Sunday, 6:30 p.m. Nothing has happened. The dishes are done, the evening is technically free, and you’re on the couch with a show you’re not really watching, because somewhere under your ribs Monday has already started.
You go through the inbox you haven’t opened, the meeting you didn’t prepare for, the thing you forgot to send on Friday. Your shoulders creep up toward your ears and your stomach goes tight.
On Monday the meeting takes twenty minutes and is mostly about the new parking rules.
A Film About Tomorrow
Look at what happened that Sunday. Your attention narrowed to one thing. The pictures in your head were more vivid than the living room. Your body reacted to something that wasn’t happening. Those are the classic marks of trance, with a script written by fear.
German physician and psychotherapist Gunther Schmidt, founder of what’s called hypnosystemic therapy, points out that fear needs a picture of something bad still to come. The past alone won’t do it, because it’s over and you survived it. To be afraid, you first have to project a bad tomorrow, and a projection is something you can work with.
Five Films Instead of One
Out of countless possible tomorrows, the anxious mind picks the worst and runs it on a loop, as if nothing else were showing. Schmidt’s suggestion is to make at least five on purpose:
- The worst possible.
- Moderately bad.
- Neutral.
- Moderately good.
- The best possible.
You don’t have to believe the best one. It only has to exist next to the worst. A lot of fear’s power comes from having the screen to itself.
Try it on Monday’s meeting. Worst: it turns out I’ve made a serious mistake. Moderately bad: someone is curt with me and I leave with a knot in my stomach. Neutral: a routine half hour, then lunch. Moderately good: people pick up my point. Best: something useful comes out of it that I didn’t expect.
Then watch what your body does with all five in front of it. Usually the worst film is still there, just smaller. Of everything in this article, this is the exercise I’d start with. You can do it on paper.
Why Your Body Gets There First
Someone slams a door behind you. You jump, your heart races, and only then do you realize it was the draft. Some reactions are old and very fast, and thinking catches up with them later. (You may know the simplified “three brains” model, reptilian, mammalian and human. Neuroscience has long known the brain isn’t stacked in neat floors like that, so take it as a metaphor at most.)
Jumping at a door is your nervous system checking for danger before you’ve had time to think. From its point of view, jumping a hundred times at a draft is better than missing something real once. Swallowing your disagreement in a meeting can come from a similar old mechanism, one that treats being cast out of the group as dangerous.
One of the main signals the nervous system uses to spot a threat is speed: a sudden movement, an abrupt noise, a car honking right beside you. Now think of an ordinary anxious day. Walking fast, scrolling fast, answering fast, eating standing up. To your nervous system that looks like the pace of someone running for their life.
So slow down your movements. You have no lever for your thoughts, but you have one for how fast you walk to the kitchen counter or pour a glass of water.
Don’t Reply Right Away
When your body goes into alarm, stress hormones flood your system, and telling yourself “okay, it’s fine now” doesn’t clear them. Lab research shows that after a brief stressor, the stress hormone cortisol returns to normal over something like tens of minutes to more than an hour, depending on the person and the situation.
Some people give themselves a full 24 hours before replying to an angry email. That’s a sensible buffer rather than a measured physiological window. Write the reply if you need to, and send it tomorrow if you still want to.
Your Own Sources of Safety
Calming yourself (self-regulation) and being calmed by someone else (co-regulation) both count, and you’ll need both. Self-regulation is ongoing, more like keeping your balance while walking than reaching a place and staying there.
Plenty of people wait for things around them to settle first: once the email arrives, once your partner apologizes. It helps to know what you can do yourself. Write down your own sources of safety, as concretely as you can:
- A place: your armchair, the woods behind the house, your grandmother’s kitchen, even just the memory of it.
- A person: someone whose voice on the phone calms you down before they’ve said anything clever. That’s co-regulation in practice.
- Your body: palms on your chest, feet firmly on the floor, a long slow exhale.
- A ritual: tea, a walk, ten minutes of trance.
Keep the list somewhere you’ll find it on a Sunday evening.
Using Trance for Anxiety
An anxious trance is already running, so you don’t need to learn how to get into one. You’re choosing which film plays.
When the alarm is high, start with your body: a few slow movements, feet on the floor, a long exhale. Once it eases a little, put on a trance. The fear doesn’t have to be gone first. Listen on calm days too, so your body learns what safety feels like when nothing is at stake.
There’s reasonable evidence for this. A 2019 meta-analysis by Valentine, Milling and colleagues pooled 15 studies in which people with anxiety received hypnosis and compared them with control groups. At the end of treatment the average effect was fairly large, d = 0.79, which roughly means the average person who had hypnosis did better than almost four-fifths of the people in the control groups. In the smaller number of studies that followed people up later, the effect was a little higher still (d = 0.99). The authors note the limits: the studies differed in the kind of anxiety and the style of hypnosis, there were few follow-up measurements, and less successful results may have ended up in a drawer.
When It’s Not a Job for Headphones
Trance can help with everyday nerves and stress. Some anxiety belongs with a professional, though. Contact your primary care doctor, a psychologist or a psychiatrist if:
- you have repeated panic attacks,
- anxiety has been disrupting your work, relationships or everyday life for a long time,
- what you’re trying isn’t helping,
- you’re having thoughts of harming yourself.
Under the UK’s NICE guidelines, anxiety disorders are usually treated first with lighter steps such as education or guided self-help. If that isn’t enough, the next step is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), medication, or both. Trance can sit alongside that, but it’s no replacement. If you’re having thoughts of self-harm, don’t put it off; get help right away.