These symptoms are often interlinked, stress can cause anxiety and anxiety can cause stress and both can lead to a depressed state, but there are some subtle differences. Anxiety is created by our thoughts, worries, feelings and emotions resulting from a physical response or experience whether it’s in real time ( happening now) or anticipatory, a fear of what might happen in the future. Most anxiety is in fact anticipatory, hasn’t even happened and probably never will. The problem with this is that our brain doesn’t know the difference emotionally between a real situation and just a thought of what might happen, so our body reacts exactly the same producing the same stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline as it goes into and stays in a fight or flight stress response.

So stress is the physiological state that occurs within your body, which caused all sorts of health problems such a digestive issues sleepless nights, lack of concentration and motivation and even more serious problems. Stress comes from the Latin word stressor which literally means to draw tight. Stress isn’t always a bad thing we sometimes need it to perform well.

Our brain is essentially a pattern matching machine and is always looking out for our safety but the trouble is it doesn’t know that what we do isn’t what we want to do it just follows the patterns of what we have always done, embedding more evidence and strength to the neurological pathways we have created usually over many years, but as I have said before we can make new neuro pathways to override the old ones.

Also if we are stressed and unhappy but don’t like to feel vulnerable and talk about it so we tend to feel disconnected to others, so as a human being we look for something else to connect to which maybe food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, work etc. I can help you to successfully overcome your addictions, habits and cravings.

Self esteem and confidence is basically just belief we have (and a belief system is just a thought that you keep on thinking)either positive or negative in our ability to achieve things, so if we don’t have much self belief we don’t even tend to try to achieve things because why would you try if you didn’t believe you could. Once we have this belief we tend to look for all the evidence that confirms that we are not very good, not bright enough, not attractive enough etc etc.

Although this belief may have started through past experiences it is usually maintained by us and our thinking now. When we have low self esteem we tend to put up with things like poor relationships, unfulfilling jobs etc because we don’t believe we could get any better. Another side effect of low self esteem is worrying what other people think of you. But your self esteem like all other beliefs is not fixed and can be changed.

Social anxiety is basically a worry about what other people think of you, for some people it’s a pretty constant worry, It’s not the same as being sociable, you can be very confident with people that you know very well, even the life and soul of the party but if you are with people you don’t know well or don’t feel that comfortable with and you find yourself going over conversations to make sure you said the right thing and didn’t offend anyone or you avoid situations if you don’t feel comfortable or you don’t think you be able to do it, then you have a degree of social anxiety. In fact social anxiety is not what other people think of you, it’s what you think others think of you because you think it about yourself.

Social Anxiety is very connected to your self confidence and is a learned behaviour usually from your childhood.

• Alcohol abuse
• Cocaine abuse
• Anger issues
• Fear of spiders
• Stuttering
• Fear of failure
• Health anxiety
• Depression
• Emetophobia
• Insomnia
• Fear of flying
• Smoking cessation
• Shy bladder
• Weight issues
• Vaginismus
• Erectile Dysfunction
• Blushing
• OCD
• Intrusive thoughts