Tag Archives: hypnosis

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

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.

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

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

Overcoming a relationship break up

Have a think about the experiences that you’ve had with that person. You’re probably doing a lot of this already, but remember that every time you replay an experience that you had with someone you delete, distort and generalise on the experience that you had which could mean that if you’re replaying all the good times that will no longer have together and that you’re deleting what maybe wasn’t quite so good about those times, distorting what was good about them to make them seem even better than they really are perhaps even generalizing that this was the best relationship you’ve ever had. When you think about stuff too much it really becomes quite different to the truth of what the situation was.

There are certain people that I can recall and when I think about them, I make it seem as if it was a really great relationship and that we had a really great time. Actually, if I look at the bigger picture I can see that the reasons why things ended were good reasons because there were definitely issues there at the same time. Remember that being dumped, being left or having to end a relationship does lead to some negative feelings but those temporary feelings are better than being treated very badly in the future. At the very least you wouldn’t want to be with someone who didn’t really want to be with you because you like yourself more than that, don’t you?

Get busy. Have fun with life, have more fun do more fun stuff. Remember that we only ever really learn through experience and later on there will come a time when you look back and go ‘ah that’s why I needed to have that happen.’

It might not make sense right now but just know it’s okay to feel bad when a relationship ends for a period of time and that over time you will automatically and quite naturally start to feel better. They’ll be in your thoughts less and you’ll start to pick yourself up and move on. And the when you do you’ll look back on the experience and it will all make perfect sense as to why things had to end the way that they did.

Ask yourself this question: How much more pain would you have had to have had before you knew it was time to move on?

I don’t think you would really want to have to do that to yourself, would you? So, be pleased that you have much more control over yourself than being run like a big bag of chemicals. Know that those chemicals do play a vital and important role in your life in determining how you feel in any given situation.

But then once you’ve recognised those chemical feelings exist it is wholly and completely possible for you to take greater responsibility and greater control over the way that you are feeling. You don’t have to be run by your emotions and that you can choose to be feeling exactly how you want to feel in any given moment.

You don’t have to depend on other people to be feeling a certain way. All of those feelings exist within you. They are your feelings and that you can have them whenever you choose to do so.

A good hypnotherapist will have the skills to help you overcome the pain of a relationship breakup and hypnotherapy can be incredibly helpful in this area. Contact the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic to arrange a free consultation.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Anxiety and Panic, Panic, Panic

Excessive anxiety is often associated with other mental problems such as depression and anxiety is only considered to be a mental health problem when it’s long lasting, severe and is interfering with everyday activities.

Anxiety attacks usually last for only five or ten minutes. Now if you’re someone who has ever had anxiety (and I think we all have at some stage) you’ll remember then the feeling passed but anyone who’s had any kind of prolonged issues with anxiety, whose had a period of anxiety attacks or anything like that, would probably say that it starts to envelop all of their world. It forms the basis for their day and I think what that tells us is that the feeling is so strong and so intense that even though it’s just a tiny, tiny fraction a tiny fragment of what might be going on in any twenty-four-hour period that the intensity of the feeling is so strong, even those five or ten minutes seem like an absolute lifetime.

If you ever have or you know anyone who has experienced the feeling of being anxious and it’s causing them a problem, ask them to make it worse. Now that sounds a little bit evil and twisted but if you can make the feeling worse, then you can also make the feeling better. If you can intensify that feeling and make yourself feel worse is that you are controlling that feeling. You are doing it. You have control over it if you can make it worse and we can also then presuppose that if you can make it worse that you can make it better, just by doing the opposite to what you’re doing already.

So, if with that anxious feeling that’s inside, you can make it worse by spinning it faster and making it seem bigger and more intense or tightening your muscles up further collapsing your lungs down and shrinking down your breathing so you’re getting less oxygen into your body, if you can do those things to make it worse, then you just have to do the opposite to start getting the feeling under control and making yourself feel better.

So instead of spinning the feeling fast you see what happens if you slow it down and spin it back the other way. Instead of shrinking down into your body and collapsing those lungs down so they don’t get much oxygen in, instead you sit yourself up and have them open and lots of air going in. If you notice that you can imagine in your mind making the feeling bigger and it makes it worse, then imagine in your mind making it smaller to make it better.

You brain doesn’t forget memories and experiences. Unlike a computer where you can delete files that you don’t want, you can’t do that in your brain. They’re always stored in there somewhere so in order for us to be able to go through life without continuously referring back to negative memories and negative experiences we need to know how to program our mind in such a way that it always refers back to positive memories and experiences.

If we’re having an experience where every day there is a negative thought that’s being replayed then actually what we want to start training our brain to do is to refer back to positive experiences and memories instead. If you have a negative memory that you consistently referring back to, be it any kind of negative thing or be it related directly to anxiety. If you’ve got something like that all you have to do is create for yourself a new memory to put on top of the one that you don’t want to keep referring back to.

An NLP therapist and hypnotherapy are both useful ways for you to be able to get rid of anxiety and stop having anxiety attacks. Speak to one of our qualified therapists in Hertfordshire or North London.

And here’s something else. How much fun are you having? Do an evaluation of how much fun you consciously make an effort to go out and have and the chances are it’s not nearly where it needs to be. If you don’t do what you like in your life you can expect that you’re going to end up feeling bad about it.

 

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk