Tag Archives: NLP

Understanding Insomnia

I came across an interesting story about the clinical hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, who once treated a patient struggling with sleep. Instead of lying awake tossing and turning for hours, Erickson advised the patient to get up and polish his kitchen floor until he was exhausted. Surprisingly, after a couple of nights of this unusual routine, the patient could quickly reprogram himself to fall asleep to avoid another night of cleaning.

Insomnia can manifest differently for each individual. Some people struggle to fall asleep initially, while others wake up too early and can’t drift back off. Some may sleep for many hours but still wake up feeling exhausted despite getting what seems like enough rest.

There are several practical points to consider when working with someone who has trouble sleeping.

Firstly, is the patient exercising enough? Regular exercise is a healthy way to burn off any excess if the body is overly energised or full of adrenaline.

Adrenaline can also be produced by stress, so what is causing the patient stress? Is it something at work, or perhaps a problematic relationship? They might be worrying about money, their health, or even their inability to sleep. Ironically, worrying about not sleeping can create a vicious cycle, further disrupting their sleep patterns.

Do they have a bedtime routine? This idea may be better suited to children, but the body thrives on repetition. Going to bed and waking up at similar times each day helps regulate your internal clock. If you’ve ever experienced jet lag, you’ll know how much your body and sleep routine suffer from a sudden change in time zones.

Are there any chemical factors at play? For example, is the patient taking any medication, drinking alcohol, or consuming stimulants like coffee?

Several subtle changes can be made to combat insomnia and address the abovementioned issues. Additionally, mastering relaxation techniques can be incredibly beneficial (many people don’t realise they don’t know how to relax properly!). Relaxation helps to ease tension in both the mind and body. When someone is stressed, their mind is racing with thoughts, and their muscles are tightly wound. In such a state, falling asleep becomes difficult, if not impossible. Learning hypnosis or meditation is a simple and effective way to achieve deep relaxation for the mind and body. Moreover, while in a hypnotic state, it’s possible to provide suggestions for deep, easy, and quick relaxation, which are more readily accepted by the subconscious mind compared to when in a normal waking state.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Relaxation Technique for Stress Relief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Gemma Bailey

www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Trauma Victims

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Building Immunity and Healing

There is ample evidence that stress negatively influences our health and our capacity to recover from illness. How many stressed individuals do you encounter who also deal with headaches, bodily discomfort, or frequent colds? I can certainly relate to this. In the past, I worked in a highly stressful environment where I often sacrificed my lunch breaks and weekends for work. Even when I was sick, I felt compelled to show up, enduring tonsillitis and other illnesses. I even took on shifts for others who were unwell, despite my struggles with health!

Everyone kept telling me to take a break or else I’d get ill. And I’d reply “Yeah I’d have to be half dead to stop me working!” So guess what happened? I got appendicitis! I had to have my appendix removed and was signed off work and unable to do practically anything for a month! It was as if my unconscious was telling me “If you believe that you need to be half dead to stop, then that’s exactly what you’re going to get!”

When we are in a good state of mind it inevitably has a positive impact on our bodies. We know for example that laughing and exercise cause the body to release endorphins, which are not only the body’s natural painkillers but also alleviate stress, therefore impacting the health and immunity of the body.

Yes, laughter is the best medicine! But if your jokes do not have others rolling around on the floor laughing, then Hypnotherapy could be a beneficial alternative.

It’s a vicious cycle between stress and illness or stress and pain. When stress hits, headaches may follow. Those headaches then become a source of stress on their own, making the patient worry about future aches and pains in their head. This leads to even more stress and anxiety once the headache sets in, hindering them from completing necessary tasks or avoiding work they dislike.

By throwing Hypnosis into the equation, we stimulate the hypothalamus which is responsible for creating moods and emotions. This can be used to induce suggestions of feeling happiness, relaxed, carefree, and fun. Simply by vividly remembering times in the past when these emotions have been experienced can onset the emotion itself. The release of the endorphin chemical can also be directed to reduce any pain that the patient is experiencing at that moment to begin to alleviate it.

Thus the cycle is broken. The endorphins aid the relaxation, pain relief and stress reduction.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Athletic Performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Recollecting Memories

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Juggling Work and Life: Finding the Right Balance

Striking a work-life balance means not letting work consume you to the point where you forget to enjoy life’s precious moments. It’s about creating memories and having fun that truly enriches your life. (For further mental health-funded support in this area, please book a free consultation here: https://peoplebuilding.co.uk/landing-page/ )

Just as our emotions offer us a spectrum of light and shade, work, whilst often being considered the last place we want to be, offers us structure, challenges and learning opportunities that we might not get if we were on a permanent holiday.

Ultimately, the work-life balance has to be tailored to meet individuals. If you have a very stressful job, getting the right amount of time away is important to maintain your well-being. However, very monotonous jobs can create stress of a different kind.

Developing a routine can be helpful to create a pattern so that at least that way your body will learn to tolerate the stresses until the relaxation time comes. The challenge with this is if you go from high stress to total relaxation it can at times put your body into a kind of shock.

Have you ever had the experience of working hard, then taking a holiday where within a few days you become ill? You spend the whole holiday feeling rough and recovering. Then by the time you are better, it’s time to return to work!

This happens when you’re body isn’t used to the opportunity of unwinding. Instead of unwinding you crash, beyond ruining your holiday. It’s also a message that you need to have more downtime more often. The question is “Can you make that a priority with the way you currently live your life?”. Exercising your relaxation “muscles” will mean that when you next come to do it, you won’t have a health breakdown.

Taking a holiday may not be financially or practically viable, but you can still start to give yourself an escape from the rat race in your normal life once you learn how to do it.

Meditation or yoga can be great ways to take time out and put your focus inward, instead of outward on all of the tasks you need to complete at work and in life.

A session of hypnosis at The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire could help kick start the learning you need to focus on skills such as hypnotherapy and meditation.

In addition, If you’re seeking guidance to better navigate your situation, thoughts, or feelings, we can arrange for 10 coaching sessions tailored just for you. In many cases, this support comes at no expense to you. Schedule a consultation to learn more at https://www.peoplebuilding.co.uk/landing-page

By regularly taking focused time to relax, even from the most stressful jobs, you increase your chances of having “stress spikes” in your well-being. Meaning that when you are active you are energised with a clear mind and working dynamically rather than freaking out. Then when you are relaxing you are at peace and calm without having a health crash from the fall of a stress spike.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Are You Fulfilling Your Purpose?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what happens if we chunk up on you?

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Dealing with Anxiety in the Workplace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Dealing with Lemons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk