To break the cycle of morning anxiety we need to reinstate the feeling of safety and comfort in your mind, especially in the mornings. In most cases that would involve addressing the underlying root cause for the morning anxiety, as well as creating a personalised calming routine for the morning and the night before, which would reassure you and bring you into balance.

If you’d like to put your anxiety well and truly in the past - please consider booking a free therapy consultation with me.

If you’re having symptoms right now - please take a look at this list of ways to quickly reduce anxiety. This is a comprehensive list of quick fixes, which – if repeated regularly – could help you manage anxiety symptoms long-term.

How To Break the Cycle of Morning Anxiety - address the underlying thoughs — If you wake up in the morning with sweaty palms, fast heartbeat, racing thoughts or a general unpleasant feeling of agitation, you could be suffering from **morning anxiety**.

There is no one-size-fits-all reason for these feelings. There could be any combination of causes that manifests in the discomfort – oversensitivity to morning cortisol is likely to be one of them.

The Mood & Anxiety Centre separates morning anxiety from general anxiety, whilst they could of course be part of the same issue.

Anxiety in any form is your body and/or mind sounding an alarm about a potential danger - either real or imaginary, or a combination of both.

There is a temptation to simply “turn off” the alarm and carry on going about our life. However, permanently ignoring the warning signals often only prolongs the suffering.

It’s important to listen to your inner protective system to find out what it’s trying to say and address those specific issues.

The easiest and fastest way to alleviate anxiety permanently is in RTT therapy treatment, in which you’ll find out the exact reasons for your anxiety, before safely letting go of it.

How to Break the Cycle of Morning Anxiety with RTT Therapy in just one session — The second half of the session is dedicated to resolving the issue causing the anxiety, so that by the end of the 2-3 hour session **your mind feels** **reassured** that the issue is being dealt with, **so that there’s no longer a need to sound the alarm**.

Your 3 week meditation treatment afterwards will include all the words your mind needs to hear to learn **to keep you in a calm state of safety and comfort** more and more often, as the anxiety subsides.

At no time during the session will you be told to view your anxiety “with curiosity" or simply notice the anxious feelings and let them pass by without getting caught up in them. Nor will you ever be made to feel like your anxiety is your fault.

A lot of the mainstream advice on the matter is aimed at alleviating mild symptoms of anxiety, as it often requires you to be able to challenge the anxious thought logically or to have enough awareness to be able to “calm yourself down” during a panic. From my personal experience, a full-on anxiety attack turns off all rationality, as the body and mind fixate on the perceived or imagined threat. This in turns off the ability to direct one’s thoughts, so it can be extremely hard to simply switch the attention to something calming.

Morning Anxiety - woman in a field — As an ex-anxiety sufferer, I am acutely aware that if it was so easy to think our way out of an anxiety attack in real time - it wouldn’t be so widespread.

Trying to “label” the experience whilst you’re experiencing it can seem like a great idea when we’re in a calm state. But of course when we’re in the grip of anxiety - all those best practices go out the window, and the automatic pattern of overwhelm resumes.

The reason why I find RTT therapy so effective in breaking the cycle of anxiety, is because it resolves the stressful thought patterns at their root. It’s the one therapy method that finally worked for me, after having tried

Group CBT,
Counselling,
Learning about anxiety,
Talking to a friend.

Some of the above methods made me feel better during the process, but none of them allowed for the worrying thoughts to subside sufficiently long-term.

Most Common Anxiety-inducing Beliefs & Their Reframes

Here are some of the most common anxiety-producing thought patterns people experience and examples of how they are transformed in an RTT therapy session.

1. “I can’t cope” / overwhelm thoughts

These thoughts can make us feel unable to handle future demands — helpless and out of control, like:

“I won’t be able to cope.”
“I can’t handle stress like this.”
“If this happens, I won’t manage it.”
“Everyone else can deal with this except me.”

Break the Cycle of Morning Anxiety by reminding yourself - you've got phenomenal coping skills — Marisa Peer’s recommends a powerful reframe for this. When I was a recovering anxiety sufferer, I had a dozen of post-it notes around my house with these empowering words:

**“I have phenomenal coping skills”.**

2. Catastrophic outcome thoughts

These jump straight to worst-case scenarios.

“Something bad is going to happen.”
“This will end badly.”
“This is going to ruin everything.”
“This situation is dangerous / threatening.”

In RTT therapy session, you’d likely look at previous situations in your life when your brain originally recorded the thought pattern and update the underlying beliefs to healthier ones.

For example, we could look at evidence of similar events that worked out completely fine for you in the end to gently challenge your inner narrative, and separate the possibility from inevitability.

We would then move on to replacing the catastrophic images in your mind with neutral or even positive outcomes, that start to feel more and more real to you with time.

3. Uncertainty intolerance thoughts

Anxiety often spikes when the mind demands certainty in situations where it can’t be provided. The typical thoughts sounds like this:

“I need to know for sure what will happen.”
“I can’t stand not knowing.”
“What if I make the wrong decision?”
“I need some guarantees before I can move forward.”

Break the Morning Anxiety Cycle by reminding yourself that You'll be ok no matter what happens — RTT therapy gently calms the mind’s desire for complete certainty of the future events, and instead teaches the nervous system to feel safe regardless of the outcome.

My own reframe of this is:
“**I will be ok no matter what happens next**.”
Yours will be created based on the words and phrases that make you feel most reassured.

5. Responsibility / guilt thoughts

These often arise because of the prior conditioning (often in our childhood) that to be a good person we have to be self-sacrificing. Success might have been tied to how much other people were able to rely on us, even if that caused our exhaustion and self-neglect.

These beliefs often revolve around the idea of being “at fault” for negative outcomes:

Overcome Anxiety by Balancing your Needs — “It will be my fault if something goes wrong.”
“It’s my responsibility to fix this.”
“I’m letting people down if I don’t manage to...”
“I’m responsible for everyone else’s wellbeing.”

In this case RTT carefully reinstates the balance of your needs vs the needs of others, by reminding you that your needs are equally important in this equation. The session can also remove the need for self-blame and self-punishment as a self-disciplining method, and instead replace them with healthy compassionate boundaries.

RTT Therapy and Rapid Induction Hypnotherapy are proven to be extremely effective in treating different forms of anxiety in one to three sessions. If you’re interested in exploring these treatment methods, please get in touch to book your free online consultation.

How To Break the Cycle of Morning Anxiety