How Hypnotherapy Can Help Treat Anxiety (And Why You Are Not Broken)
In today’s world, anxiety is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental health conditions. Studies suggest that up to 1 in 4 Australians are diagnosed with anxiety at some point in their lives, and up to half of all young Australians report being anxious.
Clearly, we’re in need of an antidote. Yet despite trying medication, talk therapy, exercise, or dietary changes, many people still find themselves struggling. Why?
Anxiety originates in the subconscious parts of the brain — areas that don’t respond well to rational thought alone. This is why simply thinking, talking or exercising your way out of it often doesn’t work. To create lasting change, we need an approach that can reach these deeper layers of the mind.
That’s where hypnotherapy comes in.
Hypnotherapy is unique because it works directly with the subconscious, and it’s today recognised as one of the most effective tools for resolving anxiety. The problem is that most people are unaware of how it works. Hopefully, this article will help clarify that.
It all begins with your subconscious mind.
Your Subconscious Has One Primary Job: Keep You Alive
From the moment you were born, your subconscious mind has had one mission — to protect you and keep you alive. It makes you blink when something rushes toward your eye. It makes you vomit if you’ve eaten something harmful. It fires up your fight-or-flight response when someone is acting aggressively. And beyond survival reflexes, it’s also been busy collecting behaviours, beliefs, values, and skills that it believed would best help you navigate the world.
Most of the time, the subconscious is an excellent guardian, and anxiety is a signal from the subconscious that something isn’t quite right and deserves our attention. But like even the wisest sages, it can get things wrong — or take its role too far. Therefore, we need to learn how to listen to the signal, to understand the language of the subconscious and respond to it appropriately. Let’s take a closer look at how this works by making an important distinction: real and imagined fears.
Real Fears
Real fear means the threat is immediate and genuine. Someone lunges at you with a knife. You hear a window sliding open in the middle of the night. You’re staring down bankruptcy. There’s a sociopath in your orbit. In moments like these, anxiety is the subconscious doing exactly what it’s meant to do: sounding the alarm to keep you safe.
But not all anxiety comes from clear threats. Sometimes, the subconscious is simply overwhelmed — stretched beyond the resources it has available. The signal feels the same, but the meaning is different.
Think of it like this: your subconscious has a limited set of resources — knowledge, skills, beliefs, boundaries, and habits — that it has gathered throughout your lifetime. It uses these to keep you safe and functioning in the world. But if life presents a challenge that stretches beyond what these resources can handle, the subconscious interprets it as a survival threat. That’s when anxiety appears, essentially sending the message: “I don’t know how to handle this. We need to retreat, regroup, and build new resources.”
For example:
If you people-please or take on too much at work, it may be a sign that your subconscious lacks proper boundaries.
If you get anxious every time you are faced with a new task, it may signal poor belief systems like “failure is bad” or “I’m not good enough.”
If relationships keep triggering conflict, the subconscious might need more awareness or better communication skills.
So, the goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety, but it’s to listen carefully to the message it carries. Anxiety is pointing toward a gap, a missing resource. When you fill that gap — whether it’s boundaries, skills, confidence, or new beliefs — the anxiety naturally eases. Hypnotherapy is one of the most direct ways to do this, which we’ll explore a little later.
Imagined Fears
With imagined fears, the subconscious mind thinks you’re in danger, but you’re actually not. Public speaking. Flying on a plane. Seeing a spider. Not getting a cigarette. Someone doesn’t text back. You receive negative feedback. These things may feel threatening, but they don’t truly endanger your survival.
Your subconscious mind builds its understanding of the world through experience. It learns by association — and those associations aren’t always accurate. In fact, they can be very ‘sloppy’. For example:
If you’re attacked by a dog at age seven, and you haven’t had much exposure to dogs, your subconscious might conclude: All dogs are dangerous.
If you stutter in front of your class and everyone laughs, it might decide: Public speaking is dangerous, or even socialising is dangerous.
If you grew up with an abusive parent, it may conclude: Being heard or seen is dangerous.
The subconscious makes these sweeping associations because it prioritises safety over accuracy. In the wild, a rustle in the bushes might have been a predator, and assuming danger could mean the difference between life and death. Hence, to the subconscious, it’s better to be safe than sorry!
Of course, sometimes the danger was real in the past — such as with an abusive parent — and speaking up genuinely was unsafe. But often, what was true back then is no longer true now, and the association has simply become outdated.
The goal then is to fine-tune and update our subconscious associations so that our anxiety matches the reality of the situation, rather than overreacting. For example, instead of a sloppy association like “all dogs are dangerous”, it could become “some dogs — like my neighbour’s — may be dangerous, especially if provoked, as I learned when I pulled its tail as a kid.”
The more accurate the association, the more your fear lines up with real, present-day risk — which, in the case above, means you’re free to enjoy meaningful relationships with most dogs. The sloppier the association, the more unnecessary anxiety you end up carrying into everyday life, cutting you off from experiences and connections that could otherwise bring you joy.
How Hypnotherapy Can Help
The reason anxiety can feel so difficult to shift is that it originates in the subconscious. And everything held in the subconscious runs automatically — like background programs on a computer. That’s why you don’t have to consciously decide to feel anxious in a crowd, flinch at a spider, or get that lump in your throat — it “just happens.”
These automatic processes are far quicker and more powerful than the conscious mind, so thinking, rationalising, or talking about them rarely brings lasting relief.
Hypnosis creates a unique brain state where the subconscious mind becomes more open to change. By combining deep relaxation with focused attention, the brain shifts into slower wave patterns, similar to those we experience in dreaming or light sleep. In these sleeping states, we know the subconscious takes the lead: it stores memories, processes emotions, rehearses skills, and integrates experiences.
Hypnosis isn’t the same as sleep or dreaming, but it shares this quality of slowing the brain waves down. The difference is that, in hypnosis, we remain aware and engaged, which allows us to interact with the subconscious directly and guide its processing in helpful ways. Most people think hypnosis is about losing control, but it isn’t — hypnosis is about gaining control over your subconscious mind.
In this state, powerful shifts can take place:
The brain’s fear centres — including the amygdala and overly reactive parts of the limbic system — can quieten down. From here, the brain is more receptive to forming new perspectives, healthier associations, and taking on positive suggestions.
Through guided suggestion and role play, we can strengthen boundaries, build self-worth, update outdated belief systems, and even rehearse new skills.
Because anxiety often stems from triggers that have been mistakenly linked to danger, hypnosis allows us to enter a calm, confident, and resourceful states and then anchor those new states to the original trigger.
Old memories can be revisited with a fresh perspective: noticing overlooked details, seeing the wider context, and as a result let go of outdated belief systems and emotional imprints that no longer serves you.
You’re Not Broken — Your Subconscious Just Needs an Update
Your subconscious isn’t trying to ruin your life — and you are not broken. Anxiety isn’t a life sentence. It’s simply your subconscious doing its best to protect you, sometimes a little too forcefully.
What it really needs is an upgrade: new resources, stronger boundaries, healthier beliefs, and the ability to tell the difference between a real threat and an imagined one.
That’s exactly the work we do in hypnotherapy: giving your subconscious the tools it needs to protect you in the right way — so you can feel safe, capable, and free again.
Client Story
“Life changing experience for me. We worked on lots of issues like childhood traumas, limiting beliefs, self-esteem, anxiety.
Lucas is great to deal with and very professional. I recommend his services to anyone!! ”
— Former client, Vicky, Melbourne
Ready to Update Your Subconscious?
You don’t have to keep avoiding it.
You don’t have to fight through it.
Anxiety isn’t a life sentence - change is possible.
You can feel calm, confident, and capable —without forcing it.
If you're ready to make a change, I’d love to help.
