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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

Quit Smoking

The benefits of stopping smoking are endless, so I will not even bother trying to list them! You will, of course, be generally much healthier, and of course, much more empowered when you are no longer at the mercy of a little white stick. In my hypnotherapy practice, I am dedicated to ensuring that you give up smoking with ease and speed. This is why I offer two choices to my clients who are interested in quitting smoking as well as a free consultation.

When you make the decision to use Hypnotherapy to help you quit smoking, I will initially want to make sure that you are completely motivated to do so and that you want to give up smoking for all the right reasons. For example, one of my clients said that he really enjoyed smoking but that his wife hated it and that he wanted to stop smoking for her. Fortunately, I identified this man’s lack of motivation to achieve the goal for himself. If I’d have carried out the hypnotherapy there is little chance that it would have been successful due to the fact that the client didn’t have the desire to want to quit smoking.

In my practice, I use a range of different hypnotherapy techniques to assist my clients so that they are able to stop smoking. Here are some example of how I do it:

Away from techniques- There are of course many off-putting facts about the negative impact smoking has on the mind and body. When your mind is overloaded with this information you will feel compelled to move away from smoking forever.

Moving towards techniques- I also have lots of information about the positive impact quitting smoking and remaining a non-smoker has. I am keen to help you set goals for the future that wouldn’t have been attainable whilst you were a smoker. Now that you are a non-smoker you can explore new ways to relax, to exercise and to spend your money.

Metaphors- I believe that if you can lay back and enjoy the experience of quitting smoking, then you should! That’s why I use tailor-made metaphors, which give very specific instructions to your subconscious mind and suggestions to give up smoking. However, consciously, you don’t even need to listen, you can just lay back and relax.

Empowering alternatives- Wouldn’t it be fantastic to know that you can, not only give up smoking but that you can also look forward to doing something really and truly meaningful to do instead. Such as spending time with your family, which, no doubt, if you didn’t quit smoking, an early grave would have prevented that opportunity.

Anchoring- As well as a qualified hypnotherapist I am also a qualified NLP Master Practitioner. This means that throughout your intervention there is a strong chance that I will also use some NLP techniques. One such NLP techniques is called anchoring. This allows the hypnotherapist to create for you, a really powerful positive resource that you can fire off at will, should you find yourself tempted by cigarettes.

Compared to all other methods, research suggests that Hypnotherapy can improve the chances of quitting smoking and remaining a non-smoker. Hypnotherapy works in several ways, including:

Reducing the anxiety associated with stopping smoking
Helping people to find the motivations for stopping
Installing coping mechanisms
Re-evaluate unconscious beliefs and behaviours associated to smoking
Installing positive beliefs so that weight gain is not inevitable.

I have successfully helped many people to quit smoking throughout my years of practice as a hypnotherapist. Few of those people have required follow up sessions, many quit after just one session.

Quit Smoking (1 session only required) with 6 months of free support.

Book a free consultation now, via my contact details below.

I still do not smoke and it’s the start of something great!

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

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