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Emotional Hunger

Foods high in dietary fibres such as bran cereals and wholemeal breads are suggested as
ideal for getting rid of fat cravings.

You need to start to identify whether the hunger that you’re feeling is hunger for food or
simply just for some kind of satisfaction. It might be emotional satisfaction, it might be
satisfaction to see the plate is empty, it might be satisfaction to just because you can. It
might be satisfaction because it’s that time of year and everybody else is doing it. It
might be satisfaction because you don’t want to appear impolite and rude if you’re at
somebody’s house so whatever the satisfaction is you need to identify what reason you
are eating for. The one that’s to be really wary of is the simple emotional satisfaction
and the way that you need to start monitoring this, something that to me can perhaps
be quite helpful to do is to do a bit of a food diary to write down what you eat, when
you eat, what time it is that you’re eating it and also to write down with that, how you
feel when you go to eat the food.

This can help to highlight when you have an emotional eating issue. And for all of those
other reasons, perhaps some of us might call them excuses, for eating when it is not
necessary quite simply the technique there is that you need to start getting a bit
tougher on yourself. You need to stop buying into all of those excuses that you give
yourself in those moments such as ‘oh but it doesn’t matter if I just have this one
because’ or ‘this is an exception because’ or that’ I never normally do this and so I will
this time because’. All of those sorts of statements that you might say to yourself that
justify taking the action of eating foods that you do not need to have and do not really
want to have, you need to start becoming aware of what you’re saying to yourself in
those moments and start dis- believing it because it’s just the excuses that you give
yourself that keep you going, that keep you giving yourself permission to take that
unnecessary action. And that’s what needs to change. When you start to give yourself
better quality reasons then you’ll start to feel a difference towards the things that
you’re compelled to do.

Now that’s not necessarily an easy step to make (which is why working with a
hypnotherapist in Hertfordshire, Essex or Coventry is a good idea) and it does mean in
need to start getting a bit firmer with yourself perhaps and recognising when you’re
giving yourself some kind of nonsense excuse and telling yourself inside with a very firm
voice that that is a nonsense excuse and that you have a greater love and greater selfworth
for yourself than to buy into that rubbish excuse. Ultimately by refusing that food
that you do not need to have, you are showing love and appreciation for yourself and
this is where many people go wrong with dieting and losing weight, is that they see the
diet as something negative. They see what it is that they are going to miss out on. They
recognise what they’re going to lack, what they’re going to lose as a result of doing that
diet and then it takes on the perception of being like a punishment.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic provides Hypnotherapists and NLP coaches in
Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex and Coventry to help with the
management of stress, anxiety and depression.

For more information about our free consultations and sessions, contact us on 0203
6677294

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Learning Hypnosis

We know of course that hypnosis is great for inducing a deep state of relaxation because it gives the brain an opportunity to relax, to maybe put some things in better order, so that you can then focus on them better once you are out of that trance experience.

We want to train the brain that flits very easily from one thing to another to focus and hypnosis is a very deep state of focus. However, for some people hypnosis isn’t the best way forward because going from a very intense state of a flitting, jumping around the brain to very deep relaxation they’re kind of at opposite poles. They’re at opposite ends of the scale so some basic visualisation could be useful.

Close your eyes and all I want you to do is to call to mind the colour red. So I just want you to see on the backs of your eyelids or to focus in your mind on the colour red. So, all you’re going to see there right now is red, red, red, red, red red, all around – it will be a red object that you see a red door or just a great big screen covered in red and that’s all I want you to think about and focus on is red.

Now change that to orange. So that all you see is the colour orange, all around all over the backs of your eyes filling the screen on your mind, nothing but orange. And orange moves to yellow. So, your entire focus now is on that bright yellow, yellow all over the backs of your eyelids and on the screen in your mind, all that you see is yellow.

Think now in your mind of green and just see green so that your whole mind is filled with green. Everything is awash with green and now blue. I want you to focus completely and entirely on a deep shade of blue. And see everything covered in blue. Blue is filling your entire mind. A great big sheet of blue and now I want you to focus on purple. A very deep purple. And I want you to watch that shade of purple turning darker and darker until it turns black. A dark heavy velvety black and it gets darker and heavier.

