Help with Anxiety for students and young people.

Anxiety and depression have doubled amongst the young since the 1980s. Studies show that students and the unemployed are the groups most likely to report being anxious. In fact, in some studies up to 82% of university students were found to be experiencing clinical levels of distress.

25-30% of students experience exam anxiety.

Alongside this young people are more likely to report low levels of anxiety than any other groups.

How does this manifest itself?

Academic anxiety. Does it affect you?

Students worry about exams, presentations, maths or writers block. One of the biggest problems is a lack of motivation. This can come from trying to avoid the anxiety around starting the work. There can also be Generalised anxiety disorder, Social anxiety and even anxiety around screen related anxiety because of social networking and Smartphone addictions. In some cases this can even lead to substance abuse or other addictions.

The anxiety that is caused can be a very serious thing, however the effects can be addressed with a little help.

The problems can lead to ongoing anxiety about the future. The negatives thoughts about the future mean that you rehearse things that have not happened yet and what happens when they go wrong. Because the brain cannot tell the difference between real and ingrained, and then they can lead to real stress both mentally and physically.

This can have a physiological result. Your heart can race, you can feel knots in your stomach, suffer from headaches, or problems breathing which can even lead to panic attacks.  Sometimes this leads to avoidance of the tasks that leads into a further downward spiral.

The good news is that by learning to let go and relax, and focus on a positive future you can address these issues and learn to let go of the anxiety. You can start to look forward to a positive future and when you learn to be more relaxed and stress free, when you are younger, you can use these skills for the rest of your life.

If you need help with any worries of your own you can contact me via the contact page at the top of this page.

Turkish surgeons using hypnosis for open heart surgery

A report in the Turkish press today discusses the fact that surgeons are returning to the use of hypnosis during operations to shorten hospitalisation and intensive care periods as well as reduce the amount of medication prescribed.

Presented in the Daily Sabbah the report follows on from previous news that talks about studies that have been undertaken to look at the efficacy of hypnosis in helping to deal with pain and post operative recovery.

In previous studies, it was also reported that women who underwent hypnosis before breast cancer surgery needed less anaesthesia and had fewer side effects than women who received only counselling.

The medical study into Hypnosis for Heart Surgery

Professor and surgeon Ahmet Akgül of the Istanbul University's Faculty of Medicine and his team apply hypnosis during open-heart surgeries and report that patients feel almost no pain during the postoperative period.

"They also do not have to stay a week in the hospital, which affects costs," Akgül told Turkish newspaper Sabah.

For his study, Akgül divided patients into two groups, a control group and a study group.

"Before the patients were operated on, the study group underwent a hypnosis section, instructing them they would not feel pain," Akgül said, adding the results were successful. Akgül said they stayed only one day in the intensive care unit and their hospitalization period lasted only three days.

The study results were published in the journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.

The use of hypnosis and teaching the techniques to people who are dealing with pain is very common. I work with many chronic pain sufferers who can find that the pain can also affect them in other ways and helping to teach them to turn down and manage the pain can have great benefits to their feelings of well being as well as the obvious issues with the pain itself.

It is also interesting to note that there are a great many medical studies that look into the use of hypnosis and hypnotherapy and the results are often surprising in their success to people who may still view this as an alternative treatment. The NHS in the UK is just one of the health providers across the world that offers a great deal of information on its own website.