stress

Animal Phobias – What can be done?

June 9, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Spiders, rats, mice, and snakes are just some of the common animals people are afraid of. But what if the fear gets in the way of life?

Phobia versus fear

Phobia is a response to something that is not a threat. This is why phobias are sometimes called irrational fears. The response is so intense it may interfere with your ability to function or perform daily tasks.

Many fears had been reasonable or useful in the past or are even useful nowadays. For example, certain snakes or spiders can be poisonous and therefore dangerous, while other animals might carry illnesses. The fear of certain animals might be genetic which is what professionals call ‘preparedness’. Even a few months old toddlers react with enlarged pupils when shown pictures of spiders whereas pictures of flowers in the same color do not have the same effect.

How do phobias develop?

Often, traumatic past experiences play a role. Many people with phobias describe a specific experience that has elicited the phobia. In addition, phobias can be transmitted through stories, films, and the behaviour of parents.

How many people do have phobias?

More than 10% suffer from phobias, according to studies significantly more women than men. Among the animal phobias, the fear of spiders is the most frequent, occurring in about 5.6% of women and 1.2% of men.

How do phobias affect everyday life?

People with phobias do their best to avoid the animal (or situation) they are phobic about. This can be quite significant and influence people’s lives to the point of, for example, not being able to go swimming for fear of water snakes lurking in the water. These behaviours of avoidance actually increase the intensity of the phobia.

Do phobias disappear with time?

No, they don’t. Even if the animal is avoided, the phobia often remains for a lifetime and determines the person’s experience of living.

What can be done about phobias?

There are different kinds of treatments that people suggest: from exposition therapy to psychotherapy using neurolinguistic programming.

What are the chances of a phobia getting healed?

It is important to differentiate between a natural fear and a phobic response. We want to remain responsible and prepared for the potential danger a poisonous snake might offer but the aim is to resolve the unrealistic fear or phobia that impedes the experience of life.

If you’d like to treat your phobia make an appointment today.

Image Credit: Photo by Flash Dantz on Unsplash

Understanding Self-Overwhelm Pattern

November 13, 2013 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

chaos — Photo by Ricardo Viana on Unsplash

Who does not feel overwhelmed at times? I certainly do, more often than I would like to. Today, I have achieved a higher level of insight on the recipe that leads to a number of my overwhelming moments, which I would like to share with you. Have a think about what aspects of this recipe might also apply to you and you might shift it for tomorrow!

I am feeling so overwhelmed!

In many cases, or from experiencing feelings that you do not like. It also keeps you from achieving things that you really would like to but entail some uncomfortable steps or to get things done that are clogging up your energy because they remain on the ‘to do’ list.

What creates overwhelm?

If you are like me, then too many visual or auditory (or other senses) stimuli will overwhelm you. My 2 year old daughter talking like a chatter box and repeating the same questions like “Mum, scissors, mum, want to cut, mum, mum, mummy, scissors… ” or imagining a task like creating a photo album from the last 2 years of her life with literally thousands of photos stored somewhere on my computer. It can also be a task, which has too many unknown components or steps, or one that needs to be finished in too short a time frame. In your case you might find some loosely related topics that create your overwhelm.

Response and result

A not analyzed or automatic response to overwhelm is something like stress, impatience or thinking ‘this is too much for me’ or ‘I cannot handle this anymore. This may lead to avoiding the task, becoming emotional (angry, annoyed, impatient), suddenly feeling sleepy or finding yourself doing other things (like watching a movie) or turning to food.

Thinking pattern creating havoc

Often, our thinking patterns or ‘cognitive distortions’ are forming a big part of the problem. If you are an ‘all-or-nothing’ thinker you will already have one ingredient for the overwhelm recipe. Another one is being overly ‘other-reverenced’.

What does this mean?

Let me show you how I have done it in the past (until today): information (visual, verbal stimuli) comes into my system. My ‘all-or-nothing’ thinking says: “I always have to respond” and my ‘other-reference’ adds: “… to my daughter” (for example). If I would add another distortion of time, I might add “now” and/or “immediately”. Given my daughter is only 2 year old this might seem very reasonable but thinking about her latest pleasure of cutting anything into small pieces it is not really an emergency to get the scissors now and always.

What and how to change?

First of all, make a list of the stimuli that lead to your overwhelm. Find your personal response and result pattern. Then ask yourself: What would I prefer to have instead? What would I like to feel instead?

In my case, the new desired response was to feel relaxed. I also needed to get clear on HOW to get relaxed because it seemed too impossible to even imagine.

I inserted a ‘self’ check: ‘Do I have enough to give right now?’ If not, and it wasn’t an emergency, I would be allowed to set boundaries and take time to look after myself. This is the antidote to being overly ‘other-referenced’ and it is called being ‘self-referenced with an outside check’. ‘Do I have enough energy?’ is the ‘self’ check and ‘is it an emergency?’ is the ‘outside’ check.

The second step was to ask myself whether I had to or needed to respond to everything she wanted at any given moment.

Often, with an ‘all-or-nothing’ frame we also look at the whole picture, which might become overwhelming, rather than looking for incremental steps to the end result.

It is important to always try on the changes that you envisage and see whether it fits for you. If not, or not yet, you might have to include another step or make some adjustments to the process. Then, when you think it fits, it is time to practice it in real life and get feedback from there.

Give it a try and let me know in the comments how you are going.

What Causes Stress?

July 28, 2010 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Stress is part of today’s society, a by-product of our way of living. Productivity has become synonymous with being a good person, working long hours the way to be promoted and to-do-lists are many people’s daily companions. The following article will look at what stress causes in our lives.

Besides the physical, mental, emotional and behavioral symptoms that stress can cause, it has some other secondary effects that we will specifically look at here:

1. Deteriorating relationships

Stress keeps people separated. Couples are spending time in front of their computers at home in the evening, finishing off work or personal things that no longer find space during the day, as opposed to spending time with each other. Families are divided as fathers work long hours and barely see their children, besides on the weekend. In the worst case, this can cause loneliness, dissatisfaction in relationship, separation or divorce.

2. Lost passion

Being under the influence of stress over a period of time can rob your passion for what you are doing. Even the most rewarding job or your devotion to your work can fade away if your body is dealing with the effects of stress. If stress remains unaddressed, lost passion can turn into losing passion for life, wondering what you are doing in this life, in this job, in this relationship etc.

3. Lethargy

Your body needs rest and relaxation to be able to perform. Another side effect of continuous stress is lethargy on a physical, emotional or mental level. On a physical level, this can lead to being overly tired even though you might have plenty of sleeping hours as your adrenals are fatigued. Emotionally and mentally you might no longer be able to deal with the simple challenges of life, like dealing with traffic or noise.

4. Accidents

Accidents are a known effect of stress. They are wake-up calls that will require you to stop and look at your life if you are able and willing to do that. Accidents are always signs that something is out of balance.

5. Death

This is not the most pleasant point in this article but it might serve to shake you up. People under various sorts of stress have killed themselves because they could not see any other way out of the situation. Asking yourself existential questions, as mentioned in point 2, can deteriorate into suicidal thoughts.

Death can also occur through stress-related accidents or through wearing the system down over a period of time until the reserves are no longer able to sustain the needs of the moment.

Make sure you notice early signs of stress and manage the stress as well as looking at the causes and making changes in your life to create a healthy balance for body, mind and spirit.

The Importance of Stress Relief

July 16, 2010 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

woman in field of flowers — Photo by Fanny Gustafsson on Unsplash

We all experience stress to a certain degree. If managed appropriately stress can help us, for example, to get things done on time. If however, you are experiencing a high level of stress on a continuous basis without adequately managing it, then it will have a detrimental effect on your physical, mental and emotional health.

Am I stressed?

In some cases, it is blatantly obvious that your current life situation causes you stress but for some people, it might come as a surprise to find out that they are dealing with too much stress. This is because the different situations that you might be dealing with, when looked at separately, do not seem like a big thing. What makes up stress is not necessarily one thing; it is often when we have a culmination of stressful events, situations or people to deal with that stress starts to affect us. A good way to find out whether you are stressed is to check for physical, mental or emotional indicators of stress. Please read my other article called ‘Stress Indicators’ for detailed information and a list of the symptoms.

What is stress relief?

There are various ways and techniques to help you manage your stress. The following is a list of possible methods to relieve stress:

meditation
massage
relaxing breathwork
changing your diet
exercise
building healthy relationships and having someone to talk to
reappraising your priorities in life
learning to control displaced aggressions and deal with their cause
working on the internal factors that causes stress, your attitude and beliefs

The purpose of stress relief

Given that we all deal with a certain degree of stress we have basically three options: 1. Remove or reduce the causes for stress or 2. Increase our abilities, options, solutions, resources or the time we need. 3. If those two options are not possible at the moment all we can do is to support ourselves with stress relief. The benefit of stress relief will only ever be short to mid-term and should not be expected to work over long periods of time. Stress relief is like a spare tyre that will get you around for a short period of time but you still need to get a new one fitted for better and safer driving.

Stress is experienced when there is an imbalance between, for example, the time needed to finish a project and the time or resources available. Stress relief will help you cope with this situation and support you get through it but it will never solve the imbalance.