And just notice how your other thoughts have slowed down completely. Perhaps you hadn’t even thought about them and if you’re enjoying the black then you can stay there. However, you could go to white if you’re already bored. And that white can get lighter and brighter. A higher and brighter white than it was before. And you can hold on to that for just a few seconds now that bright light whiteness like a healing white light just hold that there for a few seconds.

And notice as you did that, that your thoughts were entirely on that one thing. Now that took us what twenty seconds and it was easy. You can break your day up just by doing simple things like that. It just has to take twenty seconds and if you get good at that then you can start thinking about using deeper levels of trance and hypnosis. Remember that the problem isn’t so much that you have all this stuff going on in your head, it’s that you’ve given a greater degree of importance to the things that are going around in your head than you have to your own wellbeing.

Now you have a choice. Now you can choose stuff in my head or my own wellbeing. You know relaxation isn’t the same for everyone. For me, it’s about watching an episode of an old episode of Spooks, by myself, or having a lay-in but for you, relaxation might be about taking a walk or driving your car.

Some people feel that they have to be doing something to be able to be relaxed and some feel that they have to do nothing in order to feel relaxed. Now you just have to do the thing that works best for you, that helps you to calm down those thoughts in your mind.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic provides Hypnotherapists and NLP coaches in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex and Coventry to help with the management of stress, anxiety and depression.

For more information about our free consultations and sessions, contact us on 0203 6677294

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Grief and Loss

When I was eighteen years old my first car, an orange Mini, oh yes it was, was hit by a petrol tanker with me in it. The car took all the impact of the crash and it was killed instantly whilst I was largely okay. I was in shock for a good week afterwards, not least because it was a terrible accident in which if a few minor factors had worked out differently, I would have been much more seriously injured.

However, there was a great sense of grief. My first car had represented many things to me. It was the source of my freedom, a symbol of my adulthood, a representation that I was part of a club that not all of my friends had been able to pass the test to get into. I’d use my hard-earned cash to care for it, saved up for it, even though it was largely worthless in monitory terms. It was also something I had taken great pride in. I kept it clean and fixed it when it wouldn’t start. The days following its death my grief also came from the fact that I had taken good care of this piece of machinery and it, in its final moments had taken the full force of the accident and protected me.

Yes, I know it was just a car. Everyone said this but I still felt this pain within as if someone had dropped a brick on my stomach. I randomly got upset, keep thinking of the good times. In getting upset about those too I was withdrawn, stressed and I didn’t sleep well for a good while. During the days afterwards, I had arrangements and preparation as if it were a funeral.

I had to contact the insurance, the company of the petrol tanker, the D.V.L.A. and go to the hospital and get a physical assessment done. I largely think of myself as a fairly practical, strong-willed person so I know what you’re thinking: it was just a car. My point is though that some people can experience grief for a variety of different circumstances. There will be common themes to all grief but everyone will react in their own personal way. Everyone will find comfort in different ways too.

Here are some of the things that worked for me – sort stuff. It helped me to get through the technical parts of the process as fast as possible so the sorting of bits of paper, clearing out of belongings and putting those in a new home helped.

Gather the memories that are important to keep. This doesn’t necessarily mean only positive memories. For example, my old Mini had the petrol cap stolen and it was a real pain as I was scared to drive without the petrol cap but had to drive to get a new one. Some years later my mum had all the trees from her house cut down and in amongst the branches, she found my old petrol cap. I’ve kept it because whenever I have a hair brain idea about one day getting a classic car it reminds me that my old car, despite how much I loved it, was insecure and often vandalised.

Remembering, and not just remembering the good stuff, can be important if you are grieving a relationship break-up. It can remind you that it wasn’t wonderful all of the time. It means you will only have to grieve the relationship and not the person you split up with too.

Remember that the pain goes. Although there will be good days and bad days, generally over time the pain goes and you start to feel, become and act more normal again. You will take as much time is right for you and even though in the future you may look back and still feel the sadness you will get better.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic provides Hypnotherapists and NLP coaches in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex and Coventry to help with the management of stress, anxiety and depression.

For more information about our free consultations and sessions, contact us on 0203 6677294

By Gemma Bailey www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Giving up Bad Habits

If you have a particular habit or compulsion that you want to stop doing I want you to list all of the reasons why it is a good idea for you to stop having that habit vs all of the payoffs that you will get as a result of not doing it anymore. Pay particular attention to focusing on the positive elements of having that, rather than the negative stuff. Really focus on what you will get. There is a series of books by a guy called Allen Carr which you might be familiar with. He wrote lots and lots of books about giving up smoking and used to do so seminars as well to help people give up smoking or quit smoking as we should say and here’s why.

Allen Carr used to say we shouldn’t use the phrase ‘giving up’ when we’re talking about giving up smoking because you’re not actually giving up. It’s not about giving up, you are actually starting something new. The focus should always be on what you will gain. So really, we should be talking about ‘quitting smoking’ and ‘stopping smoking’ rather than ‘giving up’ because giving up already implies some kind of failure, doesn’t it?

When I deal with smokers I say to them ‘giving up smoking isn’t a punishment so if this is going to be a reward for yourself I want you to focus on the sorts of treats you’re going get in your life now and the sorts of rewards you are going to have, as a result of stopping smoking’.

So many people think it’s going to be so hard because of this and it’s going to be really difficult in these situations and so on and so forth and it makes it sound as if giving up smoking or quitting smoking is like a punishment for them. Well, it’s not. When you stop smoking that’s a brilliant thing. You’re doing the best thing for your body that you
possibly could ever do. So, you really want to be thinking about how this is going to be a reward for you from now on.

If you always view this habit or compulsion and stopping that habit or compulsion as an uphill struggle, then it will be. When my dad gave up smoking the first-time round, he did so because lots of other people in our family were giving up smoking and because my grandad had died from cancer smoking related.

I don’t think he really wanted to stop smoking at that time and I remember that when he did he had some terrible side effects. He had ulcers in his mouth. He literally looked like he’d been chewing on a piece of glass and he was moody and he found it so difficult.

Now the second-time round that he stopped smoking which is the most recent time was when the smoking ban came in in the U.K. for public places and there was one time he was in the pub, having a drink and wanted a cigarette and was trying to kind of drink and smoke and stand in the doorway and he got told off by the security guards who said ‘no you’re not allowed to do that. You are either inside or you’re outside’ and he
didn’t want to go outside in the cold and stand out there in the rain and stuff. He just said to himself ‘you know what I’m just going to stop you know this is silly, I’m just going to stop smoking’ and so he did and that really was all there is to it.

The smoking ban came in 2007 in the summer and he remained a non-smoker for the rest of his life which was up until 2014. It was an easy thing to do because he just thought ‘well I’ll just do it and that’s all there is to it’. Whereas in the past there were all the concerns about it’s going to be like this and it’s going to be hard work etc.

Think about any metaphors that you might be using to describe this habit that you have or more importantly how it would be to give up the habit that you have. There probably are some metaphors that come to mind – like ‘it’s going to be an uphill struggle’. ‘It just feels as if everything’s on top of me at the moment’. All those sorts of things are called ‘toxic metaphors’ because they are metaphors that tell us something about what you’re
thinking but in a very indirect story like way.

And also, they’re toxic because they’re not giving you a good internal representation. They’re not giving you a good internal focus. If you notice that you’ve got some of these going on then you need to start challenging them. We need to start thinking of some smart-arse answers to these metaphors so that when one of them pops up in your mind or somebody else might deliver one to your door, then you can think of something to say to give you a new internal representation.

So, if you’ve got something going on in your head about it being an uphill struggle then you can think well, do you know what, I’m very near the top now and soon I’ll be on top of the world. Something like that so that in your head, your mind starts picturing actually being on top of this problem, rather than struggling up the side of the problem. I hope that makes sense.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic provides Hypnotherapists and NLP coaches in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex and Coventry to help with the management of stress, anxiety and depression.

For more information about our free consultations and sessions, contact us on 0203 6677294

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Taking On Other People’s Problems (and how to avoid it)

People automatically and without realising it, become very talented at moving their
problems through time, space and energy. You might know someone, we all do, who is
particularly good at generalising and stating that things always work out this way, or
everybody does this or that.

We all do generalise, it is part of the filtering that our mind generates in order for us to
get rid of information that comes into our mind that it is not relevant to us, or not
important to us.

Despite these generalisations sometimes being inaccurate (because it’s probably not
everybody, it’s probably not always) we continue to use this kind of language for ease in
our communication. But is it causing us problems sometimes?

