Tag Archives: hypnosis

Dealing with Anxiety in the Workplace

Anxiety is one of the biggest mental health and well-being challenges faced by adults. In a survey covering Great Britain, 1 in 6 adults had experienced some form of ‘neurotic health problem’ in the previous week. The most common neurotic disorders were anxiety and depressive disorders.

Since the majority of us spend the vast majority of our awakened adult life at work. It makes sense that anxiety will if not caused by the work itself begin at some point to affect it.

Anxiety happens when there is a sense of overwhelm or the idea that there are many things that need doing, and all of them need doing now (and often that they are all monumental tasks to do).

However, if anxiety is rehearsed enough – and by this, I mean that you simply are anxious on a regular basis, not that you are consciously deciding to deliberately be anxious that day – then it can easily become habitual. This means that the smallest of triggers can activate it and cause the anxiety to start feeling as if it has arisen without prompt or thought.

There are in fact only two types of anxiety. No matter how complex your anxiety maybe it is useful to remember that:

Anxious apprehension
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’s lighting 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 you 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

Age Regression Hypnosis

Age regression is a way of accessing one’s memories from an earlier time. This can be helpful to remember what has been forgotten or to release emotional trauma from an earlier time. The unconscious mind has the ability to repress memories, which would occur particularly if the memory has some negative emotion attached to it, negative emotion, which the individual would be unable to deal with. However, when the unconscious knows you are ready to deal with that emotion, it can represent those memories for resolution.

Sometimes, we can remember events from the past and continue to recreate the negative emotions that went with them. Age regression can be particularly useful in this area, in fact, an NLP technique called Change Personal History, can help a person to change the way they represent their memories to themselves.

Due to the power of the unconscious, which is also responsible for creating the imagination, care and gentle indifference must be considered when performing age regression using hypnosis for traumatic memories that have been forgotten. This is because the imagination may create scenarios which justify the feelings. These scenarios may be real memories, or they may not be.

When using age regression to remember more generic things that have been forgotten, e.g. losing your keys, age regression in hypnosis can be a particularly useful tool. All of your memories are stored in the unconscious, so even if you cannot consciously remember where you left your keys, there is a part of you that knows. (And it will usually remind you as soon as you stop thinking about the keys!) Hypnosis can be used to retrace the steps taken just before the loss of memory, and ideomotor signals can be used as a direct way of communicating with the unconscious. These are generally yes and no signals which are given in answer to questions by unconscious movements, such as a finger being raised to indicate yes, and a different finger being raised to indicate no.

“Going back to a period of my life and dealing with the problems means I now have the whole of the rest of my life to look forward to.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Overcome Allergies in Hertfordshire

How often do we accept a label and fully live up to it? The answer may be many more times than we should. The challenge that we have as human beings is that we have used words to identify things, but the words are never fully reflective of the true experience.

For example, let’s say you go to the doctor one summer’s day because your eyes are sore and your nose is runny. The likely hood is that your doctor, whom you respect and trust will apply a label to your symptoms, in an effort to provide an explanation of your experience so that it can then be treated.

So your doctor tells you, have hay fever. From that Summer onwards you grow to expect your hay fever visitor. You know how you will feel, what your symptoms will be when they will start when they will stop. You even compare your suffering with other sufferers, to compete against who suffers the most!

When do you know to stop being a hay fever sufferer- how do you know that you haven’t grown out of it? Could your expectation of it be the sole reason that it is continually re-created?

How about stress? Is that a factor for allergy sufferers? For many asthmatics eczema and psoriasis sufferers it is a deciding factor in the severity of the condition.

So how can NLP and hypnosis in Hertfordshire help?

Well as we know one of the major frames of NLP is the cause-and-effect frame. This moves the client out of “I suffer” and into “I create.” This in itself may not be enough to stop the allergic reaction but does at least get the client away from relying on a treatment for the problem and looking more towards how they continue to cause it. Perhaps they can begin to notice how their diet affects their level of resistance or look for homoeopathic and natural remedies to counteract the symptoms.

For those whose Symptoms are aggravated by stress, Hypnosis is especially beneficial for creating relaxation and relieving tension and suggestions for healing can be given to the patient.

“I think it is unconscious changes that have made the impact.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Dealing with Compulsive Disorders

A definition of what compulsion means is usually worded in the following kind of way: A psychological and usually irrational force that makes somebody do something, often unwillingly.

These “irrational forces” are, in the case of compulsive disorders, caused by repetitive thoughts, or mental activity. This is an important factor in understanding and beginning to alter the way that the person with the compulsion represents the problem to themselves. By understanding that the irrational force is caused by the person’s own thoughts and activities, we begin to move the problem away from some outside force that is making them do something, and towards understanding that the problem is something that is caused by themselves.

They may not yet feel as if they are in control of their own thoughts because they have gotten into such an automatic pattern with their thinking that it is occurring as if they have no control over it. And it absolutely will feel that way. After all, whose thoughts are they? In whose head? Whose mind is that? Who is the only one listening to those thoughts? If there is no one else in your head, they must be your own thoughts! This is a great thing to acknowledge because it means that accepting responsibility for those thoughts puts the “thinker” back in control so that they have a much greater potential to create changes.

The first thing I would explore with a compulsive client, in my hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, is what Complex Equivalence exists in their mind about this problem. What does this problem mean? What is it trying to achieve? What does it allow them to do? What do they believe would happen if they stopped this behaviour?

Quite often fear is a big driver of compulsive behaviour, and frequently the fear exists to keep the person safe. When you know what this problem means, its truth and validity can be explored. Quite often there is no logical link between the behaviour/thoughts and the “reasons” why it is occurring. For example, one lady I met felt compelled to check the locks on her car (to the degree that she had to have new ones fitted every 6 months) and her greatest fear was linked to the safety of her father after he had nearly died. The was no obvious link between her father’s incident and the repeated behaviour of locking her car. Knowing this didn’t make the problem stop, but it did encourage her to question the validity of the problem which had felt like a very solid problem before she had thought about it in this way.

The next step can be taken if you believe that the client’s problem may be related to a significant emotional event. A values elicitation can be very worthwhile for discovering what “away from” values exist in their values hierarchy and can help uncover SEEs that the client might not have consciously realised were still having a negative impact.

As well as, or instead of this, I would use the fast phobia technique. The fast phobia technique doesn’t have to be restricted to phobias only. It is a process which is very useful at desensitising the negative emotions that occur when triggered by stimuli so that the person can be around the stimuli without feeling negative emotions. This means there is the opportunity to be around things that used to make them feel a compulsion and no longer feel it.

The compulsion blowout method can be used to demolish the submodalities associated with the stimuli. Submodalities are the codes that we use to make meaning of our experiences and memories. When these are adjusted, the memory/experience will no longer work in the same way as it did in the past.

There is, of course, a lot of room for manoeuvre, as a therapist, I am flexible in my approach and will adjust techniques that I already know if I think there is a way of having them work in a more appropriate way for that specific client. Other techniques I have used have included advising the client that they can do as much as they like of one compulsion, but have to trade off another. This works really well for multiple compulsions as the list slowly whittles down until there is just one compulsion to deal with. By this time they have also built up confidence in their own abilities.

“I’m more confident to deal with the feelings.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.GemmaBailey.com

New Year, New Rules!

The ‘rule’ of the rules is to make them not scary and to avoid creating rules that you’re going to dislike putting in place. They need to be rules that you can enjoy enforcing. There may be some rules that are less easy to enforce than others. For example, if I’ve decided as I have in the past that I’m going to go to the gym X amount of times per week. Then I know that that’s a rule that I’m going to have challenges with because that’s a rule that I’ve had challenges with in the past!

However, if I phrase that rule slightly differently then all of a sudden it becomes a lot more attractive, a lot more appealing, and certainly much more realistic of my expectations and my ability. For example, instead of saying ‘I will go to the gym three times a week’, instead, my rule is: You are going to enjoy taking care of yourself and having a physically fit body.

That rule seems much more appealing to me and I think the reason is that I don’t feel like I’m tying myself into a contract where I have to go three times a week and beat myself up if I don’t.

The mental image I make when I say to myself that I’m going to take care of myself and have a physically fit body is a much more serene-looking image. It’s me looking fit, looking like I’m enjoying myself, moving my body in a way that really appeals to me. NLP can help motivate you to exercise and hypnotherapy from a specialist in Hertfordshire, North London can help too.

So simply by rephrasing the rule, I’ve given it much more appeal and it means that in my imagination I get a different sense of it. The sense is that it’s going to be much more consistent and much more enjoyable to me.

Here are some rules that you might like to use that I’ve already reframed for you so that they’re set up in the best possible way:

If you ever had a rule about your health in the past that you did not stick to, it may just be a case of reframing or restating that rule in a way to makes it more appealing to your unconscious mind. As an example: I will stop eating junk food and stick to a healthy diet.

Notice what mental imagery you create, what picture springs to mind when I say to you: ‘I will stop eating junk food and stick to a healthy diet’. The image I get is me sitting at the kitchen table with a stick of celery looking unimpressed.

So, a better rule could be: I’m going to get my body to the healthiest possible state by having a balanced varied diet.

Doesn’t that sound so much better? It doesn’t sound as painful. It doesn’t sound as if you’re missing out and this is an important thing with diets guys I’m just going to say this quickly is one of the challenges with diets is that firstly, it presupposes that you’re going to be missing out on certain things.

Visit an NLP therapist in North London or Hertfordshire for a free consultation to discover how they can help motivate you to exercise and live a healthier life.

If you’ve ever had the experience in the past of being told that you can’t have something, doesn’t it make you want to even more?

A challenge with dieting is that you are stopping an old way of eating in favour of going for a new way of eating and then once you’ve lost the weight, probably stopping that way of eating and trying then to go through the transition of having a normal balanced diet so you go through at least two transitions. You go from where you are now into diet mode and then from diet mode back into normal mode once you’ve lost the weight.

How about you just have a healthy life instead? That’s only one transition. You only have to do that once. You have to change once, so if you can say to yourself that you’re going to have a varied and balanced diet, getting your body into the healthiest possible state, then you’ve only got one thing that you need to change and one thing that you need to stick to and you do that for the rest of your life.

Now when I say it’s the rest of your life you don’t have to freak out about that because remember it’s a balanced and varied diet, which means that you can still have a takeaway. You can have chocolate. You can have those foods that you enjoy for all the wrong reasons. You just need to do it in a balanced way.

Hypnotherapy can provide you with the commitment and willpower to be able to stick to a diet in the future. Speak to the Hypnotherapy and NLP clinic for more information.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

PTSD usually occurs after a person has been exposed to a situation which threatens great physical danger or when physical harm occurs to themselves or to another.

Those with PTSD may exhibit a variety of symptoms. Some become very detached and “numb” losing interest in their old way of life and the people they used to be close to, becoming aggressive, violent or no longer affectionate, whilst others may be very jumpy and sensitive.

Particular triggers such as sounds/smells/images/feelings associated with the event may create an emotional response. Quite often those with PTSD also experience flashbacks. This is a spontaneous repeat of the memory of the event that may be triggered by the sounds/smells etc associated with the event or the flashbacks may also occur as dreams when sleeping. Often thoughts of the event will then continue to occur throughout the day. Other anxiety disorders such as depression are often associated with PTSD.

It can be useful to establish how the person is representing the flashbacks and memories of the event to themselves in their mind. Those who are experiencing a great deal of emotional pain from the incident will usually replay the memory fully associated- seeing it through their own eyes as if they were there. Those who see the memories and flashbacks dissociated (as if they are watching themselves in the event), usually have a lesser degree of pain from the event when they remember it in the now.

Techniques such as the NLP fast phobia cure can be used to help the brain interrupt the experience normally associated with the memory and gives the opportunity for the mind to re-code the event so that the incident is altered and desensitized. EFT has also proved to be effective in treating PTSD as it realigns the body’s natural energy systems. Using eye movement patterns in addition to tapping also gives the brain an added opportunity to desensitize and reprogram old memories.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Boost Your Creativity

The Encarta dictionary defines creativity as “the ability to use the imagination to develop new and original ideas or things, especially in an artistic context.”

Creativity and imagination are largely linked with right brain functions, whereas analytic and rationalised thinking is more associated with the left brain.

As individuals, we may tend to be more inclined to naturally use one side of the brain more than the other, which would define the ability we have to tap into our creative talents. Of course, there are influences in our lives as we grow up, that are responsible for either nurturing or stifling our creativity. For example, most of our schooling tends to focus much more on learning via the left brain, encouraging logical and objective learning, as opposed to holistic experiential learning which is related to the right brain.

Creating can lead to a deep sense of satisfaction and there are many different ways that people can express creativity. The common factors tend to be that a great feeling of compulsion to do something. Then throughout the process of doing it, a connection with oneself, or even a feeling of motivation or trance-like experience. If the person remains motivated to continue their project until completion, they will feel a great sense of pride once the process is successfully completed. Just imagine if it was a requirement of your job to feel this good every day! In fact, those who set up their own business often do so as an extension of a hobby or creative process that they already enjoy.

If you are not a natural creator, how can you develop this skill to create more wholeness and inspiration?

Here are some tips:

1. Have a few sessions of Life Coaching to help uncover the things you value most in your life and begin shaping your dreams. Motivational techniques can also be applied if a sense of uncertainty prevents you from taking the steps you need to make.

2. Listen to music that makes you feel good and switch off the news! Often the news is depressing and can put you in a bad state.

3. Make lots of notes. You never know when those good ideas will sneak up on you and if you don’t jot them down, they may be forgotten.

4. Get inspired. Look at other people’s creative work, either in the field you are interested in, or just in the natural environment around you.

5. Do some brainstorming around your chosen idea. This will move it from pie in the sky to the specific steps you will need to make.

6. Read books. Books are great for expanding ideas and are “healthier” for your brain than watching the telly all the darn time!

7. Keep your brain fit by doing crosswords, and quizzes and participating in creative and intelligent conversations.

8. Be healthy in your body. Your mind and your body are linked so you need to look after both. Feed them healthy food and exercise them both.

9. Write a list of how you will feel and how your life will be affected by expressing your creativity. What will it mean to you?

10. When you get an idea, do something about it, before someone else beats you to it!

“Thank you all so much, this has made a positive change in my life.”

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Headaches and Migraines

I started having migraines when I was about 7 years old and found them a very scary experience. There is something quite frightening about experiencing that degree of pain in the part of the body where the brain is stored!

Luckily, my migraines would disappear after I had vomited, and gone to sleep – painkillers wouldn’t touch them at all. I was also fortunate to not experience distorted vision (sometimes called a warning aura) or prolonged nausea or the kind of migraines that last for several days.

I recently experienced a headache after visiting a friend who lives around 45 miles from my home. On the way back, the oncoming headlights of the cars began to irritate me, and I sensed that my headache was going to develop into a migraine. I knew that if I allowed that to happen I would certainly be stuck a long way from home, so I made the decision to stop at a service station, park my car and lay in a hypnotic trance in the back seat for about 20 minutes. Hey presto, 20 minutes later I was fit to continue my journey.

The reason why migraines occur is largely to do with chemicals within the body. Your body is like a laboratory, and the chemical within it have an impact on your physical body. When a person has a migraine, there is a change in the serotonin levels in the body (it drops) and this causes the blood vessels to swell. It is the swelling that causes the pain.

People experience migraines for different reasons, emotional stress or tiredness are often factors, some foods may also be a trigger, or in my example above bright lights were a factor and loud noises can be too. Going without food can cause a migraine. to start, menstruation or even changes in the weather!

Hypnosis is a wonderful way to escape from the pain of migraine for several reasons. Firstly the trance can be laced with suggestions for controlling and lowering the level of pain experienced. The simple relaxation is also hugely beneficial- if the migraine. was not caused by stress, you can expect that after the onset of the pain there is definitely going to be some stress and relief that can only be a good thing. For reoccurring migraines, suggestions can be given to help the patient become more aware of the subtle warning signs that a headache or migraine. is on the way. Then self-hypnosis or relaxation can be used to prevent the symptoms from increasing.

“I feel so much better. Thank you so much, Gemma!”

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Resilience

I think a lot of people think resilience is your ability to stay strong in the face of uncertainty or in difficult circumstances. For me, resilience is how quickly and easily you get back up once you’ve been pushed down. When I think about resilience in the context of my own experiences in life, resilience had come about from having some quite negative things happening in my life previously. I have learnt how to survive and come out the other end and I have learnt how to cope with certain situations through developing methods and coping strategies. When things get tough I now know how to deal with it better through previous hardships and how I proceed in a more positive direction.

Therefore, speaking of things that may contribute towards becoming a resilient person here’s what I think you need: I think you need confidence because if you lack confidence then you’re going to find it very difficult to put into action and employ any sorts of strategies. You might feel like hiding under the duvet and that is not going to be the ideal solution. You need to have enough confidence to get out there and face the world. You’ve got to have the confidence there in the first place to be able to push through difficulty. You also need hope! Hope is super important. You need to believe that you have something worth fighting for so that you don’t get completely overwhelmed by the negative experiences that happen in life. You’ve got to hope that you’ll be okay and you’ve got to have hope that things will turn out all right in the end.

Overall, I would say you’ve got to just have a quite positive state of mind because the more positive you are the easier it is for you to be creative and resourceful and to think about alternative ways of reframing your circumstances. The more easier it is for you to problem-solve your way through a situation.

What’s important in developing resilience is not being shy about putting yourself in situations where you might get knocked down and not holding back from situations where you might get knocked back because those knockbacks are you developing a thick skin which will help you to become more resilient and emotionally more tougher.

