Category Archives: Articles

Relaxation Technique for Stress Relief

In our fast-paced world, it’s common to find ourselves caught in a never-ending cycle of stress. The hustle and bustle of daily life triggers physical reactions in our bodies, releasing adrenaline during tense moments that we struggle to shake off. This excess adrenaline lingers in our system, becoming a toxic force that worsens our focus, shortens our patience, disrupts our sleep, and hampers our efficiency. This is what we refer to as stress. While a certain stress level is necessary for optimal performance, learning how to manage it effectively is essential.

Employers face a significant challenge with stress, leading to high sick leave rates. By offering support programmes, companies can address stress early on and help employees develop effective coping strategies to keep it under control.

On a personal level, stress often leaves you feeling tense and exhausted. Until you’ve booked your hypnotherapy session, why not try this simple relaxation technique? It will help you feel much more relaxed and only takes a few minutes.

1) Make yourself comfortable, ideally somewhere quiet, where you can close your eyes for a few moments.

2) Sit back and begin to focus on your breathing. With each outward breath, think of the word “calm.” If you know your heartbeat, imagine it becoming safely slow and steady. Do this for 2 or 3 minutes.

3) Picture a calming, gentle light—whatever colour represents calm to you is the right one—and imagine the light slowly moving through your body. It will relax every part of your body as it flows through you while you continue your slow outward breaths, steady and rhythmic, echoing the word “calm” in your mind.

4) Move the light up, down, and through your body several times until every muscle and limb feels completely relaxed.

5) Take some deep, refreshing breaths, imagining the air as crisp and fresh, gently revitalising.

6) Open your eyes and think of the positive things you have and will achieve in your day.

Discover the power of NLP and Hypnotherapy for stress relief by scheduling a complimentary initial coaching consultation here: https://peoplebuilding.youcanbook.me.

by Gemma Bailey

www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Trauma Victims

A person who has experienced a trauma is often in a victim state. This is because the incident gave them limited choices in the responses they could formulate at that particular time. They probably felt the circumstances were out of their control or perhaps trapped or in danger.

It is essential to highlight that these suggestions will only work for those whose trauma is in the past and is over. For those still living in a traumatic situation, a slightly different approach must be taken to help support that person in making new decisions about how to react in that situation now and in the future.

The trauma victim must be able to feel safe and secure at any time during the work you do together. This is because of the risk of abreaction during your therapeutic processes. A resource anchor can effectively get the client into a positive and resourceful state quickly and easily. However, you must be sure that the intensity of the resource anchor is significantly more potent than any potential traumatic emotion that might show up during the sessions you have together.

It is crucial to encourage the client to understand their role in shaping their thoughts and emotions. Recognise that the unfortunate event took place in the past and was indeed very distressing. It’s important to realise that the event itself is over, and what remains is the memory of it impacting the nervous system. The client is now perpetuating these thoughts and emotions rather than being controlled by external forces.

Alongside this crucial aspect, conveying your message with sensitivity is essential, ensuring that the client doesn’t feel blamed for their thoughts and emotions. This approach is counterproductive. Instead, focus on empowering language, emphasising concepts like “taking control now” and “choosing which emotions to embrace and when to experience them.”

Some therapists possess a unique X factor beyond NLP or Hypnosis training. It’s the ability to shift someone’s perspective completely with a simple reframe. Have you ever experienced that “Aha!” moment when your whole thinking changes in an instant? It’s a powerful skill, but it must be used wisely and with the client’s comfort in mind.

I recall working with a man who had suffered abuse as a child from another child. He often expressed his hatred for the abuser and how they had ruined his life. I tried to help him see the abuser in a different light, but it only made him more convinced of their evilness. When I asked him who he thought was abusing the abuser, he was shocked and defensive. However, after sharing some facts about abused children becoming abusers, it started to shift his perspective.

Hypnosis offers numerous advantages for addressing trauma. One effective method is regression, which allows clients to uncover details about their traumatic experiences that they may have overlooked. This newfound awareness can provide a fresh perspective when recalling the event in the future and allows for the possibility of re-experiencing the situation more constructively—expressing thoughts or actions that could have transformed the event into a less painful memory.

Additionally, hypnosis plays a crucial role in fostering tranquillity and alleviating the negative emotions tied to past experiences. This process also opens the door to instilling positive affirmations that clients can draw upon later. Clients need to practice these new positive tools. When they realise that the trauma belongs to the past and now only resides in their minds, it brings a sense of relief. However, it’s important to acknowledge that similar events may arise in their lives again. Clients must feel assured that they can approach any future trauma differently in a way that empowers them rather than re-traumatises them. This transformation can also occur during hypnosis.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Athletic Performance

My grandma always said, “Practice makes perfect.” But what she didn’t emphasize was the significance of practising with intention, visualizing success rather than dwelling on potential failure. How often do you find yourself wondering, “What’s the worst that could happen?!”

Athletes always strive for victory, aiming to be the best every single time. They know they have only one chance to succeed, so being anything less than perfect is out of the question.

When athletes come to me for help with their performance, the first thing I advise is to practice success. Visualize everything going perfectly: scoring the winning goal, achieving the longest jump, or moving at top speed. By focusing on success, you attract more of it, which is crucial for manifesting the desired outcome. Moreover, when you focus on something in your mind, you activate the same neural networks as if you were actually performing the act.

Scientists initially believed that neural networks existed only in the brain, but we now know that they are a network throughout your entire body. This means that if for example, you think about running, as you are laying in your bed, you will be activating and accessing the muscles in your legs. It is quite likely that they will twitch unconsciously as you consider moving them. This was famously noted by Milton Erickson, the man largely responsible for bringing hypnosis to the clinical arena. When Milton was a child he was struck with polio and left paralysed. As he sat in a chair, longing to be outside playing with his siblings, imagining running in the long grass and kicking the football, he noticed that his legs had begun to swing in the chair!

NLP utilises a technique called anchoring. In this, the mind creates a link between an intense feeling and an external trigger. This can have positive and negative implications for our athletes. For example, there may be negative anchors (triggers that create a bad feeling) associated with past failures which are set off whenever the athlete is performing or due to perform. If the trigger for the bad feeling can be established, then the negative anchor can easily be collapsed. If an athlete needs to tap into resourceful emotions, such as calm, focus or power, an anchor can be created with a trigger of, squeezing their fingers for example.

A simple way to become the best at what you do is to find someone else who is the best at it and find out how they do it. If you think that Thierry Henry is the best striker that the world has ever seen, it is possible to model the way that he thinks, feels and behaves to create the results he achieves. This is done using strategy elicitation which allows us to extract all of the conscious and unconscious components that create the behaviour, which leads to excellent results. When the strategy has been extracted, it can be installed in someone else using rehearsal, metaphors or hypnosis. Hypnosis provides a deep state of relaxation which can be prolonged to maintain calm and alleviate anxiety, as well as installing positive empowering suggestions, such as being able to focus and concentrate with ease.

At a deeper level of understanding, NLP can be used to discover a person’s values and uncover and resolve any conflicts here. For example, if a person has a value of success and a value of not being defeated, then there could be some problems here. For a start, not being defeated is what we would call an “away from” value, in that the person is trying to move away from something, in this case, to move away from defeat. This means that their focus is on defeat, making it likely that this is the thing that is achieved. This is then also in conflict with success, which could mean that success is sometimes achieved, but is not sustainable.

After all, if sports or athletics is your life, it’s not the taking part which counts, but the winning.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Recollecting Memories

We’ve all been there, struggling to recall where we placed our keys, the name of a familiar face, or that one additional item we meant to grab at the grocery store. That feeling of frustration and irritation when you know the answer is just out of reach is something we can all relate to.

The conscious mind, which handles short-term memory, is believed to be just a small part of the entire human mind. The larger portion consists of the subconscious mind and long-term memories. For instance, when you try to memorise a number, like a phone number, it occupies your conscious mind until you’ve committed it to memory. After that, it shifts to your subconscious, allowing you to recall it without actively thinking about it. However, many people encounter difficulties when trying to retrieve information stored in their subconscious that they’ve consciously forgotten. Although the data is still there, accessing it can feel like searching for a book in a dark library with only a flashlight to guide you.

Usually, the information shows up again sometime later when you are least expecting it. This is a good thing to know because it tells us that getting stressed and continuing to try to find the information when we cannot, doesn’t help. You are much more likely to get the information back if you relax and think about something else. It’s a little like when you are late for an appointment and driving somewhere unfamiliar. As soon as you begin to feel stressed you will go into foveal vision and miss all of the clues that are there to get you to your destination. When you are relaxed you can see more in the periphery and notice the clues that will send you in the right direction.

However, when the information required is lodged away from the conscious mind, hypnosis can be a useful aid to retrieve it. Many people now have heard of using hypnosis for past life regression, but we can also use hypnosis to regress to previous times in our current life. This can be useful for those who want to go back in time and find lost information – this could be a set of lost keys, or something related to a deeper psychological problem.

When it comes to hypnosis work, the practitioner must establish clear boundaries. For instance, I may help someone address a past memory, but I won’t delve into uncovering potential abuse if the individual is unsure. There could be valid reasons why the unconscious mind is blocking such information, and revealing it prematurely could be harmful. It’s essential to consider the emotional readiness of the individual before proceeding.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Are You Fulfilling Your Purpose?

With our hectic schedules, it’s easy to lose sight of our true selves and desires while focusing on daily tasks. Our brains can only process a limited amount of sensory data at once, yet we are constantly bombarded with stimuli.

How is it possible to have any room left for creativity?
For exploration?
For connections?

Your existence isn’t meant to be robotic. If you sense a purpose within you, it’s essential to strive towards fulfilling it as effectively as possible. Otherwise, life has a knack for presenting you with obstacles until you do. Fulfilling your purpose can be viewed as a form of problem-solving. The distinction lies in whether it’s a pursuit that excites and motivates you. Conversely, if it’s a problem imposed by life to keep you on track, it’s unlikely to bring a sense of fulfilment.

Another challenge is when someone doesn’t actually really know what their “purpose” is. Do you remember meeting with your careers advisor at school (if you were lucky enough to have one!). It’s a little sad that they tended to advise you based on your predicted grades and other people’s expectation of your abilities. These well-meaning misdirections can set people on the wrong path for years maybe until they feel worn down and do not know why.

In NLP, there is a set of questions called ‘Milton Model questions’, that we use sometimes to help develop more abstract ideas or bigger-picture thinking. The questions come from observations of Milton Erickson who was the foremost hypnotist of our time. He was largely responsible for bringing hypnosis into the clinical world.

The questions are used in several ways within NLP and Hypnotherapy, not least for creating trance-like states and helping to chunk information together at differing levels of abstraction.

The questions we use to chunk up towards more global, bigger-picture ideas are:

For what purpose?
What is your (higher) intention?
And you could also ask: Above and beyond that, what does it do for you?

It’s useful to use these questions therapeutically to understand what more positive intentions might be driving a seemingly negative or unwanted behaviour. For example:

Smoking
(for what purpose): Relieve stress
(what is your higher intention in that?): To relax
(above and beyond relaxation, what does it do for you?): Peace

If someone wants to quit smoking, it’s not just about stopping that habit, it’s also about addressing their need for peace in a more healthy way (if indeed peace is what smoking does for them. The responses would differ for different people.)

So what happens if we chunk up on you?

If you use those same questions on you what is your higher purpose?
Is what you are doing in life now in alignment with that purpose? If not, what would be?

A process like this is just the first step that The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire can offer you to help you find yourself once again and reclaim your true identity.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Dealing with Anxiety in the Workplace

Anxiety is a major hurdle in the realm of mental health and well-being for adults. According to a survey in Great Britain, 1 in 6 adults faced some kind of ‘neurotic health issue’ in the week leading up to the survey, with anxiety and depressive disorders topping the list. Considering that adults often spend a considerable part of their waking lives at work, it’s understandable that anxiety, regardless of its origin, will start to affect their work environment.

Feeling anxious usually occurs when we feel like we have too much on our plate or when we believe that everything needs to be done immediately and that each task is incredibly daunting. If anxiety becomes a regular occurrence, it can easily turn into a habit. This means that even the smallest things can trigger it and make it feel like it’s coming out of nowhere.

There are only two types of anxiety. No matter how complex your anxiety maybe it is useful to remember that: Anxious apprehension and Anxious arousal.

Anxious apprehension is verbal worrying. Talking to yourself, inside your mind in an anxious way. What is interesting about anxious apprehension is that when people’s brains have been scanned during an EEG, primarily, it’s the left brain that lights up if someone is running anxious apprehension. When they’re having those anxious thoughts, it’s their left brain that gets illuminated and that’s because the front lobe of your left brain is associated with speech. That’s why self-talk comes into it.

The other kind of anxiety that we have is anxious arousal. This one relates more to anxious feelings like fear and panic. This kind of anxiety typically lights up the right brain. If we conduct an EEG brain scan on someone behaving fearfully or showing panic, it activates the temporal lobe which we associate with danger – and it sends the message that we need to avoid that danger.

If you have anxiety in the workplace, you can begin to unpick your anxiety by assessing how your anxiety works. There is a sequence of steps that you follow, which you probably do very quickly and have not been aware of until you begin to slow down the process and study them. To do this it may be easier and more effective to work with a Hertfordshire-based NLP Practitioner or Hypnotherapist who will be trained to help you have more awareness of your thoughts and actions.

For example, you may start the process of anxiety by making images in your mind of all of those tasks at work that cause you to feel overwhelmed. Or a picture of your boss’s face looking disappointed. It might be that your self-talk in a particularly panicked or aggressive way. You may be particularly good at tuning into your internal sensations and notice small flutters that are then distorted to be out-of-control stomach-churning worries.

The anxiety you experience could be caused by work itself, in which case a therapist can work with you to help you have better control of your emotions. This isn’t just to enable you to be more productive – it is important to increase your overall enjoyment of your time at work so that you do not keep putting your body through unnecessary stress.

As an NLP Practitioner in Hertfordshire, I often work with my clients in practical ways too. For example, it might be that there are changes to your routine or working habits that can alleviate the anxiety at work too.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Dealing with Lemons

I remember when I first started to learn about NLP and Hypnotherapy. There seemed to be a type of person that would often be attracted to these subjects. I might be wrong, but I don’t think I was one of them. I (like to) think I came at it (the subjects of NLP and Hypnotherapy) in a part academic way and a part business-minded way. But some were from the school of positive thinking.

Now don’t get me wrong. Thinking positively is a good thing. But I’m talking about the über, unnaturally positive thinkers. The people who seemed to have almost lost empathy for real challenges that people faced because they were so quick to “re-frame” someone’s tragic experience in a positive way.

So when I talk below, about how to deal with lemons, I don’t mean to the detriment of empathy and being realistic about your circumstances. I also do not mean that the people who are über positive positive thinkers are lemons! The lemons are the challenging situation that life throws at us, unexpectedly at a point in time when the last thing we needed was a sodding lemon.

What we’re going to establish is how to take those lemons and make lemon drizzle cake from the rind, lemonade from the juice and grow the seeds into lemon trees that become the biggest income generator on our lemon farm. Such that within a short period of time, you switch from thinking “those sodding lemons” to thank goodness that life came along with that lemon once upon a time.

The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic which is based in Hertfordshire uses many different methodologies from NLP, Hypnotherapy, CBT and even EFT to help clients to be able to see difficult or stressful circumstances from a more positive perspective, without forgetting to listen to why the problem is a problem for you first.

This is a form of re-framing that you can apply to any kind of problem or challenge without dismissing the difficulty of ‘the lemon’.

There are probably many other questions you can ask to make lemonade from a lemon, but these are some that come to mind for me.

What is something good to come from this that we have not thought about yet?
What can you learn from this experience? What is a more balanced viewpoint?
How will this scenario make you stronger?
You don’t know what the silver lining is, but trust that one day you will look back at this situation and will realise why this event was important. How can this situation help you?
How could this situation be helpful to others?
What, more negative situations, could this scenario potentially have prevented?
How can you see this negative scenario as an opportunity?

If you chose to use these questions with someone other than yourself, make sure first to make that assessment of how much ‘tea and sympathy’ they might need first, before you jump in with the questions above. Be sensitive to their current emotions by letting them know that they are heard. Give them enough time to say what they want to say if indeed they want to say something. Acknowledge their pain, struggle and their difficulty so you start on the page they are currently on. Then once you have got that rapport, you can start making lemonade.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Age Regression Hypnosis

Age regression is a way of accessing one’s memories from an earlier time. This can be helpful to remember what has been forgotten or to release emotional trauma from an earlier time. The unconscious mind has the ability to repress memories, which would occur particularly if the memory has some negative emotion attached to it, negative emotion, which the individual would be unable to deal with. However, when the unconscious knows you are ready to deal with that emotion, it can represent those memories for resolution.

Sometimes, we can remember events from the past and continue to recreate the negative emotions that went with them. Age regression can be particularly useful in this area, in fact, an NLP technique called Change Personal History, can help a person to change the way they represent their memories to themselves.

Due to the power of the unconscious, which is also responsible for creating the imagination, care and gentle indifference must be considered when performing age regression using hypnosis for traumatic memories that have been forgotten. This is because the imagination may create scenarios which justify the feelings. These scenarios may be real memories, or they may not be.

When using age regression to remember more generic things that have been forgotten, e.g. losing your keys, age regression in hypnosis can be a particularly useful tool. All of your memories are stored in the unconscious, so even if you cannot consciously remember where you left your keys, there is a part of you that knows. (And it will usually remind you as soon as you stop thinking about the keys!) Hypnosis can be used to retrace the steps taken just before the loss of memory, and ideomotor signals can be used as a direct way of communicating with the unconscious. These are generally yes and no signals which are given in answer to questions by unconscious movements, such as a finger being raised to indicate yes, and a different finger being raised to indicate no.

“Going back to a period of my life and dealing with the problems means I now have the whole of the rest of my life to look forward to.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Overcome Allergies in Hertfordshire

How often do we accept a label and fully live up to it? The answer may be many more times than we should. The challenge that we have as human beings is that we have used words to identify things, but the words are never fully reflective of the true experience.

For example, let’s say you go to the doctor one summer’s day because your eyes are sore and your nose is runny. The likely hood is that your doctor, whom you respect and trust will apply a label to your symptoms, in an effort to provide an explanation of your experience so that it can then be treated.

So your doctor tells you, have hay fever. From that Summer onwards you grow to expect your hay fever visitor. You know how you will feel, what your symptoms will be when they will start when they will stop. You even compare your suffering with other sufferers, to compete against who suffers the most!

When do you know to stop being a hay fever sufferer- how do you know that you haven’t grown out of it? Could your expectation of it be the sole reason that it is continually re-created?

How about stress? Is that a factor for allergy sufferers? For many asthmatics eczema and psoriasis sufferers it is a deciding factor in the severity of the condition.

So how can NLP and hypnosis in Hertfordshire help?

Well as we know one of the major frames of NLP is the cause-and-effect frame. This moves the client out of “I suffer” and into “I create.” This in itself may not be enough to stop the allergic reaction but does at least get the client away from relying on a treatment for the problem and looking more towards how they continue to cause it. Perhaps they can begin to notice how their diet affects their level of resistance or look for homoeopathic and natural remedies to counteract the symptoms.

For those whose Symptoms are aggravated by stress, Hypnosis is especially beneficial for creating relaxation and relieving tension and suggestions for healing can be given to the patient.

“I think it is unconscious changes that have made the impact.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Dealing with Compulsive Disorders

A definition of what compulsion means is usually worded in the following kind of way: A psychological and usually irrational force that makes somebody do something, often unwillingly.

These “irrational forces” are, in the case of compulsive disorders, caused by repetitive thoughts, or mental activity. This is an important factor in understanding and beginning to alter the way that the person with the compulsion represents the problem to themselves. By understanding that the irrational force is caused by the person’s own thoughts and activities, we begin to move the problem away from some outside force that is making them do something, and towards understanding that the problem is something that is caused by themselves.

They may not yet feel as if they are in control of their own thoughts because they have gotten into such an automatic pattern with their thinking that it is occurring as if they have no control over it. And it absolutely will feel that way. After all, whose thoughts are they? In whose head? Whose mind is that? Who is the only one listening to those thoughts? If there is no one else in your head, they must be your own thoughts! This is a great thing to acknowledge because it means that accepting responsibility for those thoughts puts the “thinker” back in control so that they have a much greater potential to create changes.

The first thing I would explore with a compulsive client, in my hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, is what Complex Equivalence exists in their mind about this problem. What does this problem mean? What is it trying to achieve? What does it allow them to do? What do they believe would happen if they stopped this behaviour?

Quite often fear is a big driver of compulsive behaviour, and frequently the fear exists to keep the person safe. When you know what this problem means, its truth and validity can be explored. Quite often there is no logical link between the behaviour/thoughts and the “reasons” why it is occurring. For example, one lady I met felt compelled to check the locks on her car (to the degree that she had to have new ones fitted every 6 months) and her greatest fear was linked to the safety of her father after he had nearly died. The was no obvious link between her father’s incident and the repeated behaviour of locking her car. Knowing this didn’t make the problem stop, but it did encourage her to question the validity of the problem which had felt like a very solid problem before she had thought about it in this way.

The next step can be taken if you believe that the client’s problem may be related to a significant emotional event. A values elicitation can be very worthwhile for discovering what “away from” values exist in their values hierarchy and can help uncover SEEs that the client might not have consciously realised were still having a negative impact.

As well as, or instead of this, I would use the fast phobia technique. The fast phobia technique doesn’t have to be restricted to phobias only. It is a process which is very useful at desensitising the negative emotions that occur when triggered by stimuli so that the person can be around the stimuli without feeling negative emotions. This means there is the opportunity to be around things that used to make them feel a compulsion and no longer feel it.

The compulsion blowout method can be used to demolish the submodalities associated with the stimuli. Submodalities are the codes that we use to make meaning of our experiences and memories. When these are adjusted, the memory/experience will no longer work in the same way as it did in the past.

There is, of course, a lot of room for manoeuvre, as a therapist, I am flexible in my approach and will adjust techniques that I already know if I think there is a way of having them work in a more appropriate way for that specific client. Other techniques I have used have included advising the client that they can do as much as they like of one compulsion, but have to trade off another. This works really well for multiple compulsions as the list slowly whittles down until there is just one compulsion to deal with. By this time they have also built up confidence in their own abilities.

“I’m more confident to deal with the feelings.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.GemmaBailey.com