Do these generalisations trip us up sometimes? Do they trip us up when we are using
them in our own language or perhaps when we believe the generalisations of others? If
this is a problem you experience, it might be worth getting some hypnotherapy or NLP
sessions to help you with this.

Those who generalise are being inaccurate some of the time because they continue to
apply the rules to all occasions, painting their generalisation paint brush over a greater
space than the original image and blurring the edges of the picture of reality. So,
generalisations do distort things for us. Although it does make our communication much
faster.

Perhaps you know someone (and if you don’t then it is probably you!) who moves
problems from the past onto others. They like to share their story. To share their pain,
zap their own energy and quite possibly zap yours at the same time too.

So, a classic example of this could be. I have a terrible headache today. You know what
it is like when your head is just pounding and you start to feel sick and as soon as you
hear the words, well you know what it’s like. Unless you are an absolute ninja in mind
voodoo then you start trying on the pain mentioned to see if you see if you do know how
it feels to have that pounding headache. When you do that you’re probably not getting
yourself into a particularly good state. This is not a useful thing for you to do. So, it
means the person you are communicating with has very effectively moved their own pain
through space, through time, out of them and into you. NLP strategies can protect you
form this.

Now to be fair, of course, you do always have choices about whether you decide to pick
up that pain and ‘try it on’ and to avoid doing so, you will need to become a bit more
self-aware. Some of it comes from you being a better listener, instead of just nodding
your head in the right places and falling into their state with them. You don’t have to
take other people’s pain on. If for example, I have a pen and I give you that pen and say
here I have a pen for you as a gift please take it and I give it to you and you take it. Who
owns the pen? Of course, you do, you own the pen, I just gave it to you.

Now, if that pen was my anger, or my aches and pains, or my sadness and I came to you
and said here, here is my sadness, let me tell you all about it. I want to give you this
information as a gift and you take it and make yourself feel sad then it’s your problem.

So, remember you do have the opportunity and you do have the option to say, ‘no thank
you I do not want your gifts!’ Be aware of the people who do that to you, who you do
that to, and that problems can be moved through energy. They can be moved from one
person to the next, to the next. It’s a bit like laughter, it’s contagious. But that’s a very
good thing, but sometimes so is misery and that is not a good thing at all.

For more information about our free consultations and sessions, contact us on 0203
6677294

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Using Matching and Mirroring When Meeting New People

From an NLP perspective, when you meet someone new, think about the matching and mirroring of your body language. If you want to create a good first impression, rapport is absolutely essential. Now rapport is all about us liking people that are like ourselves. We connect with them much more easily and more naturally and because you don’t necessarily know this person’s history, you don’t know about their hobbies and interests, there’s a better way of being able to get rapport with them. On the basis that the majority of our communication, fifty five percent comes through our body language, our body language is the best way to gain that rapport and the way we do this in NLP is using a tool called matching and mirroring.

What this means is that you copy some of the gestures and some of the physical observations that you make about the person you’re communicating with. So, if you notice, for example, that they tap their finger gently on their knee whilst they’re talking and then pause when it’s your turn to talk, you could perhaps be tapping your finger or tapping your foot whilst you’re talking and then pause when it’s their turn to talk. If you notice that they, for example, lean over on one side then you too can move yourself into a posture where you are leaning over to one side.

Remember you need to be subtle about this. You don’t want to come across as weird and just outright copying them but it is a great way to be able to get rapport. The more subtle you can be the better, so if you can match and mirror things like breathing and blinking rates, that’s much more effective than some of the bigger gestures.

However most of us perhaps cross our legs when we sit down so if you notice that their legs crossed then you do the same. If they uncross legs, you can leave a few seconds and then you can uncross legs too. So, the difference between matching and mirroring isn’t all that great. Mirroring simply means that you are copying as if you were looking in the mirror so if they are right hand raised then if you are facing them you would be left hand raised, because that would be like a mirror image.

Matching means if they were sitting opposite you and they had their right hand raised, you would have your right hand raised, so you would be opposites to each other as you were looking at each other. However, they both appear to be just as effective as each other.

These skills are taught at our Hertfordshire and North London Clinic by our trained therapists.

I remember when I was working as a Nursery Manager for a large private day nursery corporation and I interviewed a nursery nurse. It makes me laugh thinking about it now – I interviewed a nursery nurse who wanted to work in our baby room. One of the things that we did in the baby room was something called ‘floor play’ which is when you have lots of different activities, but they’re all set out on the floor because they are for babies.

And this nursery nurse that came to see me was very keen on making a good first impression. She was neat and tidy. She had revised her C.V. really well she knew all about the technical stuff in terms of looking after babies and she was coming across as very confident. In fact, if I remember correctly she was coming for a supervisor’s job so I think she was trying extra hard.

Now this was one of those situations where I really had to kind of bite my lip for the rest of the interview because I was very close to laughing my head off. The question I asked her was “which particular activity do you most like to do with the babies in the baby room” and her answer was “I really like to do foreplay”. Instead of floor play.

So, she went bright red and I just bit my lip and pretended that I hadn’t noticed. Here’s the thing if you get your words in a muddle, apologise and carry on. If it’s something like that then I think as long as the person that you are trying to make a good impression with has got a sense of humour, it would be okay to have a giggle about it, but watch out for their reaction before you decide how to address it.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic in Hertfordshire and North London can help you to learn the skills of effective rapport building just a few sessions. Just give us a call to find out more.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Getting a Good Night Sleep – Part 3

One of Milton Erickson’s remedies for sleep was that if they laid in bed for more than fifteen minutes and they hadn’t gone to sleep within that fifteen-minute time period, they were to get up out of bed and go and polish the kitchen floor for the whole night.

They would spend the entire night polishing the kitchen floor and go to work the next day and then come home and if they, by any chance they happened to go to bed that night and still be awake fifteen minutes after getting into their bed, they would have to get up and clean the kitchen floor for the whole night again. After that first night of having absolutely no sleep whatsoever they was so exhausted that of course they got into bed and very quickly went off to sleep.

It started a new pattern and once it happened to that particular client maybe three maybe four times that he’d had to get up and polish the kitchen floor all night his brain very quickly caught on to the fact that when it got to bed, it had to go straight to sleep because otherwise there was a punishment for him.

If you are somebody who’s got into the habit of waking up in the middle of the night, instead of laying there tossing and turning get up and get out of bed. If you find that you’re laying there awake for more than fifteen minutes, get up and go into another room. Remove yourself from the bed-place which should be linked to sleeping and go and do something that is not at all relaxing – go and do some work or reading. I would suggest to you, keep doing that thing until it’s time for you to get up and do your normal morning routine.

You of course have to remember from a safety element that you do require a certain number of hours sleep in order for you to drive and function the next day so only do that extreme Erikson measure if it’s going to be safe for you to do so and to be able to get through the next day effectively and safely. So, if you can’t do the Erickson technique and go all the way through till the next morning, then keep going at least for ninety minutes.

I’m not too sure how true this is, but I did hear that a sleep cycle lasts for ninety minutes so if you’ve woken up and you don’t get back to sleep straight away you might have to wait ninety minutes until the next kind of sleep cycle starts again. So, if you find that you’re awake and you’ve had to get up and go and do something else, do that something else for about ninety minutes. Let’s say eighty to be on the safe side, then get yourself back to bed and hopefully you’ll be into that next cycle of sleep and will be able to get back off to sleep again.

So, the other useful thing in terms of getting yourself to sleep and having a good sleep routine is anchoring. Usually in NLP when we’re creating anchors we traditionally, for the most part we’re using kinesthetics anchors so an anchor which is activated by some form of touch and it could be you touching the client in a particular location or it could be the client is touching their own handle, their own fingers or something like that. Some kind of kinesthetics anchor for them.

The anchor I’m going to suggest to you, in order for you to use this in helping you get to sleep better at night, is actually an olfactory anchor and those of you in the know, will know that olfactory is to do with smells.

Lavender very good for relaxing you. There’s all sorts of aromatherapy that is used for relaxation and for calming people down. There’s a whole market of sleep sprays that you can buy. Spray it around your pillow or around your bed and where you sleep, every night when you go to bed and eventually your brain will start to associate that smell with the winding down, relaxing and going to sleep and there you have your anchor.

External stimulus, being the smell creates an internal state of relaxing into a deep sleep.

If you are suffering from insomnia, book a free consultation with the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic to work with a qualified hypnotherapist in Hertfordshire or North London.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Getting a good night sleep – Part 2

Remember that when you are eating you are giving your body the fuel it needs to survive and that fuel could be really good quality and exactly what your body needs or it might be filled up with crappy chemicals. And if you’re filling your body with crappy chemicals, you are going to create some kind of chemical reaction within your body. That chemical reaction could be adrenaline. That’s the one thing that’s really going to interfere with you trying to get to sleep at night.

Using your bed as the place that you sleep and make love and nothing else. Ideally not reading in bed, not laying in bed playing on your iPad, not sitting in bed with your laptop on your lap. All those things can interfere with your perception of what ‘bed’ means. Bed should mean sleep and so if you’re doing other stuff in bed, it kind of loses its bed value. It loses its relaxation value. Make sure that you really like your bed and that you like your bedroom because if you don’t want to be in there, it’s going to be difficult for you to relax in there.

Like your bed sheets the colours in your room, the furniture. When I think about my bed I think: ‘I love my bed I love it’. If your bed doesn’t do that for you, you perhaps need to think about switching some things around in your bedroom. Changing the decoration, be it the colours, be it the fabrics, be it you know the main thing the actual bed itself. You need to like bed in order to want to go there and have a good night’s sleep.

Making sure that your day is finished properly so get the lists ticked, get jobs done. If you’ve got stuff that you know it’s hanging over your head that you’re going to have to deal with the next day that could prevent your brain from switching off. Where possible get things done during the day and use some positive visualisations about the day ahead – what you’re going to be doing the next day. Make sure that visualisation is not too stimulating, not too exciting. If you’re going to be doing a bungee jump the next day, probably not a good idea to lay there visualising doing that because it’s just going to get the adrenaline kicking in and getting you a bit too excited.

Don’t try to go to sleep because if you try then you’re forcing it and then it’s just not going to happen. It will feel unnatural and whilst you’re laying there, remember the feeling of letting go. When you have gone to sleep in the past and just on the cusp of that sleep, there’s been times when you’ve thought to yourself ‘Here I go!’ and you know that that sleep is about to occur and it is a really lovely sinking feeling. That’s the feeling that for me summarises what hypnosis is. Usually when you’ve had that thought, it’s maybe brought you around a little bit and then you have to get back into it in order to go properly off to sleep. But if you can remember that sensation and lay there having the memory of how that feels that will help to induce it and help to get you off to sleep.

If you are experiencing difficulties with sleep a hypnotherapist from the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire and North London can help. Consultations are free and non obligatory. You will also learn more in the 3rd and final part of this article series which will be available to you next month.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Getting A Good Night Sleep – Part 1 

People Building produce Hypnosis MP3s which you can purchase from their website or from iTunes. There are Hypnotherapy audios available for those who want to get better at getting to sleep at night.

Here are some other useful things for you to think about: You must have some sort of bedtime routine. This is important because it gets your body into a habit of knowing what to expect next, so if you have a bath before you go to bed that’s a great way to relax and that lets your body know it’s wind-down time and of course in order for your brain to switch off and allow you to go to sleep, first of all your body has to relax. It’s kind of the same in hypnosis – in that your body relaxes first and then the mind can follow.

And let’s face it, the two things are not that dissimilar. We know for example that the word hypnosis comes from the Greek word Hypnos which means sleep. It’s a great misconception to think that hypnosis is sleep, they’re not the same. There’s different levels of brain activity that occurs between sleep and being in hypnosis.

Hypnosis would be a lighter version of sleep, even though they’re on the same kind of sliding scale. When we do professional hypnotherapy training for those who wish to become a hypnotherapist, we have what we call a sleep curve to demonstrate this. The top of that sleep curve is ‘Beta’, which is your usual awakened bright and lovely state. Then there’s ‘Alpha’ state. Now a lot of us spend most of our time there as well because we’re floating in and out of daydreaming and imagining and watching TV and being in a light trance when doing things like that.

And then we move into ‘Theta’ and this is where we start to move into the sleep side of things. This is when we drift into a light to medium level of sleep. At the very lower level is ‘Delta’ and Delta is your deep, dreamless relaxing sleep.

