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What is dental anxiety?

Wouldn't you prefer to enjoy going to the dentist?

Do you dread going to the dentist? Dental Anxiety is very common. Most people feel some sort of anxiety. Any dentist will tell you that about five percent of their patients are noticeably afraid.

Dental Phobia is less common but more serious. Lots of people have to suffer toothache, stained teeth and bad breath because they just can't face entering a dentist's office.

Dentist fear is very real. Some people break into cold sweats at the idea of it. Or get panic attacks. Or even faint. For some people, they would rather be in a car crash. I have had clients who could not even bring themselves to be on the same street as the dentist, the fear was so strong.

But there are ways of managing dental anxiety, and ways of eliminating it completely. You definitely don't have to put up with it.

Ways to deal with your dental anxiety

Not all dental fears are the same.

You should get your teeth checked regularly. Neglecting your teeth doesn't just affect your looks and your breath. Bad teeth are a potential source of infection. Showing obvious bad teeth can have a serious effect on your mental well-being too. You might find it hard get dates, or feel socially out of it.

There are several reasonable reasons why you might not want to go to the dentist.

Dentistry is expensive, maybe once you have started you won't be able to afford it?
Maybe you are ashamed of your teeth and the dentist will criticize you for poor hygiene?
Or are you afraid of the needles, drills and pliers lying on the tray?
Do you have an excessive gag reflex? Some people can not bear to have anything in their mouth.

But some people have really excessive dental fear reactions. They will endure pain for years. Pain that stops them sleeping. Pain on every bite when they eat. They only make an appointment when it becomes a real emergency. And it feels like going to your own execution.

Dentists rank your discomfort as

Stress - feeling uncomfortable as you wait for your turn.
Anxiety - worrying, fidgeting, pacing, distracting yourself.
Fear - pounding pulse, sweating, wanting to run away.
Phobia - totally unable to even make an appointment.

Manage the fear by yourself - some dental anxiety tips:

1. Stress If the dentist experience just causes you stress, then it can be treated like any other stressful situation.

Try to stop it building up. In the waiting room, or even before that, you can practice deep breathing, meditation, mindfulness, or other calming techniques.
You can distract yourself from thinking about it by online games, or a good book.
You can bring along a support person.
You can talk to the dentist before your appointment. Talk about what actually frightens you most.
If it is the drill that is the problem, you can bring ear plugs, or headphones.
Agree a signal for the dentist to stop. That way you have some control, and can order a break during the procedure. Agree with the dentist if is there is slightest pain, you signal, and don't go on until you get more anesthetic. There is absolutely no reason why you should feel any pain, even from the initial injection. Dentists know how to avoid that too.

2. Anxiety is the fear of something that hasn't happened yet. There are many conditions that make people anxious in general. They are not anxious about anything in particular, or they are anxious about everything. Dental anxiety is anxiety triggered only the thought of seeing your dentist.

Your dental anxiety is based upon what you think is going to happen. Or rather, what you fear is going to happen. Your mind builds up images of pain, of feeling trapped, of losing control.

But these are just images, they are not real. Nothing has happened yet. And if they're not real then you can learn to change them. You can learn visualisation exercises to deal with any kind of anxiety.

3. Fear Your dentist can offer you a general anesthetic.

Dentists are highly trained professionals and want to do everything they can to help you through the experience. They may go as far as giving you an anaesthetic to knock you out for the procedure.

In severe cases you might need get tranquillizer pills from your doctor.

These are effective, but carry the risk of side effects. And of course, you will need to repeat them every time.

4. Dental anxiety phobia

Basically, extreme dental anxiety, fear of the drill, needles and all the rest of it is a phobia, just like any other phobia.

Phobias are easily removed with hypnosis. I deal with phobias every week.

A phobia is a fear that is out of proportion to the actual threat. Needles can hurt. Dentistry can be uncomfortable. But in a phobic person, the reaction and fear is way out of line. For some people, even having their teeth cleaned professionally involves gripping the arm rests, ankles crossed, heart pounding.

The fear is very real. It is in the same class as Public Speaking and Fear of Flying. It can be crippling, and is made worse when other people make fun of it. And on top of that, it gets stronger over time.

Where does dental phobia come from?

Phobias are created when something dramatic happens to you, that makes you experience an overwhelming and sudden fear.

Your unconscious mind creates a powerful association between the event and that fear. And forever after your unconscious mind does everything possible to keep you away from that situation, or anything that is similar to that situation.

If it means that your unconscious gives you a terrifying fear of dentists, then it works tirelessly to keep you away from them. Your unconscious mind is doing what it is designed to do – keep you safe.

