Habits and changing these to release anxiety

While many people focus on major life stressors, anxiety is often fueled by small, repetitive daily habits that keep the nervous system in a state of "high alert." Often recommendations to be calm and centered are discounted as being silly or not practical .I am not here to judge but to be aware of these gives you options to do something about it.

Here are common habits that contribute to or worsen anxiety:

1. "Digital First" Routine

Reaching for your phone the moment you wake up is one of the fastest ways to spike cortisol. Do you check your phone while driving? Many people do because the habit or reaching for it, the moment it pings is hard to break. Then to do nothing once you check it causes more anxiety.

• The Habit: Checking emails, news, or social media before even getting out of bed.

• Why it causes anxiety: It forces your brain to switch from a restful state to a "reactive" state immediately. You are bombarded with other people’s needs, negative global news, or "highlight reels" that trigger comparison before you’ve centered yourself.

2. Excessive Stimulant Use

Caffeine is an "anxiety amplifier."

• The Habit: Drinking multiple cups of coffee, energy drinks, or soda throughout the day.

• Why it causes anxiety: Caffeine mimics the physiological symptoms of a panic attack—increased heart rate, jitters, and shallow breathing. If you are already prone to anxiety, your brain may misinterpret these physical sensations as a sign of actual danger.

3. Avoidance and Procrastination

Avoidance provides temporary relief but creates long-term dread.

• The Habit: Putting off a difficult conversation, an intimidating work task, or even opening mail.

• Why it causes anxiety: Every time you avoid a task, your brain registers it as a "threat." The longer you wait, the larger the threat grows in your mind. This creates a "looming" feeling of background anxiety that never truly goes away.

4. Poor Sleep Hygiene

Sleep and anxiety have a "bidirectional" relationship—one always affects the other.

• The Habit: Using screens late at night, irregular bedtimes, or "revenge bedtime procrastination" (staying up late to reclaim personal time).

• Why it causes anxiety: Sleep deprivation makes the emotional centers of the brain (the amygdala) more reactive. Without enough rest, you lose the ability to regulate your emotions, making small stressors feel like catastrophes.

5. Blood Sugar Roller coasters

What you eat (or don't eat) directly affects your nervous system.

• The Habit: Skipping meals, relying on highly processed "white" carbs, or consuming excessive hidden sugars.

• Why it causes anxiety: When your blood sugar crashes (hypoglycemia), the body releases adrenaline and cortisol to stabilize it. This physical "crash" can cause shakiness, dizziness, and irritability—sensations that feel identical to anxiety.

6. Constant Multitasking

Trying to do everything at once keeps your brain in a state of "fractured attention."

• The Habit: Having dozens of browser tabs open, listening to a podcast while working, or checking notifications while talking to someone.

• Why it causes anxiety: This places a high "cognitive load" on the brain. It prevents you from reaching a state of "flow," leaving you feeling perpetually rushed and never truly "finished" with anything.

How does hypnosis help to change habits?

Hypnosis is often misunderstood as "mind control," but in a therapeutic setting, it is a powerful tool for neuroplasticity (the brain's ability to reorganize itself). It works by bypassing your conscious mind to communicate directly with the subconscious, where habits are stored.

Here is how hypnosis facilitates that mindset shift:

1. Bypassing the Critical Conscious Mind

Your conscious mind is like a security guard; its job is to keep things the same to save energy. When you try to change a habit using only willpower, the "guard" often rejects the new idea because it conflicts with old programming.

·How Hypnosis Helps: It induces a state of deep relaxation allowing the conscious mind steps aside. This allows new, positive suggestions to reach the subconscious without being filtered out by logic or self-doubt.

2. Rewiring the "Cue-Routine-Reward" Loop

Habits are essentially neural "superhighways" in a part of the brain called the basal ganglia. They follow a specific loop: a trigger (stress) leads to a routine (smoking) which leads to a reward (dopamine hit).

·How Hypnosis Helps: It uses mental rehearsal and guided imagery to "re-route" the highway. In a trance state, your brain cannot easily distinguish between a vivid imagination and reality. By "practicing" a new response to an old trigger while hypnotized, you are physically strengthening new neural pathways.

3. Reframing the Emotional Root

Many habits are defense mechanisms formed in childhood. A habit is often just an old coping strategy resurfacing.

·How Hypnosis Helps: We regress the person to the intial events so that "origin story" of a fear or habit can be resolved and reframed to have new meaning. By reframing that old memory from an adult perspective, you can release the emotional charge. Once the emotional "need" for the old habit is gone, the habit itself collapses.

4. Reducing "Resistance to Change"

Anxiety and stress make the brain rigid. When you are stressed, you default to what is familiar, even if it’s harmful.

·How Hypnosis Helps: By activating the parasympathetic nervous system hypnosis lowers Cortisol. A calm brain is much more capable of learning, adapting, and accepting a new mindset.

Here is the question.Which habits are causing your quality of life to be diminished?Some of mine such as putting my right sock prior to the left will not affect me. If not opening mail as an avoidance causes my bills to remain unpaid, I would need to change that.