Environmental Contributors and Causes of Anxiety

Even though numerous publications emphasise the role of genetics and biology in anxiety, most people’s anxieties have more to do with their immediate environments. Most individuals don’t understand what triggered their anxiety in the first place and are thus unable to address it successfully. When there is a genetic predisposition to anxiety, the environment you grew up in and those you associate with play a vital role in your anxiety levels. How you interpret, internalise, and imprint the anxiety of others onto your own personality also plays a role. In part two of this 7-part anxiety guide, I will uncover more insight into the environmental factors that accelerate the progression of anxiety.

“Living in a toxic environment influences your mind; when unchecked, your life becomes toxic, where your mind goes, the rest of you will follow.” – Dr John Souglides, PhD.

Understanding The Environmental Contributors and Causes of Anxiety

The knowledge that anxiety disorders may be triggered by one’s environment advocates and supports the treatment of these conditions. Anxiety can be addressed with a tailored approach once it is understood how one’s life experiences have played a role.

Your environment consists of your physical surroundings (where you live and spend time), and your conditioning (what you’ve been taught). The most common environmental causes for anxiety are as follows:

Circumstantial & Environmental Stress

Anxiety disorders are often brought on by the strain of unexpected or traumatic situations. An extended period of stress creates a compounding of anxiety, developing into an anxiety disorder, for example:

• Panic Disorder
• Social Anxiety Disorder
• Generalised Anxiety Disorder
• Specific Phobias
• Separation Anxiety
• Selective Mutism
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

The portion of the brain responsible for managing stress can become compromised under chronic stress conditions. If the brain is weakened by stress, it will alter how the person responds to stress in the future, making future stressors more difficult. In addition, when stress is chronic, the anxious feelings continue long after the source of the stress has been removed. This is because unresolved sources of anxiety and stress in the subconscious mind become imprinted and magnified, causing a downward spiral of emotional distress.

Upbringing, Conditioning and Life Experiences

There are two ways in which the experiences you have in life may affect you and your outlook on the world: They can either help you flourish and break free of self-limiting ideas, or they can do the opposite. Anxiety disorders can be promoted or prevented based on one’s life experiences. Anxiety develops in a person who is taught or conditioned to dread things at an early age.

• Anxiety is a learned behaviour that may be inherited from your parents. We can learn to feel anxious by observing and imitating how others address their anxiety.
• Lack of early positive social experiences can create difficulties with social interaction with others in future.
• Emotionally damaging relationships create instability leading to anxiety.
• Abuse and neglect create powerful emotional responses, one of them being anxiety.

Trauma is connected to a wide variety of anxiety disorders which can affect the response to even the smallest interaction. For example, anxiety can affect how you respond to phone calls and social media interactions, leave the house and complete daily tasks.

Unexpected or Significant Life Changes

Anxiety disorders may be triggered by a change in one’s way of life, their surroundings, or their relationships. While some individuals have little trouble adjusting to new situations, others find it difficult. Change can be large or small. Common life changes can induce anxiety, such as:

• A new job
• A new home
• Divorce or break up
• The loss of a loved one
• Moving to a new city or country

Change forces people into an unfamiliar emotional mindset; the lack of what you are familiar with influences stress levels, which compounds and creates anxiety disorders.

Lifestyle Choices

Your lifestyle has a significant impact on your anxiety levels; for example, less exercise has an influence on creating anxiety. As the body starts storing unused energy, it begins to produce less stress-coping chemicals. Food for thought – caffeinated beverages can boost stress levels and exacerbate anxiety symptoms. People often drink less water than usual when they’re anxious. According to Eastern medicine, the lack of water in the body is a subconscious sign of avoidance of emotions because water represents the energy connection one has to emotions. Substance abuse is another lifestyle choice that impacts anxiety. Substance abuse becomes a coping mechanism for stress, but it can also cause significant chemical imbalances, which can stimulate the progression of an anxiety disorder.

How Can Hypnotherapy & NLP Help?

Symptoms of anxiety might include alterations in brain structure and function, as well as disruptions in blood flow and metabolism. Hypnotherapy combined with NLP has been shown to be a very successful treatment for anxiety, unlike pharmaceuticals, where the effects are only short-lived and centred around symptomatic treatment. Hypnotherapy can help people overcome the debilitating symptoms of anxiety by getting to the root of the problem. In addition, hypnotherapy can restore equilibrium to the unbalanced and rewire the brain with improved systems and solutions for coping with life’s challenges.

Although chemical interventions mitigate anxiety, hypnotherapy addresses its root causes. With the speciality modules I have put together through years of research and implementation, anxiety can be something of the past. My innovative techniques will help you change your perspective so that your whole being ‒ your body, emotions – mind, and spirit ‒ can grow and improve on its own, bringing you inner calm and a feeling of self-healing.

How Can Hypnotherapy Help?

Hypnotherapy is vital to rejuvenating health and wellness; it is becoming well-recognised as a powerful tool even within the scientific community. More research is being conducted, allowing the open platform to uncover more of the unlimited potential of the human conscious and subconscious. It is undoubtedly becoming recognised for its power to neutralise negative emotional energies and replace them with life-giving ones.

Anxiety can keep itself activated; it can feed itself through more anxiety. Once anxiety manifests itself, the anxious person can even start to fear the symptoms themselves, which causes the condition to exacerbate. As a qualified hypnotherapist and life coach, I am here to reassure you, to let you know that treatment is available. Hypnotherapy can help reduce the severity of your condition, address the underlying causes, and restore peace of mind for a better, healthier lifestyle.

Take The First Step Towards Overcoming Your Anxiety Today

It does not matter where, how or why anxiety was initiated and what created it; the important part is to find relief and peace of mind. There are many available treatments, but hypnotherapy takes you to the core of it. Here, you can identify and resolve your triggers to create your own peace of mind and promote your own inner self-activated healing.

Now that you understand more about the environmental contributors and causes of anxiety and how hypnotherapy can help address them, keep an eye out on my blog to discover more as we delve into detail. Looking to take the first step towards overcoming your anxiety? This is a great place to start! Reach out, and let’s embark on this journey together.