The good news is, you can overcome your fear of the dentist. You probably won't enjoy it, but you don't have to have that dental anxiety any more. Your fear is not about the dentist. It is actually about a different fear, something from your childhood.

What causes dental anxiety?

I have dealt successfully with many people with the fear of a dentist. Dental anxiety is usually not just a fear of needles. In the worst cases it is a generalized fear of being near a dentist at all. I knew a man who could not walk along the same street. He knew he should go in, but avoided it.

When looking for the causes of dental anxiety, in every case it can be traced back to a specific incident in childhood.

Usually the client does remember something from childhood. They were taken to the dentist and for some reason got spooked. It might have been fear of a strange place, or picking up on the mother's anxiety, just the pain while sitting in the waiting room.

Some children get wound up by their friends, and by the time they get to the dentist they have been convinced that they are going to be in a torture chamber.

A frightened child just wants to go home. The child does not want some stranger poking round his mouth, sticking needles in, giving him pain, whatever. The child just wanted to get out of there and go home with his mother.

But what actually happened next was that the child was made to stay, while every nerve in his body was screaming for him to get away. Nobody wants to hurt him, But he must have the operation. So he is forcibly restrained, held down and operated on. The result was a child who is now traumatized. He was frightened by a strange situation, by strange people, by the pain and the knowledge that he can't get away. It is the "can't get away" part which is most important.

The dental anxiety phobia is a combination of feeling trapped and knowing that you are going to get hurt. Your mind predicts what is going to happen, and so it does everything possible to stop you getting into that situation again.

And from then on, the two fears are linked. Anytime you think about the dentist, it brings out that fear. That is what you are feeling.

Your intelligence knows that the needle is not really dangerous. But your unconscious believes that you must never go near that chair again, because you will be catapulted back to feeling like a terrified child again. And your mind just will not allow that.

Your mind's job is to protect you, to make sure you don't re-experience the fear. So it does anything, anything, to stop to you ever going back the dentist. That way you will be safe. And the more you try to override it, the stronger your mind tries to make you avoid it.

Dental anxiety has the same of origin as fear of public speaking. Fear of public speaking can usually be traced back to an incident at school. The child was suddenly asked to say something, said what they thought was right, and then got humiliated.

The humiliation was totally unexpected, and undeserved, and every other member of the class laughed at them. Far of a dentist the same combination of pain, unexpected, and being unable to get out of the situation.

How to remove your Dental Anxiety

Hypnotherapy changes how you feel now, as an adult, about going to the dentist. With hypnotherapy, a dental visit becomes a normal part of your life. Unpleasant, expensive and inconvenient. But the fear will be gone forever.

Once you remove the dental anxiety, going the dentist becomes what it is - a medical procedure with a slight discomfort. Something you can handle easily.

Ways to overcome fear of the dentist with hypnosis

Relaxation Hypnosis is extremely good for learning how to relax. You can learn self-hypnosis relaxation from a professional hypnotherapist, or you can buy relaxation CDs and downloads from the Internet. If your dental anxiety is fairly mild, this may be all you need.

Hypnotherapy The basic tool of hypnosis is suggestion. A good therapist will be able to take you into trance and give you lasting suggestions that will enable you to think differently about your dentist experience. You might get suggestions about feeling more confident, about being calm when you enter the dental surgery, or about allowing someone else to work on your body without the dental anxiety kicking in. The suggestions will be tailored to your exact needs.

Visualization Most hypnosis involves some form of visualization or guided imagery. A great deal of hypnotherapy is based on visual metaphor. If your therapist chooses this modality, you will be able to visualize yourself going through a successful procedure with no discomfort. Once your mind has imagined it vividly, it becomes your new reality. When you arrive for the procedure your mind will replace the previous fear of the dentist with feelings of complete confidence, almost indifference.

Regression this is a very popular technique and widely used. The hypnotherapist will put you into trance, and then guide your mind back to the first time that you experienced the fear of the dentist, or an earlier fear that you have associated with the dentist.

You won't feel the actual fear of course. But will you make a connection to it. Once you go back in your mind, connected that first fear, you are in the ideal space to deal with it. By re-imagining the source incident, you take away its power to affect you.

The therapist will lead you through the situation again. But this time your dentist experience is different. This time, you are made to feel that you are in charge. In this new dentist experience you are in charge, you decide what happens. You take control this time.

You can become bigger than the dentist. You can see yourself throwing the chair through the window. You can put the dentist in the chair. You get to experience total power and control. When you do that, your mind changes.

When you come out of trance you will find that the fear has gone.

Somatic replacement therapy for the Dental Anxiety Phobia

This is the method I use most often. It is based on the fact that every emotion is experienced somewhere in your body. There is always a link between emotional feeling and bodily feeling.

You are not normally aware of it, but it is always there. When you experience a strong emotion, you will also experience something in your muscles, usually your chest or stomach. Just think of something you are afraid of, and you will feel a tensing in your stomach or chest.

That is because there is one-to-one relationship between these things. Every time you experience the dentist fear, you get a matching effect in your body, in your muscles.

What this therapy does is make the connection obvious to you. I will get you to think about what you feel about the dentist, and at the same time, I will make you aware of where you are feeling it in your body.

Then the magic happens! I will get you to focus your mind on the bodily feeling. I get you to treat it as if it was a 'thing', a real object. In trance, you are able to describe the object that represents your dental anxiety, in increasing detail. The more your talk about it, the deeper you go into the feeling, into trance.

Then, I get you to allow the object to change, in any way it wants to. You are giving it permission to let go. As it changes, you will feel the feeling change, until it has changed completely, and the fear changes as well.

By dealing with a metaphor representation, you don't have to go back and deal with the actual fear of the dentist. Instead, you deal with something that exactly matches the fear. And remove it.

This procedure is based on solid psychological principles, and works for everyone. It will work on you.

Most dentist health practices support and encourage the use of hypnosis. After, they will be able to do a better job for you if you are relaxed and cooperative, won't they?

And you will finally have something to smile about.

Dental Anxiety Success

Fear of Needles

Mrs. Maitland told me that she had been advised by her dentist to consult a hypnotherapist regarding her daughter’s (Alana) fear of needles. It appears that Alana was terrified of needles to the extent that it was interfering with her normal medical treatments.

Mrs. Maitland brought Alana to see me at my office. Mrs. Maitland was present during the entire consultation.

Alana seemed a charming girl of about 12. She behaved normally during our interaction. She seemed a little shy but otherwise a happy child. Her mother described her dental anxiety at her last dentist visit.

Apparently Alana was uncontrollably terrified of some proposed procedure and could not be persuaded to allow anyone to touch her. She asked me to try to help Alana overcome this fear.

Procedure:

I asked her mother stay in the background and I asked a few questions to get to know Alana. She seemed quite confident and willing to talk about her problem with needles. I decided to use a psychological technique called Metaphor Therapy.

I asked Alana to imagine that I had a needle, and I was going to use it on her. I asked her how that idea made her feel. She said that she got a feeling in her stomach. I asked her to close her eyes and pay attention to the feeling in her stomach.

The technique consists of getting the patient to visualize the feeling as an object, and then enable the patient to transform that object into something they can deal with and remove.

I gradually got her to describe the feeling in more and more detail. The words she used were - big, silver, round, shiny, sharp, cold, smooth. As I got Alana to focus on the images she became entirely immersed in experiencing her own inner representation of the feeling.

The next stage is to establish a link between removing the object, and changing her behaviour. I asked her “What would you like to have happen to that thing?” “Go away”, she said. “And when it goes away, what would that mean for you?” “I could be happy.” “And when it goes away and you can be happy, what can you do then?” “I can be OK.”

The next step is to convince the client she has control of the feeling. “Can you imagine that cold, hard, silver thing getting a bit bigger?” I walked her through imagining it bigger, and then bigger still, and even bigger.

Then I reversed the process and got her to imagine it becoming smaller and smaller. I then told her “You can make it bigger, and you can make it smaller. This means that you have control of that thing. That’s good, isn’t it?”

She agreed that she was in control. I then told her to imagine it getting smaller and smaller, and simply notice how it was changing as it got smaller. This is an indirect hypnotic suggestion of change.

I then waited a few minutes to give her time to make the changes and asked “what does that thing look like now?” She said “It is like a bug.” It was “harmful, white”. I asked her “What would you like to do to it?” She said “Squash it!”

I then got her to describe how she would squash it, and invited her to do it, and describe what she was doing. The bug ended up a smear on the ground under her shoe.

The technique requires total removal of the ‘thing’, so I suggested she could get a tissue from her mum, wipe it away, and throw it in the bin.

I got her to open her eyes again and come back to the present.

I asked her to think about injections again, and asked “How does that seem to you now?”. She said. “Ok, I suppose.” I then tested her reaction. I told her I was going to get a needle out of my drawer and get her to hold it.

As I opened the drawer she made no reaction, other than exhibiting a mild curiosity about what might be in my drawer. There was no reaction to the idea of a needle at all.

The whole procedure took about ten minutes.

Outcome:

Two days after the consultation I got an email from her mother: I can see already the needles fear is gone, thank you!

Her mother brought Alana to see me again on a different matter, and both confirmed that the needle phobia and dental anxiety has gone completely.