NLP for Anxiety:
What You Need to Know
Discover how Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) helps relieve anxiety by addressing fear responses and promoting positive outcomes. Learn practical techniques to reframe anxiety, boost confidence, and transform your mindset for lasting relief.
Neurolinguistics, or NLP for short, has been used effectively for anxiety relief for many many years - decades even – and it is one of the most effective ways to alleviate reoccurring anxiety symptoms and physiological responses to fear. Before we continue, here are some brief details about neurolinguistics:
History of Neurolinguistics
NLP was developed by two linguists in the early 70s and quickly became an accepted modality for powerful, permanent change used by the likes of Tony Robbins, Barack Obama, Phil Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, etc.
Neurolinguistics has its roots in hypnosis and related modalities and plays on quick change techniques that affect the nervous system directly and without all of the constraints found in the traditional hypnotic process (although hypnosis still is very, very effective in its own right.)
Neurolinguistics is just the nerdy way of saying, "brain language," and describes the language each person’s brain or nervous system uses to get a result; this includes anything from driving a car to writing a paper to connecting and love to brushing your teeth.
The highest prime directive of the unconscious mind is to preserve the body. Everything that you go through - whether it makes you miserable or makes you elated or anything in between - is only there to make sure you get a positive result which usually stems from keeping you alive.
Now that we have the formal stuff out of the way let’s have some fun.
When using neurolinguistics to solve anxiety issues it's important that you know why you are experiencing what you’re experiencing. Consider this: consider the dread, the fear and the tension have an ultimately coveted purpose. Consider that your mind and body, your hidden self, is trying to keep you alive, even though you didn’t ask for it. So, even while suffering, the negative feelings are a simple mis-communication, nothing more. You, of course, wouldn’t consciously choose to feel this way (who would?), but it's not like your inner self is trying to inflict harm – quite the opposite, in fact.
So, imagine that you can take a beat, pause and sit in those negative feelings. Be courageous enough to thank your unconscious mind for its ultimate effort to keep you secure and safe from any harm.
Now, in the end, the feeling you have when you are truly in a special, unmitigated, powerful position is the most important part of the process. Neurolinguistics leads you into the feeling you have when you’re not anxious, but when you are confident - the feeling you have when you are focused on the outcome you desire.
Neurolinguistics helps you transition from a state of:
The feeling you have when you you’re being or have been successful - this is the route, the actual core of the change through neurolinguistics. This is the most important thing for you to tap into. I want you, as a practitioner, to realize that if you’re reading this you have experienced what I’m describing - you have experienced confidence, you’ve experienced success. Anytime you do something right, you probably don’t take it into account consciously; that could be anything during the course of your busy day.
Next you want to notice the direct reason why you are feeling the abreaction or the negative feeling. In this case, it would be the outcome that is least desirable or the feared outcome this is what must be defeated in order to to let go of anxiety (note: fear from the past is not the same as the anxiety that we’re talking about here, fear from the past is dealt with in a separate method.)
You've done well so far, let's go a bit further.
Remember, when we're talking about anxiety we're talking directly about what it is you fear happening as the end result, the worst possible outcome: you embarrass yourself or you lose a ton of money, or the person that you love vanishes and loves somebody else, maybe you crack your car up, maybe making a fool of yourself in front of your peers, anything that you can think of that would be the worst case scenario. So, the question is how anxious you get and what makes you anxious right now try in real time: find the height of your anxiety, the one thing that could result, and how it could change your experience negatively.
Good now ask yourself, "why am I finding something in the future that is the opposite result of what I want?" Anxiety is akin to casting a spell where you'll respond negatively to something, and something disastrous happens. What do you gain? What do you gain from expecting it to end poorly? When it comes to this one-time event, what do you expect to gain - are you trying to find security, are you trying to help yourself from doing the thing that will hurt or harm you? Consider that there are other reasons, maybe you've experienced embarrassment in the past, maybe you've experienced physical pain in the past - it all ends up flowing back from your mind's prime directive.
So now that you can understand what you’re going through, and that you’re not malfunctioning, you’re actually functioning correctly. And now, it’s up to you to decide how you want that event to go. It’s up to you to decide how smoothly you want it to go, an incredible ultimate outcome that would make you the happiest. So you can imagine yourself 20 minutes after that ultimate outcome and then turn and kind of face yourself in the present moment, notice the feeling and where you feel it – maybe it’s in your chest or in your midsection or in your back or your shoulders - notice how the tension leaves your body when you imagine this future moment happens successfully and everything falls into place; you imagine the result as if you’re feeling great and the anxiety somehow… vanishes.
Since you’ve done it this time, you can do it again. And now have a new sense of control over your future.
Friends, this is just a quick note and a slight description of the neurolinguistic process you use to rid your mind and your body of anxious feelings. Know that this is the actual nuts and bolts of allowing yourself the luxury of expecting success and feeling great about your future. Dare to explore more - because there’s much more to designing the way you want to live - enjoying consistent relief from anxiety and unseen pressure far into your future.