going well and what you’re capable of, rather than constantly rehearsing what might go wrong. The second is sleep. Good quality sleep is when your brain processes the day and empties your stress bucket, and it’s very hard to keep a level head when you’re running on empty. Together, these give you the capacity to pause.

That pause is everything. It’s the space to take a breath and evaluate what is happening, rather than reacting to what your imagination has already decided will happen. It’s the difference between responding to the facts in front of you and
responding to the worst-case scenario your safety check has conjured up. With practice, you can learn to give yourself that moment of calm, and to use it, so you can be solution-focused rather reactive.

Is it the right time to change?

Living with an overactive safety check is exhausting. It’s the sleep you’ve lost, the plans you’ve cancelled, the conversations you’ve had in your head a hundred times before they’ve even happened. But it doesn’t have to stay this way.

Are you nodding to yourself right now?

Do you want to trust yourself to tell the difference between real danger and false alarm?

Do you want to respond to what’s in front of you, rather than what your mind has imagined?

If any of these feel true for you, that’s your answer.