Today we’re chatting with hypnotherapist Jessica Boston, who believes doing a ‘trust adjust’ could change your life for the better. 

Hey, Jessica. If you could recommend One Good Thing everyone can do to improve their mental health, what would it be?

My one good thing would be my ‘trust adjust’ technique. It’s a technique that offers a chance to explore what’s behind our anxiety rather than being floored by the discomfort of the feeling. Working with trust is at the very heart of hypnotherapy work; it’s the language of our nervous system, so building up awareness and curiosity around our experiences of anxiety can tell us a lot. 

Why is this your One Good Thing?

Any time you are working on anxiety, you want to examine what it is your body is struggling to trust in that moment. It sounds too obvious to be plausible, but hear me out: any feedback from the body is only ever relevant to an interpretation your body has made around threat and your safety – when you feel anxious, you are essentially responding to something that you have perceived, for whatever reason, as untrustworthy. This may be a relationship that exists in the external world, as in a friend or a business opportunity you are uncertain about, but most often, what we are really feeling is that we are unable to trust ourselves. 

So how do we change that?

When you start to feel a sense of anxiety building, listen to what the body is struggling to trust. Try placing your hand where you feel [the anxiety] and ask out loud: what don’t you trust? Then listen for information. It might be a word, a picture, a symbol… but once you have that information, you can begin to make adjustments to your relationship with your experience, either removing it from your life or making adjustments over time so that relationship becomes more dependable. When you begin to do this you can see over time how this relationship came to be untrustworthy and what it will take to heal it.

How can doing the trust adjust technique help us?

Ultimately it helps you to look at anxiety in a different way – no longer this large suffocating blanket but many different micro-relationships, all with individual breaches in trust that have happened over time that need to be addressed. You will start to build a curiosity for what’s behind your anxiety and this process can also be beneficial in helping to slow down the anxiety, which can be a loud and fast-acting feeling.

Are there any ways we can get this wrong?

Common pitfalls people have when working with emotions is the idea that some emotions are inherently good or bad – ie sadness and anger are bad, happy is always good. In fact emotions are teachers and when we learn to listen to them fearlessly, and hold space for them, they will offer us the information that becomes the key to our healing. Everyone always makes sense and your emotions do too.

How do you personally do your One Good Thing?

I am constantly reviewing my relationship with trust. I listen to my body; we are in constant conversation and if I find myself anxious, I don’t think of it as its definition or as bad, but rather as feedback that needs to be addressed. Many of us struggle with trust, it’s at the core of my work as a hypnotherapist. I’ve created hypnosonic meditation albums to support people on rebuilding ‘subconscious trust’ and these are tools I also use daily. For me, getting curious about my anxiety and using ‘trust adjust’ is all about seeing what’s behind the feelings and what actions you can take from there.

How has doing this changed your life?

Understanding anxiety from a different perspective will change your life. Instead of looking at it like your body hates you or wants you to suffer, but rather as a mechanism we all have that’s looking to protect us from a place of love, is something that will make a difference.

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.

Images: Getty