Category Archives: Articles

All in the Nick of Time!

Do we move problems through time? Well here is an example of how you might. I
am going to give you some sentences below. I want you to notice how they make
you think or feel differently.

I have a problem. Just repeat that to yourself and notice how it makes you think
and notice how it makes you feel.

I did have a problem.
I had a problem.
I am going to have a problem.
I’m having a problem.
I’ve always had problems.
I’ll always have problems.
I’ll always have had problems.

Now what you will have noticed is that for each sentence the problem is travelling
in a different place, it might be stuck in the past, it might be still in the present,
or it might be moving into the future and if we do that again and change the word
‘problem’ to ‘happiness’ and adjust it slightly so it still works grammatically then
you can notice how it makes you think or feel differently:

I have happiness.
I did have happiness.
I had happiness.
I’m going to have happiness.
I’m having happiness.
I always had happiness.
I always have happiness.
I’ll always have had happiness.

Once again think about where that happiness is – is it in the past, is it in the
present, or is it in the future? Just by simply changing a few words in the sentence
can make you think and make you feel very differently.

Now doing these kinds of NLP linguistic exercises doesn’t necessarily get rid of all
the bad stuff when we move our problems into the past or into the future and it
doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you will be wildly successful in the future just
by talking about having happiness now and having happiness in the future but you
can definitely get in touch with a little sense of making yourself perhaps feel a bit
lighter, or a bit heavier about things and that’s what hypnotherapy and NLP
therapy is really about. It’s not about massive major breakthrough changes all of
the time, but it is part of a bigger package. It is part of the ingredients of making
things start to work a little bit differently for you.

Start experimenting with it. What if the problems that stayed and the happiness
that came and went were actually influenced by the expectations created in your
language? If that were true wouldn’t you wish to err on the side of caution, just in
case you really do possess the ability to influence your own experience in
with your words.

You would talk about that old phobia as opposed to your phobia. You would talk
about the depression you had, instead of the depression that you have. You would
talk about the success you are creating, instead of the success that you are looking
forward to achieving. You would talk about the happiness that you’re feeling
rather than the happiness that you are looking forward to.

Simply about changing a few little words here and there with your hypnotherapist
in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Essex or Coventry. Start talking about the old
painful stuff as if it is old and in the past. Start talking about the stuff you want to
and will achieve in the future as being bright, beautiful and not too far away.
Instead of talking about the things that you want to talk about the things that you are
doing. The things that you are achieving. Fix them in time and start moving
towards them and start to notice the difference that can make for you.

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

Christmas is Coming and The People are Getting Fat

How we can avoid these foods that are not terribly good for us and why on earth is it is
that sometimes we just can’t?!

There’s a reason why we are drawn towards the crisps and the chocolate and the chips
and all of those foods that we know are naughty and full of fats.

The reason is that those foods are really good fuel foods. The fatty foods give us fat
for our body that we can hang on to and can use them as long-term fuel and the reason
why that’s appealing to us is because instinctively rooting way back to our ancestry
there was a time in the past when the person who caught the fattiest piece of meat,
who shot the fattiest zebra or whatever our ancient ancestors may have been out
hunting for were the people who survived the longest.

So, it’s instinctive to us it’s in our genetic makeup that we are drawn towards these
fatty foods because in the past the person who got the fat was the person who survived.
Fat is the richest source of energy with more than twice the energy value of any other
nutrient. Alcohol is the only other nutrient that comes close and interesting, isn’t it,
that this time of year is also alcohol-fueled as well for many people.

Not only are we eating the fatty greasy foods and building up our fat supply that way but
we also tend to be drinking lots of alcohol and building up even more fat reserves as a
the result of doing that. If you can get on top of that now, you don’t have to worry about
doing the whole big weight loss starved diet stuff, signing up for the gym stuff, in the
New Year.

It’s a biological respect for fat that makes it so hard for people to defeat fat cravings.

There’s a big link as well which is coming to the surface between people’s stress levels
and the desire to eat fatty foods and this is another thing for us to be aware of at this
time of year because it’s this time of year probably the most stressful time of year there
is. At a psychological level, the emotional comfort that fatty food has played in life can
drive you towards things like chocolate on a bad day because when you were crying like a
a child, you were comforted with fatty and sweet foods. Now that might not always be the
case but if you go way back to when you were a baby, quite often parents would try to
calm a crying baby by offering it milk and certainly a mother’s milk is incredibly sweet
and very, very high in fat so we’ve learned from a young age that if we’re feeling
emotional in some way that we’ve got some kind of upset or negative emotion going on
that that can be reduced by having access to these fatty foods just as we have the fatty
milk as babies.

However, at a biological level under stress, we tend to use our adrenaline system in that
fight or flight mode. And fatty foods stimulate dopamine and noradrenaline which are
both responsible for giving us a rush to cope with a crisis. So, if we’re feeling stressed
out then the fatty foods can really give us that little kick that we might need. So, if
we’re going to combat this, particularly if we look at the kind of stress levels element of
it then we need to get into the habit of pausing that stress before reacting and reaching
for the chocolate biscuits or reaching for the extra mince pie.

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

And Sleep!

The longer that you go without a proper sleep routine and without having sufficient
amounts of sleep, the more likely it is that you are going to then start suffering with
sleep related problems.

E.E.G. recordings show that we go through five stages of sleep, with each of its
characteristic brain activities. So, it’s all got its own individual brain activity. Stage one
is the transition stage from wakefulness to sleep and is identified with beta waves and
lasts between one to seven minutes.

In stage two E.E.G. recordings show fast frequency bursts of activity called sleep
spindles. In stage two through to four, muscle tension, heart rate, respiration and
temperature gradually decline and it becomes more difficult to be awakened. Just thirty
minutes after falling asleep, we pass through Stage three and enter into Stage four. In
this stage E.E.G. recordings show delta waves and it is the deepest stage of sleep. There
is marked secretion of growth hormones in Stage four.

Sleep researchers determine what sleep stage a person is in by the ratio between the
number of sleep spindles and the number of delta waves. After this stage we go back to
two and then we enter REM Sleep, the rapid eye movement sleep. Here E.E.G. tracings
look exactly the same as the beta waves that are observed when we are completely
awake. In fact, brain imaging studies show that the neurones in the cerebral cortex
become much more active during our REM Sleep and REM Sleep makes up twenty percent
of our sleep time. During this stage we experience vivid dreams. We go through this
sleep cycle five to six times during eight hours of sleep.

It’s also true that lots of you will kind of come out of that sleep cycle and actually be
almost awake or even awake throughout the night but you go back off to sleep again so
quickly that by the morning you forget it even happened. Other people are more aware
that they wake up several times throughout the night and for me personally, I’m
someone who when I’m asleep, I am asleep. It feels like I sleep for about five minutes
and then the alarm goes off, even though it might have been several hours and I have no
recollection of ever having woken at any stage during the night.

Some animals have really interesting sleep cycles. Some birds sleep for brief periods
with one eye closed and for that short moment it’s suggested that one hemisphere of
their brain shows waves that indicate sleeping and the other side shows signs of
wakefulness. Elephants sleep for three to six hours of which two hours are spent
standing. Dolphins sleep with only half its brain while the other half remains alert. The
two hemispheres alternate every one to three hours during sleep. Dolphins kept in
aquariums usually swim in circles in the same direction during sleep. There is no solid
evidence of whether animals dream, which brings us to the dream world of human
beings.

So what kind of sleeper are you?

If you are suffering from insomnia or other sleep related problems, it might be time to
use hypnotherapy to reprogram your sleep patterns.

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Ease My Guilty Mind

The dictionary definition of guilt is: a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some
offence, crime, wrong whether it’s real or whether it’s imagined.

That’s the important thing here – we’re not saying get rid of guilt when you’ve done
something bad because clearly that feeling is there to remind you that you have
strayed from your own moral code.

However, the issue shows up when people are feeling guilty about things that
actually they have no business feeling guilty about and are spending a great deal of
time worrying and feeling this anxiety about something quite unnecessarily.
When guilt is justified it’s meant to bring us to a realisation that there is a
standard that we have fallen short of. But whose standard is it?

It is really about getting those boundaries right between feeling guilt when it’s
justified and not feeling guilty when it’s justified by somebody else’s standard that
is perhaps not your own anyway. There are times when guilt is unjustified and can
make you become over responsible striving to make life right. You over give of
yourself, you are willing to do anything in your attempt to make everyone happy
and that’s all to try and get rid of that feeling of guilt.

Guilt that’s making you do so much for other people is actually wrongly motivated
because you’re just doing it to avoid the guilt or you’re doing it because you want
to avoid the fretting or you’re doing it because you can’t make the decision
yourself.

Here are your ten N.L.P. presuppositions that I think relate to guilt:

First of all, the map is not the territory. What that means is your perception of the
scenario isn’t the same as the scenario itself because you’re filtering in bits of
information from the outside world and you haven’t got the full picture.

Number Two: People are not their behaviour. People are people. They just happen
to have certain behaviours.

Number Three: The meaning of all behaviour is dependent upon the context it
appears in, like all human emotions guilt isn’t really a bad thing unless you know
you’re using it in the context of it makes you feel bad. However, if you’re using it
as a form of feedback to tell you when you strayed from your moral code then in
fact guilt can be really good.

Number Four: All behaviour has a positive intention. Nobody is setting out to do
anything bad. They’re doing it to give themselves a good feeling say there is
positive intention even in bad behaviour. A person’s behaviour is an insight into the
model of the world they are operating. Someone’s behaviour is our greatest way of
understanding how they’re thinking and that’s really useful stuff to know.

Number Six: Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have
available. Even if you’re in a situation where you feel that other people are causing
you to feel guilty you are allowing yourself to choose to feel guilty as a result of
someone else’s behaviour then the best thing for you to remember is that they are
doing the best that they can with the emotional resources that they’ve got
available at that time.

And that ties in nicely to Number Seven that there are no one resourceful people
only unresourceful states. If you feel that someone is causing you to choose to feel
guilty it’s not because they are being an unresourceful person, it’s because they are
they haven’t got the full access to the wide range and spectrum of possible
emotions and ways to communicate with you at that particular time.

Number Eight: Everyone has all the resources they need to succeed and to achieve
their desired outcomes. Good news: you’ve all got it within you those people that
might be causing you to choose to feel guilt, they have all of the resources there
as well. It’s just a case of getting in touch with those resources.

Number Nine: the person with the most flexibility of behaviour has the greatest
influence on others and that ties in with the old saying ‘if you keep doing what
you’ve always done you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got’. If you’re in one of
those triangles where someone says or does something and it causes you to feel
guilty and then you make a reaction based on that feeling of guilt and then later
on they do the same thing again and then you have the same old feeling again and
then you react in the same way guess what you need to start doing something
different because you can’t rely on them to change.

And then last of all: There is no failure, only feedback.

By Gemma bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Changing Your Values

If you’ve got ‘away froms’ you are not focusing on what you want in your life. You are
focusing on what you don’t want – and you get more of what you focus on.

One of the reasons why many people become self-employed or run their own business is
because it gives them a greater sense of freedom. However, if freedom is high on your
values hierarchy and so is with security you could end up with a conflict in your values
hierarchy. What this means is, if you’re working towards having freedom you’ll be taking
lots of time off but if you want financial security you need to be working quite hard and
doing your job a lot. Now is there a conflict? Absolutely, because you can’t be working
and taking loads of time off. There’s a conflict in the values hierarchy. Balance needs to
be sourced and perhaps freedom needs to move a little bit lower down the list in order
to have a greater sense of security or security needs to be moved further down the list
in order to have the balance between still having the freedom but not worrying about
the money as much.

These are the sorts of conflicts that can also show up in a values hierarchy. In addition, if
you were working on something like a relationship values hierarchy and you did it with
your partner, you want to cross-reference each other’s results because if you have a very
high value of adventure but your partner has a very high value of security, for example,
then there’s going to be conflicts in your relationship because you might want to be
jumping out of aeroplanes and bungee jumping to get your sense of adventure but for
them if they want to have security that could really freak them out. Values are really
useful to use in that kind of a context too.

In terms of doing those techniques where you start to change around the values
hierarchy, where you start to make changes to your ‘away from’ and do the various
N.L.P. techniques to resolve those you need to work with an NLP Master Practitioner,
which is where the values stuff is taught. When a therapist is trained to be an N.L.P.
Master Practitioner, they are taught the values elicitation process as standard and will
already have learnt many of the techniques in order to resolve values issues.

Other N.L.P. techniques that might come in handy at this stage are going to be things like
change personal history, parts integrations if there are any parts issues going on, we could
perhaps do some very basic anchoring if we needed to. Things like hypnotherapy might
be involved as well. So that’s how to clear up your values. Something else I didn’t
mention earlier with the values hierarchy which is really important actually particularly
when we’re looking at the context of a career that can show up especially if you’re working
for yourself.

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Believe in yourself; or No One Else Will!

The power of beliefs really is all about results versus excuses. Remember that an
excuse is just a limiting belief. So, if you have some kind of self-esteem issues
you’ve got some negative beliefs going on about yourself. That’s all it is and you’re
probably making some really good excuses about why you would have that
problem.

For example ‘I know I can’t do whatever it is because ….’ and then you’ll come up
with all the reasons or excuses as to why you are unable to perform in the way you
want to perform. Now when you do that to yourself, when you tell yourself and
you reinforce the idea that there are certain things that you are unable to achieve
or that you don’t do very well what that results in is limited and poor action and
that limited and poor action will lead to a limited or poor result.

And you will then witness that result as your version of what you believe reality to
be and that will reinforce the lack of belief that you have. Now people who do the
opposite, on the flip side, who say to themselves, ‘I know I can because…’ and
they will think of all the reasons why they have so much potential and that
potential will lead them into taking action and that will be a positive action. It will
be a very active and energised action. That action will give them a result and it’s
quite likely at this stage that that result is going to be a little more positive result
than the person that was telling themselves they couldn’t do it.

For our, ‘I know I can person’ that result will give them a reinforcement of their
belief. So, they’ll see that positive result and they will say see, I knew I could do it
and it will reinforce the belief in themselves. These things are always on a bit of a
cycle which is why it is useful to interrupt them and make some changes if they
are not working in the best possible way.

Let’s look at the N.L.P. belief change process. Now this is a sub modality
intervention. What that means is that this is an exercise that works with the
coding that you apply in your thoughts and your memories and that coding relates
to sensory specific information. A qualified NLP Practitioner will know how to do
this intervention easily. A modality relates to your visual, auditory, kinesthetics,
olfactory or gustation senses and a sub modality is a finer distinction on one of
these senses. For example a finer distinction on vision could be whether you see
something in black or white, or whether you see something in colour, so the
modality would be vision and the sub modality, the finer definition of that vision
could be seeing it in black and white or seeing it in colour.

Now I want you to consider what it would mean to you if you could change that
belief. What impact this would have upon your life. So, do that and then pause in
between time if you need to. Now I want you to have a think about what would
happen if you didn’t get this sorted? Seriously, what’s going to happen to you if you
continue to live with this belief? What if it gets worse? How is this going to cause
problems for you if you continue to hold on to this silly old belief that you’ve got?
The Hypnotherapists and NLP Practitioners at the HNC are qualified to take you
through a belief change exercise in just one or two sessions. You can have high self
belief in no time!

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Stop Smoking Using Hypnotherapy (and your imagination)

Deciding to quit smoking is not ever a punishment. Doing that for yourself is showing
that you love yourself and when you put that new frame around it, in NLP we call this
reframing, when you put that new frame around it, it makes it so much more palatable
to be able to take on that kind of a challenge. Actually, suddenly starts to seem
appealing to realise that when you do this, you’re doing yourself a massive favour. That
you are showing how much you care for yourself, by taking care of yourself in the best
possible way.

So that’s a really important thing to do too and for those of you who are can’t quite get
your head round that way of thinking yet and need a little bit more leverage so a bit
more of a push. Then the best thing I can suggest to you is this – if you think about
cigarettes and start to reduce the quality of the way in which you remember them,
because the chances are the way that you remember the taste of cigarette smoke is
much tastier than the way it tastes in real life. You have a much better memory of it
than how it actually tastes when you come to experience it. Think about the memory of
cigarettes and just start to reduce the quality of that memory and you can do this very
simply by distorting the colour, so perhaps draining the colour out and changing it to
black and white. You can do it by moving the image further away from you, by shrinking
that image down, by putting a frame around the image, by moving the image to a
different location within your field of vision so whatever it is that your eyes stare out to,
to imagine that image just move your eyes somewhere else and put the image over
there and you’ll notice that you start to feel very differently about it.

Now it might not mean that you absolutely hate it but it will certainly start to
reduce the power that the memory of cigarettes, such that you don’t feel quite as
compelled in the future to be drawn towards them.

Imagine yourself smoking a cigarette and realising that there isn’t just tobacco inside it,
but it is also stuffed with someones pubic hair. Just imagine that right now.

Imagine that cigarette that you loved. Not only has it got bits of the tobacco you used to
enjoy, but it’s also got somebody’s dirty hair in and you’ve been putting it in your
mouth, not knowing quite where it came from. Then it’s got wedged in one of your back
teeth and you cannot get it out and so you try to swallow to get rid of it, but only half
the hair goes down your throat and the other half is still in your mouth. How awful, so
you put your fingers in to try and reach for it to try and take that bit of hair out and try
and salvage whatever you can from the cigarette but as soon as you stick your fingers in
your mouth, it makes you start to gag.

Can you imagine that happening?

And I wonder how many of you now are thinking about the cigarettes that you used to
absolutely love and are not feeling quite as drawn to it as you used to? All that took was
just a couple of minutes and using your imagination. Imagine what a session of
hypnotherapy could do for you!

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