Suffering from stress or anxiety?

With it being mental health awareness week, this article contains advice that can hopefully help anyone who is struggling with stress and anxiety. 

Joline Saunders, is a clinical hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner and helps people overcome stress and anxiety based issues. 

As a keen equestrian, and 20 years as a National Hunt yard racing secretary, Joline truly understands the challengs of being a groom, has helped countless members of her team over the years, and shares some helpful thoughts: 

Rewarding but emotional 

Working in the horse world, although rewarding, can bring lots of emotional challenges.  It is often hard, physical work, long hours, involves being out in all kinds of weather conditions and it can feel isolating at times too. 

Of course also not forgetting the fact that with horses, things don’t always go to plan!  This can result in upset, frustration, stress and on top of that, the people you work with and/or for, may be likely to lash out their stress and frustrations at you too. 

In this case, sharing is definitely not caring!

Although it is perfectly normal to experience stress and anxiety from time to time, for some people it can become overwhelming and make normal daily tasks difficult to deal with.

Some people have an identifiable cause for their anxiety, such as a traumatic experience like an accident or injury in the past, which affects confidence and in turn causes anxiety in the present.

For other people, small stresses can build up over a period of time without you even realising and before you know it, you feel stressed out much of the time.

Long-term stress very often goes global too – meaning you see the negative in everything in your life.  It’s like you are wearing grey tinted glasses when you look upon the world and you can lose the pleasure in things you used to enjoy doing. 

Some helpful tips

Here are some easy ways that will help you to overcome stress and anxiety. 

Please do not under-estimate how you can feel much calmer and relaxed when you implement these ideas. 

You are absolutely worth the investment of a little thought and time in yourself to help yourself feel calmer and balanced emotionally. 

Talk to someone

It’s really important to talk to someone you trust about how you are feeling.  To get things out of your head and verbalised can be incredibly helpful in reducing anxiety and worry.   If you don’t feel you can talk to friends or family, please do consider the confidential Grooms Minds Support Line. 

There is no shame and absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about in making use of these wonderful, free telephone services and no one else will know that you have anyway, as they are totally confidential.  You having nothing to lose by using them so please, please do so.

Write it down

Writing down how you feel is another good way of getting those feelings and thoughts out of your head and in turn, giving your more clarity.   Consider keeping a diary or journal where you can safely and confidentially express those anxious thoughts and emotions.  If you were to give each day a rating out of 10 as how stressed or anxious you have felt, as you start to feel better, it will give you written evidence of how far you have come too, which is a great thing for when we have the odd low day, as we all do. 

If you choose to do this technique, and I really hope that you do, every day also come up with three things you are grateful for about that day.  Maybe you were grateful because the weather was nice, or your horse went well, or for a chat with a friend.  Doing this, switches your mind away from looking for negatives all the time and will help you to feel calmer and more positive.  There’s always something to be grateful for everyday. 

Taking Care of Yourself

However busy you are, you function far more efficiently and effectively when you are taking a little time to look after your basic needs. Important things for you to consider are:

Nutrition

When we are very stressed, we often tend to lose our appetite.  The fight or flight state tends to shut down digestion, after all, when we evolved thousands of years ago, there was no time to think about eating when faced with an angry sabre toothed tiger. 

However it is important to give your body the healthy fuel it needs to function effectively.  By eating healthy, balanced meals, you are sending your body the message that everything is okay, there is no sabre toothed tiger on the loose and to calm down.  Consuming a diet that is high in sugary foods and drinks will only add to feelings of anxiety.

Gentle Exercise

Stress and anxiety trigger the flight or flight response which prepares our body to exercise – to either fight the threat, or run away.  Gentle, enjoyable exercise can help disperse the stress hormones in your system. 

Walking, yoga, swimming - whatever it is that is accessible to you and that you enjoy, try and incorporate it into your weekly routine.  I realise that you most likely have a physical job, however gentle exercise can be relaxing, whereas often dashing about the yard or to events, is not often relaxing. 

An easy way to calm down quickly

There’s a really simple breathing technique that will help you to calm down quickly and easily.  If you were to practice it for just five minutes a day for a week, you will notice how effective it is.

Basically you just breathe in for the count of 7, then out for the count of 11.  You don’t have to count – just ensure your exhale is longer than your inhale. 

By breathing in this way, extending your out-breath for a few minutes each day, you will feel calmer.  Whenever you feel tense, focus on breathing out.  The good thing is, no one else need know you are doing it so you apply this whatever situation you are in. 

For more details on this easy, effective way to calm down quickly, see HERE

 Self-Hypnosis or Mindfulness Meditation

By listening to self-hypnosis audios or meditation apps on a regular basis, you can find yourself feeling much calmer and clearer mentally.  These are not considered so ‘woo-woo’ any more, there is a lot of scientific evidence supporting the benefits of hypnosis and meditation.

It doesn’t need to take long in your daily routine – some of the apps available take only 10 minutes out of your day but you will reap so many benefits from doing this. 

Remember, you are worth the small effort it takes to help yourself feel calmer. 

Regular self-hypnosis or meditation really helps to give your mind some space to de-stress and consequently daily life becomes much easier to deal with and you feel so much calmer generally.

There are many options available online if you do a search.  Apps I use and sometimes recommend to clients are, Calm and Headspace.

If you can commit to trying to incorporate hypnosis or meditation into your daily routine for just a week, I am sure you will be very pleased with the results on your stress levels.

British Grooms Association Offer

As a BGA member you can benefit further from Joline's hypnosis downloads available on her website www.jojohypno.co.uk/shop  with £10 off any download ordered.  Just enter the coupon code BGA2018 at the checkout.   The offer is available until the 31^st, May 2018.

If you would like to have a chat to discuss how hypnotherapy may be able to help you overcome stress and feel calmer, please do get in touch.  Hypnotherapy is particularly effective for these issues.

Your Author

Hello, I’m Joline Saunders, a clinical hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner and I help people overcome stress and anxiety based issues.  

Whether you have had a stressful or traumatic experience in the past and you haven’t been the same since, or you feel overwhelmed and out of control because of stress and anxiety – we can work together to help you overcome it easily and comfortably.

Working from a clinic Moreton-in-Marsh in the beautiful Cotswolds and also online by Skype or Zoom, I love helping people overcome whatever has been holding them back from achieving a happy, fulfilled life.

www.jojohypno.co.uk