Delta is the kind of sleep that you have when you get into bed and go to sleep then wake up and it feels like only three minutes has passed by, even though you might have been there for hours. Your body is in exactly the same position and you had not moved at all. In theta state it would tend to be are more of a rapid eye movement kind of a sleep – so a dream sleep. A sleep where you’re asleep but your mind is still busy filing things and sorting information out and if anyone were to watch you they might see you moving around a little bit in that sleep. Your eyes moving under your lids and your body being perhaps a little bit twitchy.

It’s no good coming home from a busy day and trying to jump straight into bed. You need to have that little bit of wind down time first.

There are obvious considerations such as not eating too late, not drinking too late, avoiding caffeine and avoiding alcohol. All those things will affect your sleep quality. So, if you’re having issues with sleep at the moment whether it’s ‘I can’t get to sleep at night’ or whether it’s ‘I get to sleep at night but I wake up a couple of hours later and can’t get back to sleep’, really have to think about those things and what it is you know the quality of the stuff that you’re eating during the day.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Overcoming Personality Disorders from Childhood Events

It is always recommend to work with a qualified NLP practitioner or hypnotherapist. All therapists from the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic based in Hertfordshire and North London are trained to undertake the processes mentioned below.

An NLP change personal history technique can be useful when someone with a personality disorder has experienced a traumatic incidents in their past or during childhood. It’s a technique for eliminating traumas so that those events are no longer viewed as traumatic or perceived as being traumatic in the moment of now.

The client remembers a time in the past when they experienced some kind of traumatic event and then we use ‘leverage’ which is calling to mind the pain and pleasure related to this. For example, that the pain would continue if they held on to this problem and the pleasure that would be experienced if they got rid of it. Then you break their state – so change their thinking or subject to ‘reset’ their mind.

Ask them for a list of positive resource states which they could to utilise now and if they’d had those at the time when the old event happened then the event wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place. Now using that list of resources they’ve given you, you create a stacked resource anchor.

With the build-up of all of those positive resources you test it and make sure that the anchor is way more intense, much stronger than any of the negative feelings that are associated with the old events. Then you have the client remember and relive the event in their mind but they do it fully associated so they kind of relive it through their own eyes whilst you (the practitioner) fire off the resource anchor so that you get all the good feelings coming back as they relive the old event. And what that does is it means that they re-experience the old event but with all of those good resources there now.

In doing so, they have a different experience of the old event.

Another thing we can do, is a parts integration. We chunking up on both elements of their personality where we have the incongruence.

For example, if the issue is ‘I want to connect with people and I also want to be alone’. There’s an incongruence there, we know that that person is trying to seek two completely opposite things both at the same time and it’s causing them some distress because they’re always unable to do it. When we say ‘chunk up’ we would ask questions on each of the statements that are incongruent with each other such as “For what purpose? What does that do for you? What’s your highest intention in doing that?”

Those questions take us up to a greater overall need that they’re trying to meet – for example connection. Then we also look at the flip side opposing portion of what they stated and ask the same questions. Once you found that there is some similarity between actually what those two needs are trying to meet, then you can give the unconscious mind and the nervous system the opportunity to process that actually these two polar opposites are alternately trying to seek the same aim and the same goal and then we can reintegrate, which is where we use our parts integration.

So, one of the final things we can do to assist someone with a personality disorder is to teach them what in NLP we call, second position.

So, when we use the perceptual positions technique we basically have a client in first position being themselves and in second position they’re seeing their situation and their behaviour from another person’s perspective, so they get an outside perspective on what’s going on. And this can be really useful for these people with personality disorders who are trapped and caught up in their own unhelpful thinking in their heads.

In the same way that when they perhaps had a traumatic event as a child, quite often the reason why that event is recorded as a trauma is because children haven’t developed the ability necessarily to dissociate from what’s going on, so to take a kind of objective view of it and to have that experience of stepping outside of themselves and to view it from an outside perspective. As we get older, we develop more of an ability to dissociate from bad things that happen but sometimes adults have not developed that skill either so it’s a very useful thing to teach.

There will always be challenges in the future and if instead of getting caught up in those challenges, you’re able to step back from them and view your own behaviour and reactions and notice how your thinking and feeling, then that can be an incredibly insightful thing.

It can definitely offer some room for reacting differently and getting some better results. To find a hypnotherapy specialist or NLP coach in Hertfordshire or North London, contact the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk