This century has led to the distracted generations, wasting hours a day checking irrelevant emails and intrusive social media accounts. And this ‘always on’ culture – exacerbated by the smart phone – is making us more stressed and less productive, according to some reports. This, in turn, is causing stress, anxiety, sleeplessness and undue pressure.
“Something like 40% of people wake up, and the first thing they do is check their email,” Professor Sir Cary Cooper of Manchester Business School, who has studied e-mail and workplace stress, told the BBC. “For another 40%, it’s the last thing they do at night.”
The Quality of Working Life 2016 report from the Chartered Management Institute earlier this year found that this obsession with checking emails outside of work hours is making it difficult for many of us to switch off.
The more enlightened firms have been stepping in to help. In 2012, Volkswagen began shutting off employees’ email when they are off shift while Daimler has allowed its workers to have all the work emails they receive while on holiday automatically erased.
And France’s new labour law, enacted a few weeks ago, encourages all companies to take similar measures.
Besides the obvious anxiety this can cause, using smartphones and tablets in bed before sleep can have a negative impact on sleep patterns and this, in turn, feeds the feelings of stress and anxiety.
Clinical hypnotherapy can help people beat the information ‘addiction’ and relieve the feelings of stress and anxiety this causes.
“We live in a society where great demands and responsibilities are placed on us,” says the National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH). “Today, about one in seven people are suffering from stress or anxiety at any one time in the UK. And while some people manage, more and more people are showing signs of over-anxiety, which leads to stress, which can make a significant impact on the quality of life and wellbeing.”
The ‘need’ to always be online and receiving information is a learned behaviour which can become a habit or an addiction. People can find themselves in the grip of many habits that they seem unable to control and these can range from nail-biting or smoking to more deep-seated compulsions.
A learned behaviour is often ‘distorted’ by the subconscious which builds mechanisms that support how we live and what we do, says the NCH. However, sometimes things get distorted and what the subconscious thinks is a protection mechanism becomes an unwanted habit that causes upset rather than a means of survival.
But a clinical hypnotherapist, using hypnotic techniques, can help to remove habits with precision.
“The reason why hypnotherapy works so rapidly with bad habits and behaviours is because it works directly with your subconscious, bypassing the critical mind and getting to the root of the issue,” explains the NCH.
Similarly, in dealing with anxiety or stress, the hypnotherapist will again work with the subconscious to allow the person to feel more confident and relaxed. Together, the therapist and anxious person will come up with a goal as to how the person wishes to behave when faced with the situation that causes this anxiety. Then, using suggestions to the subconscious, the therapist will work towards achieving this result.
“People who have experienced side effects of anxiety such as insomnia, find that they are sleeping much better and as a result are able to work more effectively,” adds the NCH, agreeing that sleep patterns can be disrupted by using online devices in bed before sleeping.
To break an online addiction of beat the anxiety this can cause, contact an NCH hypnotherapist near you by clicking here. It will make a difference.