Hypervigilance and how to break the cycle
When I attended the NHS pain management programme, they used the analogy of a ticking clock to explain hypervigilance. People who have persistent pain are often hypervigilant because of their focus on pain symptoms and other sensations associated with their condition. Have you ever been around a clock that audibly ticks? The ticking is a consistent noise, and we often find it fades into the background. But on some occasions, that ticking might be more noticeable to us. Rationally, we know it can’t have gotten any louder, but it seems that way when the house is quiet, or we’re in bed at night. Other times that we might notice the ticking is when time is important to us, for example, if we’re running late or have a meeting to go to. I remember when I worked in an office job that I didn’t enjoy, the ticking of the clock was very noticeable at times when I didn’t have much on or when I was bored, and especially that last half hour of work! In these instances, our brain is focusing on the ticking, either because it is not distracted by other incoming information from our senses or because it thinks we really need to hear the clock as it is important somehow. If we managed to convince ourselves that that ticking clock was actually a bomb, can you imagine how loud the clock might sound?!
Hypervigilance is an important mechanism to help keep us safe. Being sensitive to your surroundings, being on alert, and scanning for potential threats are all useful things when you are in a potentially dangerous situation. But sometimes, it can become the default mode in which you live your life day to day, constantly on red alert and looking out for danger.
Such constant hypervigilance severely limits your ability to focus on specific tasks and to attend to other demands due to a large part of your cognitive capacity being taken up by scanning for threatening stimuli. Hypervigilance can be exhausting, especially as it often affects our ability to get off to sleep and maintain deep resting sleep. Our sympathetic nervous system also gets over-stimulated, which triggers the fight or flight response.
When we focus on the feared stimulus and take actions to keep ourselves safe from it, the perceived level of threat is often intensified, which reinforces our concerns for the situation and causes us to be even more hypervigilant. It becomes a vicious cycle.
We can’t stop hypervigilance from ever happening again. It is an inbuilt safety mechanism that ensures your safety, but you can get to the point where it only fires when it needs to, rather than it being your default state.
Here are 13 different ways to help you to reduce hypervigilance:
Be mindful. Acknowledge the emotions you are feeling, including fear. Don’t try to bury or ignore them. Allow them to be there. Accept them and be non-judgemental towards yourself for feeling them. Do not belittle your experience, but at the same time, try not to overreact.
Be kind to yourself. Show kindness towards yourself rather than being overly critical of what you are experiencing. Give yourself words of comfort, similar to what you would a close friend or family member. Let yourself know that you care about yourself. This is where self-care comes in too.
Recognise you are not alone. It’s easy to think that you are alone in your struggle, and this can be very isolating. Know that other people experience hypervigilance and the same emotions you are feeling, although perhaps for a different reason than you. You are not alone. Take comfort from that.
Distract yourself. When we focus our attention on something else and become fully immersed in an activity, that ticking clock fades into the background! Distraction works best if you are doing things that you enjoy and interest you.
Focus on what you can control, not what you can’t. In ‘The Gift of Fear’, Gavin de Becker explains that we often tend to give our attention to risks that are beyond our control, such as plane crashes, terrorist attacks etc. whilst ignoring those we have some control over, such as poor diet, smoking, etc, even though it’s more likely to be the latter which causes us more harm. Find out how to determine what you can control and which you can’t.
Practice relaxation techniques. Stress hormones are known to induce attentional and memory biases toward threats, so it makes sense to do what you can to help you feel more relaxed in general. A classic would be progressive relaxation, where you tense a group of muscles as you breathe in and release them as you breathe out, progressively working throughout the whole of your body in this way. There are many relaxation techniques that you can make use of, some of which you will find dotting about on this blog.
Regulate your breathing. Whilst breathing is typically an automatic behaviour, it is something that we can also take conscious control of and make changes to. Changing our breathing has a physiological effect on the body which in turn can affect how we are feeling and thinking. This is because breathing techniques which involve regulating your breath, slowing it down, and making the breaths deeper trigger a relaxation response within our bodies. Find out more about paced breathing and other breathing techniques
Focus on your goals and values. Living a valued life and working towards your goals gives you something to focus on and has been found to act as a buffer to stress, reduce the impact of events, help you to make changes, encourage action, and lead to a broader view of events. Find out more about the benefits of discovering and affirming your values.
Avoid stimulants/depressants. Alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and recreational drugs can all put you on edge, increasing stress and anxiety and making you even more hypervigilant, so it’s best to avoid or reduce your intake of these substances.
Exercise. Exercise can help to release any nervous tension and has been found to help with various mental health issues.
Move from a ‘threat response’ to a ‘tend/befriend response’. In her book, ‘The Upside of Stress’, Kelly McGonigal relays the results of various research studies that show how spending time with others and helping them in some way can benefit our mental health. One such study showed that the more time trauma survivors spent helping others, the happier they were and the more meaning they experienced in their lives. It has been found that helping others can transform feelings of fear into bravery and powerlessness into optimism. So try spending more time with friends and family and helping people out where you can.
Imaginal exposure. Spend some time imagining being in a situation that has in the past caused you to be hypervigilant. Do not focus on the worst-case scenario or a perfect one but a more realistic representation of what happens. Imagine it as if you were there. You must be nicely relaxed while you do this. Notice the discomfort that you’re experiencing as you imagine it, how it plateaus and then starts to diminish the more you imagine the scenario. Find out more about exposure and desensitisation and how it can help overcome fear and anxiety.
Be present. When we are worried about things, we can lose ourselves in our thoughts, and all manner of crazy things can come up. By shifting your focus outwards to your environment, you start to focus on what is happening rather than what you think is happening. Focus on your senses, what you can see, hear, taste, touch and smell. Focus on things that are positive and neutral, though.
Hypnotherapy is also very effective at helping to reduce hypervigilance. It’s not very common for someone would go for therapy with just hypervigilance as it is a symptom of other mental health issues such as fears, phobias, anxiety, OCD, trauma, and PTSD, among others. When I work with clients for this, we delve deeper into the tips I’ve given above and explore other avenues too. If you would like to find out how hypnotherapy can help you with hypervigilance and the associated issues you are experiencing, please do get in touch.
References:
McGonigal, K. (2012). The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It
de Becker, G. (1996). The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence