Tag Archives: Hypnotherapy

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.

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

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

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.

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