While I worked as a manager in a large private day nursery, there was a staff member called Charlotte. Charlotte’s social status was different from mine, I grew up on a council estate, I worked hard to get my diploma to be able to work with children. Charlotte came from a wealthy family and had been given some of the finer things in life which I had to work hard towards i.e first car was a new car and a deposit was put down on her house. I was her manager and I was grafting away to be able to afford my monthly car payments just to get myself to work. I felt resentful not just because of her social status but also because she had a good relationship with her parents.

One day I noticed that she had developed a skin condition called dermatitis. It was on both of our hands and it looked like her skin was falling off and it looked look pretty uncomfortable, to be honest and it was stress related. It took me a while to reframe the beliefs that I was carrying around “she’s got it easier than I have and it’s not fair and I wish I had it that easy”. What I realised was something that for me might be by comparison to all the other stuff quite a low-level problem, for her, it was really significant because it seemed like she’d missed out on the benefits of having tough stuff happen in life. From having tough things happen in your life, you can learn so much and build up your resilience through time and experiences.

When going through tough times, you might feel that the best thing in the world is if you had no problems but if you are a person who can see a silver lining then you can really start to enjoy life a lot more and get a lot more benefits from living it even when it’s really difficult.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk

Finding Motivation in 2021: Part Two

In last month’s article, we began discussing re-motivation and this is something we have all experience through the pandemic in 2020 and through 2021 presently. This has been the highlight of my work with my clients recently at the Hypnotherapy clinic in Hertfordshire. We confirm that some people need a reason ‘why’ to do things that they want to do and we also confirm a little bit about our own personal drivers in getting motivated. In this month’s article, we are thinking about our levels of motivation. Is whether what we’re doing; is it for ourselves if we’re doing it? Is it for other people or is it a combination of both?

When we talk about goal setting we talk about making sure that your goals are quite selfish, that you’re doing, what you’re doing for yourself only. However, very often, our motivation to actually do those goals may well come from a place of knowing that what we’re doing will actually make some kind of positive difference to others as well.

If you can feel motivated to do something because it gives you the buzz because it is going to pay off for you, in some particular way, then that is definitely going to be useful for you but failing that then definitely dig deep and start thinking about the ripple effect of what it is that you’re going to be doing on the wider world and we call that the study of ecology. That ‘digging deep’ is something we can explore together in our hypnotherapy and NLP sessions in my Hertfordshire clinic.

The study of ecology is when you think beyond yourself and say “is this good for me? Is it also going to be good for others? Does it serve the greater good in some way?” Potentially the answer could be ‘yes’ to all questions above. If we asked these questions in the context of getting a new job, a really hard job. For example, I have a funeral directors building across the street and something tells me that that, you know, it appears to not be a very good job to have to do. It might be a little bit depressing at times so imagine if that was going to be the new job that you were going into then you have to start thinking ‘well, how is this going to be good for others?’

Potentially, you’re going to be helping people in their time of need. You’re going to be making sure that you’re providing something that really honours and respects people that have passed on, that was loved by friends and families alike. This means you are considering the wider picture ‘how does what I’m doing actually help others in some way’ and normally you can find something.

I remember when I was doing a key-note speaker for Lloyds Bank which isn’t too far from the hypnotherapy clinic in Hertfordshire and it was at their education conference and so I had a room filled up with bankers. There were a bunch of bankers in the room and they were listening to me rambling on about this whole idea of ecology and how what you’re doing is in some way serving the greater good. I’ll be honest that when I was planning this particular presentation, I did have to dig deep to think about what good is it that these people are actually doing for the world. How are they contributing because obviously, they’re in quite a privileged position so what I ended up proposing is that actually, these guys are providing a service that enables other people to be able to maximise their money?

These bankers were specifically working with schools which made it relatively easy to make that connection because I was able to say:

“As a result of you going into a school and selling your product to them, you know, that you are either saving that school money or that you are helping them to be more productive with their finances in some way because you believe in the service that you are offering to them and as a result of doing that those schools are maybe financially free up. Perhaps they are just financially more robust or more financially competent. As a result of that, they’re going to be serving their children, families and communities in a much better way than they may have been able to do if they’d worked with the competition. In some way, you are helping those children and their families and their communities to be able to access more support from that school because you sold them the service that you offer now.”

It’s a little bit of a tenuous link to serving the greater good but if we want people to be able to tap into their motivation levels, to their optimum level, then we may need to do that extra bit of digging deep in order to, you know, really help you to see that what you’re doing actually has some positive ramifications beyond you and sometimes that’s where the real source of motivation is going to come from very often people will do more for others than they will be motivated to do for themselves.

By Gemma Bailey