Tag: <span>hypnosis</span>

Anxiety Hypnosis Hypnotherapy Insomnia Sleep disorder • • • • • • • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 0 Comments

Insomnia – Is it all in your head?

A man looking at his alarm clock in despair at ten past two in the morning because he can't sleep.

Worrying about not getting enough sleep could be the very thing that is causing your insomnia. Although sometimes there could be factors preventing us sleeping such as our diet and health, in a large number of cases it could just be all in the mind. Many of us are actually sleeping much better than we think. What many people actually have is ‘paradoxical insomnia’ where they think they are sleeping much less than they actually are. This can especially be common in people that are a bit anxious or sleep lightly. They may not be getting as good a sleep as the average person but studies show that although they tend to wake up a lot they are still getting sleep in between looking at their clocks. Because the sleep is very light they get the feeling that they are not sleeping at all so accepting that they are actually getting some broken sleep is the first step to tackling insomnia.

Insomnia is often about fear. Fear of just lying awake, fear that they can’t sleep or fear that they will not be able to function at work properly if they do not sleep. This fear then becomes a cycle and then going to bed becomes a negative task and then the fear of sleeps sets in.

So insomnia can simply be as much of a problem as the individual decides to make it. The problem is in your head. So if you can think your way into a problem then surely you can think your way out of it. But how can you do this?

First of all don’t put pressure on yourself to sleep. Don’t think of yourself as going to sleep but think of it as going for a rest. Resting is very restorative. As soon as you put pressure on yourself to sleep it’s not going to happen. So, make rest your goal! Research shows that for some cognitive tasks the benefits of rest were indistinguishable from sleep.

Much of the time people have decided for themselves wether they are good or bad sleepers. Remember you get what you focus on so if you focus on being a bad sleeper then you are probably going to get a bad nights sleep. Maybe if you decide that you are a good sleeper then if you do get a bad night then it won’t be so much of a big deal. Good sleepers have a belief that they are going to be fine whatever happens in the night. People that get highly stressed about their sleep have more depression, tiredness and cognitive impairment than people with a more positive belief system about their sleeping habits.

Increase your confidence about falling asleep by determining what time you need to get up then set your alarm and count backwards five and a half hours and don’t let yourself go to bed before that time (so in this case it would be one am). Make sure that you get up with that alarm and that you do not allow yourself any little naps throughout the day. Once you have done this for a few days your body will try and satisfy it’s need for sleep by making those five and a half hours as efficient as possible. Your sleep will then become much more continuous and much deeper. Once you have developed the confidence that you will fall asleep you can start bringing your bedtime forwards until it feels right for you. People may try and tell you that you need eight or nine hours sleep but research shows that six or seven is enough for a lot of people.

Move away from defining yourself as an insomniac by taking your focus away from sleep. See if you can go a whole month without talking about it! If you are asked by anyone about it then just say you slept fine.

Sometimes if we haven’t slept well the night before we tend to go to bed early in order to make up for it. This is a common mistake. It’s far better to go to bed later rather than earlier so that you make your sleep more efficient and don’t lay there in bed putting yourself under pressure to sleep.

You can start your bedtime routine as early as in the morning. Pick a wake up time and STICK TO IT! The brain loves consistency so if the brain has routine then it knows what is coming. Exercise is also a great idea. Early in the morning and outside in the fresh air is even better.

Sometimes it can be a case of an overactive mind. If I find my mind racing when I go to bed I find it very useful to use Emotional Freedom Technique to shut down my thinking. Hypnotherapy can also be very useful either by finding the root cause of the problem or using suggestions to help you sleep and get back into a routine.

For more information about hypnotherapy and EFT in Essex please contact me.

Positve thinking Uncategorized • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 0 Comments

How positive thinking improves your life!

A sign saying negative think positive but the negative is crossed out.

 

So what are the amazing benefits of embracing positive thinking? Thinking with a positive mindset gives you freedom! But what exactly does it free you from? By developing a positive mindset you get freedom from all the negativity inhabiting your mind. When you have negative thoughts it corrupts your mind and then gradually pollutes your emotions. It also has a detrimental affect on your behaviour and attitude. Any thoughts that instil fear in you and make you succumb to your fears are also negative thoughts. Thoughts such as ‘I am incapable of doing that’, ‘I am not good enough’,  ‘I am a failure’ and ‘what if something goes wrong’ and similar thoughts are all negative and it is this that prevents you taking a step forward because these thoughts make you feel incapable of doing something. If you surrender to these thoughts each time, and never consider going against them, then you get stuck in a cocoon of negativity, and you are never able to live freely.

BUT there is good news. By learning to develop a positive mindset, you learn to battle the negative thoughts emerging inside you. Positive thinking helps you realise that your negative thoughts, feelings and emotions are nothing but a corruption of normal thoughts. There isn’t anything that you cannot do! Really it is just a matter of trying. By retraining your mind it helps you to be liberated from the negativity rooted inside of you. This makes you stronger standing on your own and putting an end to pessimism. Once you can do this you will learn that life is much more beautiful and much simpler than you have been making it. It is wonderful to be free from negativity and break down those barriers that stop you from chasing your dreams and goals.

In addition to freeing you from your negative thoughts positive thinking helps you become free by helping you see the many different possibilities in life. Research shows that a negative mindset pushes you to only behave in a specified manner. When you have negative thoughts you become frightened of certain outcomes and prevents you from taking any action against that possible outcome. So you can’t get beyond that to get a chance to see the other side of the coin. Sometimes our minds are conditioned to see the bleak things only but with a combination of hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy and Emotional Freedom Technique then our minds can easily be deconditioned as long as there is willingness for that to happen.

By developing a positive attitude and mindset you become more open to things instead of being restricted by your negativity, you start considering different ideas and seeing so many other possibilities in life.

Positive thinking is also very empowering as it helps you to build your own unique skill set. We are all gifted in different ways and negative thinking often stops us from being able to access those skills through a lack of self-confidence. The lack of self-belief, which feeds a lack of confidence can keep us in a terrible job that we don’t like or makes us dependant on others financially. By developing your positive thinking you become open to the thought that there might be something special about you as well! You might have a hidden talent that could help you towards your dreams and goals. This type of positive thinking will boost your self-confidence which makes you dig deeper in yourself to find your true potential thus enriching your life and opening up those opportunities you thought were just dreams!

For more information about positive thinking and overcoming barriers visit www.positivelycalm.com. Change your way of thinking now because YOU deserve it! You will find you have much more energy and will be so much happier!

Depression EFT Hypnotherapy Uncategorized • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 0 Comments

Believe!

 

A person holding their hands in the air in triumph on a beach with the sea and a sunset in the background with the word believe at the top.

If you are not expecting it, you are not allowing it to happen

Your belief system brings into your life what you want to happen. If your beliefs are strong enough then what you believe will probably happen. If you believe everything in your life is bad then it is likely that you are going to bring bad events into your life. If you are optimistic and believe that good things are going to happen then that is what you are going to attract into your life. Simple? Yes and no. Sometimes because of negative events that have happened in our past it does sometimes take some retraining of our minds. And also remember that our minds and emotions are connected. So, if we are going to desire good things into our lives then remember each emotion indicates how much energy you are summoning. Your predominant thoughts and beliefs that you currently hold are all relative to your desire.

We learn our belief systems as very little children, and then we move through life creating experiences to match our beliefs. If you look back through your own life you may notice how often you have gone through the same experience.

If you are feeling a very strong emotion, wether positive or negative, that means that your desire is powerfully focused and you are summoning a great deal of energy towards your desire. So, when your emotions feel bad, like depression, fear or anger, that means that you are offering a lot of resistance to your true desire. When your emotions are strong and feel really good , like enthusiasm, passion, positivity, expectation or love, that means that you are not offering out any resistance to that which you desire so the energy that you have summoned through what you desire is not being challenged vibrationally by yourself and you are then currently allowing the things that you desire to come into your life.

So it seems to be an obvious rule that the perfect situation to create and allow into your life what you desire is to really, really want something that you believe is possible. When that combination of both desire and belief is present within you all those things will quickly unfold into your life.

BUT when you want something that you do not believe is possible, when you have that desire but you do not expect it, it will not easily unfold into your life. Hypnotherapy and EFT can be fantastic tools to eradicate negative thoughts and feelings and make your belief system so much more positive!

Believe and Expect and the universe will answer your call……………..

Meditation Uncategorized • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 0 Comments

Improve your life through Meditation

Improve your life through Meditation

A person sitting in the lotus meditation position meditating

Hello everyone and I hope that you have all had a positive week since my last blog and as you can see from the title of this weeks blog I have decided to talk to you about how you can improve your life through meditation as I believe that meditation is beneficial to each and every one of us. It is a natural mind state that many of us have become detached from. Everything has become so fast in our lives now that people find it hard to switch off. In fact we could all benefit from learning to LITERALLY SWITCH OFF! That’s switch off your mobile phones, your ipads, your wifi and all this other electrical equipment that is putting different radio waves and electric ions into our surrounding atmosphere. It is a good idea to first switch these things off before we can relax our minds and go into our own meditative state and SWITCH OFF our own minds. Our minds definitely need much more rest than they are currently getting.

I learned meditation myself at quite a young age. I did have some trauma in my life and I now believe that meditation saved me from quite a lot of psychological damage. Of course at a very young age I didn’t even really realise I was meditating and I certainly didn’t realise that meditation was a form of self- hypnosis. So, for me, at that time it was escapism, turning my mind off to the real world. This used to be more in the form of reading fictional books or pretending I was someone else. It was all a coping mechanism I naturally used to help me through some harder times. It was later on when I was in my teens that I discovered what meditation, as we know it now, really was. I believe everything that happens to us happens for a reason and I was lent a book on meditation and astral projection that I found fascinating. I found that, with some practice, I could learn to shut down my conscious mind and enter a state of extreme relaxation. I say with some practice because it’s not something that you can learn to do it one sitting. Like everything worth having you really have to practice and train yourself as it is a discipline. It is a fantastic practice to learn though for your own physical and mental health.

To begin with it was just a case of sitting down quietly somewhere I wouldn’t be disturbed and trying to switch off my thoughts. This wasn’t always an easy task so I often used my imagination to focus on something. I remember imagining a flickering candle in my mind and concentrating on that until I felt my mind and body relaxing. Sometimes I would put relaxing music on (with no words) and I would focus on this, again, until I felt my mind and body quietening down. The more I practiced this, the easier it got, until I was finding myself in deep meditative states. I didn’t realise it at the time but when I became trained as a professional Hypnotherapist I realised that I was putting myself into self -hypnosis where I could often find answers to questions and solutions to problems that would naturally come to me. I believe that this is our natural way of being. How we should be much more of the time than we currently are.

So, what are the benefits of meditation?

Calmness – Letting go of negative thoughts so that the mind doesn’t dwell on them until they are blown completely out of proportion causing anxiety. The act of the deep breathing exercise also helps to slow and calm our bodies down.

Anti-Inflammatory – Stress cause inflammation which has been linked to heart disease and asthma and skin conditions such as psoriasis. Relaxation through meditation helps switch off this stress response. This is also very good for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Lower blood pressure – A study at Harvard Medical School found that meditation lowered blood pressure by making the body less responsive to stress hormones, in a similar way to blood pressure-lowering medication. Meanwhile a British Medical Journal report found that patients trained how to relax had significantly lower blood pressure.

Increased Fertility – Studies at the University of Western Australia have revealed that women are more likely to conceive when they are relaxed and men have a boost of sperm count through relaxation.

Helps cure neurosis – Helps to find emotional balance and cure neurosis and un healthy emotional states. It helps cleanses emotionally soaked memories.

Boosts Immunity – Relaxation has been shown to help boost the immune system making it very beneficial to recovering cancer patients. A study at the Ohio State University found that progressive muscular relaxation, when practised daily, reduced the risk of breast cancer recurrence. In another study at Ohio State, a month of relaxation exercises boosted natural killer cells in the elderly, giving them a greater resistance to tumours and to viruses.

Aside from the regular sitting still and closing your eyes and trying to clear your mind there are many other ways to meditate from using guided imagery to breath focus, yoga, saying mantras and guided imagery. I find the most beneficial meditation for me is a tapping meditation using Emotional Freedom Technique. An introduction video to EFT can be found here. And a video showing me demonstrating the basic recipe for tapping can be found here. If you would like a guided imagery relaxation audio you are welcome to download my relaxation mp3 FREE OF CHARGE here.

You may want to try some different forms of meditation to see what works for you. The important thing is to find the time to do it, even if it is just twenty minutes a day. We all deserve at least that. Give it a try and see how much more positive your life becomes. GO ON! YOU ARE WORTH IT!

HAPPY MEDITATING!

 

Brad Mace, Dhp, MAPHP (acc).

Anxiety coping mechanisms EFT fear of flying Hypnosis Hypnotherapy Motivation positivity Self-improvement Therapy • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 2 Comments

Fear of flying. Plane stupid?

A man flying in the clouds with an ipad attached to his chest looking panicked.

Fear of flying. Plane stupid?

Hello again everyone. Welcome to my latest blog about fear of flying. I apologise for there not being a blog for the last couple of weeks but this is due to me taking a much needed holiday. I always choose to go away somewhere nice and warm as it is coming to the end of winter here. It’s nice to soak up the sun after the many months of early darkness and dreary grey days knowing that on my return home that it is nearly spring and the days are getting longer and the sun is beginning to shine much more warming us both physically and mentally. Sometimes it’s not until you actually go away that you realise how much the rest is needed. While I was away it got me thinking about people that have a phobia of flying (aviophobia) and how awful it must be not to be able to just escape to another country when they feel like it. The interesting concept of phobias is that there is not normally a rational fear behind them. Even if the fear doesn’t actually prevent a person from travelling anywhere it can greatly impair their enjoyment of the journey. We all know that flying is actually one of the safest forms of transport but many still hold a fear which is out of their control. So, what can they do about it?  After all there is far greater risk, statistically, of being kicked to death by a donkey than dying in a plane crash.

I have had a very high success rate with fear of flying using a combination of Hypnotherapy and Emotional Freedom Technique. EFT is a great self-help tool that can be used to bring down any anxiety about flying and the beneficial aspect of this therapy is that, once learned, it can be used anywhere. On the way to the airport, at the airport or sitting on a plane. That is the wonder of emotional freedom technique. I would, however, look deeper into the root cause of the problem to help clear the phobia using hypnotherapy. In my experience the majority of the time it’s because of one issue – CONTROL. People feel out of control in a plane. The average person does not have is a great understanding of how planes work and what the noises are that they hear and where there is a lack of understanding people feel out of control with many not able to put their trust in a pilot that they don’t know and a machine that they don’t understand. If a client feels out of control in their life then this problem will just be exacerbated. This may not  necessarily mean that the client is feeling out of control presently but using hypno-analysis we can look into the past and find out the originating cause of the phobia. This may not necessarily even have anything to do with flying or planes but may just simply be a control issue or a deeper set condition.

I once had a client, many years ago, that had never flown and even if she saw a plane flying overhead she would duck in panic! Hypnosis regressed her to eight years old where she remembered watching a news report about a plane that crashed onto a motorway. This had made the news as it was such a rare occurrence but the fear of seeing that at her young age was repressed into the subconscious causing her phobia. Reliving this event as an adult helped release the negative emotion stuck in the subconscious and we used some suggestion therapy for another couple of sessions re-framing any negative thoughts related to flying. She wrote to me after, happily informing me she had taken a short flight and actually enjoyed it and had booked a much longer flight for her honeymoon.

So, what should you do and not do should you suffer from fear of flying?

  • Don’t avoid flying. It is a treatable problem. Fears and phobias have one of the highest success rates for treatment of psychological problems. We tend to make ourselves feel safer by avoiding things but we truly grow by stepping outside our comfort zone.
  • Think about the destination you are going to. Really focus on all the positive things about being there.
  • Challenge any negative thoughts. There is a big difference between discomfort and danger. Think about your triggers. If turbulence is a trigger, for example, think about it logically. ‘Ok I might spill my drink but the plane isn’t going to fall apart.”
  • Learn some relaxation techniques. Deep breathing exercises, meditation and of course emotional freedom technique will all help. Reading is also a very good distraction or listening to music.
  • Keep hydrated. Try to avoid alcohol and drugs. Before and during the flight, it’s important to keep blood sugar levels up. Stick to water and juices to keep hydrated and remember to eat little and often to maintain your energy, which can help control anxiety levels. Rest if you can, though sleep is not essential.

To learn more and for further support with any of these issues please contact me for a free initial consultation.

Happy Holidays! 😉

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