Choosing Your Battles

The whole point in setting a New Year’s resolution is to work on changing something you’ve been unsuccessfully battling in the past. For some people, this could be an attempt to shed unwanted pounds while others might want to be better organised. Some of us have cluttered our lives to such an extent that we waste precious time which we could be spending on productivity at work or having fun on family events.

No matter what your resolution is, the thing you need to understand is that you will be working on new behaviours. The reason you need to resolve to change anything at all is because you have gotten into a rut of doing the same things over and over again. You have learned to behave in a certain way and it’s time to retrain your body and mind to act differently. That being said, it isn’t easy to learn new behaviours unless you have a little help along the way.

The first thing you should do is simplify your list of resolutions. Choose your battles wisely and work on one or two at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so trying to do too much, too soon, will often set you up for failure!

Mind over Matter?

Now then, we get to the crux of the matter. In order to be successful at meeting your New Year’s resolution you need to recognise that it’s often a case of mind over matter. Your mind is much more powerful than you give it credit for, but controlling your thoughts may be a problem. This is where hypnotherapy can be an invaluable aid.

Call it reprogramming your thought processes, or auto-suggestions that help us respond differently to given situations, but in either case, it’s all about giving your mind power over the physical world. Whatever you choose to call it, hypnotherapy can help you overcome the thought processes that lead you to behave in certain ways you are trying to change.

Hypnotherapy reaches the subconscious levels of your brain so that your new reality is what you perceive as habit. Instead of consciously telling yourself how you should act in a given situation, your brain tells you that this is how you respond. It’s amazing how effective hypnotherapy is on a subconscious level!

The New You Is Your New Reality

Summing it up, you are seeking a new reality with your New Year’s resolution. If your mind believes that this new reality is how you act and react, then it will happen just that way. Once you need to think about what you are doing, it no longer comes naturally as a habit. If you finally want to be the new you, let the subconscious levels of your brain control your actions. That’s the new you with a whole new set of habits to live by. This is what you have been missing all those years. Let 2020 usher in a new you with a whole new set of habits you never knew you had.

Live the new year as a NEW YOU by letting your mind control your new habits. That’s the secret you’ve been missing all these years!

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Hypnotism or hypnosis has long been associated with magicians and illusionists, but what people often forget is that it’s also an old trick used by certified hypnotherapists for treating a number of issues such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, and other disorders of the mind. Therefore, hypnosis can definitely help people in sleeping better.

Relaxation

One of the primary reasons as to why a person is unable to sleep for long or at all is because he/she is incapable of voluntary relaxation. We can only sleep peacefully when both our mind and body relax, and that’s exactly what a hypnotherapist brings about in the patient; a state of psychological and physical relaxation through hypnotism, which leads to restful sleep automatically.

Understand that deep sleep or slow-wave sleep is what we all need in order to wake up refreshed. Deep sleep is also necessary to form memories and hypnotic suggestions significantly increase the time a person spends in their deep sleep state, thereby ensuring that not only is he/she able to sleep, but the sleep is actually more useful to their health and life.

Helping with Somnambulism

Somnambulism or sleepwalking is commonly seen in children, and even in some adults. Strangely enough, the reasons behind sleepwalking are not yet completely clear, although there have been many studies through the years. The condition is characterized by not only the act of walking but also some other complex motor functions by the individual while remaining asleep or only semi-conscious. As this could potentially lead to falls and a variety of dangerous situations for the patient and those around him/her, it is often necessary to treat somnambulism with hypnotherapy early on. Hypnotherapists help patients with somnambulism keep safe by planting a hypnotic suggestion during the session, which invariably wakes them up each time they get out of the bed and their feet touch the floor.

Does Hypnotherapy Work for Everyone?

The answer is no, hypnotherapy does not work for certain people because they simply can’t be hypnotized at all. Fortunately, these are rare individuals and those that are already suffering from some sort of sleep deprivation due to anxiety, depression, etc., will most likely be open to hypnotism and its benefits. Note that being resistant to hypnotherapy and being completely immune to its effects are not the one and the same. Those that are more resistant to hypnotherapy will require more sessions to achieve the desired result, but it can be done, albeit at a slower pace.

Is Hypnotherapy Enough to Solve All your Sleeping Issues?

It can help greatly on its own and hypnotherapy will definitely amplify the effectiveness of other treatment options, but it’s not a completely standalone treatment either. Depending on the particular sleep issue in question, and the severity of the condition, medication and therapy might also be required to properly address the issue and its underlying causes. Nevertheless, most people who go for hypnotherapy sessions see great improvements from the very first one because of the treatment’s direct and unorthodox approach.

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Panic attacks can be quite debilitating and can happen without any warning. While they are not nearly as dangerous as a heart attack or a stroke, anyone who has had one will agree that it can certainly feel like you are having them both at the same time. Fortunately for us, panic attacks are only symptoms of our body reacting to intense fear, stress and excitement, which can be controlled with hypnotherapy. To understand panic attacks and the role hypnotherapy can play in controlling or even eliminating them completely, read on.

What Stimulates a Panic Attack?

A panic attack is a symptom or a result of an overtly sensitised fear response, also described as the instinctual fight or flight instinct getting hyperactivated due to current events or memories of earlier events. Alarmingly enough, one’s chances of experiencing panic attacks actually increases with each episode as the fear response becomes more and more sensitised after every attack and the association of intense fear with the stimuli gains more wide reach. What this means is that if a barking dog induced a panic attack in a child earlier, repeated instances of such events might cause him/her to associate all dogs with intense fear, even friendly ones. The bottom-line is that panic attacks are triggered by sensations of intense fear and/or embarrassment, whether it originates from something rational or just a memory.

What are the Signs of a Panic Attack?

The Anxiety and Depression Association of America or ADAA states that any person who can associate his/her physical and psychological sensations with any four of the following symptoms can potentially be suffering from a panic attack.

• Tachycardia, shortness of breath, tightening of the chest, choking sensation, chest pain
• Shaking, dizziness, chills and hot flashes, nausea, fainting
• Numbness and tingling sensations
• Feeling of unreality, depersonalisation, losing control and fear of death

Under normal circumstances, panic attacks do not last for more than 10-minutes, so if these symptoms are persisting, get yourself checked as soon as possible for a medical cause.

How Can Hypnotherapy Help?

Hypnotherapy can indeed be the most effective treatment for panic attacks because it treats the underlying psychological issue from which the panic attacks are stemming, instead of just curbing the symptoms. If the mind doesn’t perceive an event as a source of fear, the body won’t go into fight or flight mode and therefore, panic attacks are eliminated at the source itself. If you are wondering how a hypnotherapist does that, consider the following steps which might be taken in some situations.

1. The hypnotherapist uses his/her training as a hypnotist to relax the patients as much as possible.
2. Then, the patient is systematically led to a state of trance and guided towards that point in his/her life which led to the panic attacks
3. As the patient regresses back to those memories which caused shame, fear, anger and other negative emotions, the hypnotherapist allows the patient to explore those memories.
4. At all times, the therapist assures and guides the patient to fully realise and experience every repressed emotion related to those incidents.
5. As those emotions and feelings are explored and realised as only memories, the therapist now uses the power of suggestion to slowly turn the panic-inducing memories completely inert

Since the emotions and feelings are realised completely and the therapist reprograms the traumatic memories into harmless ones, the patient’s mind disassociates fear and panic from them. This essentially ensures that even when future stimuli remind the patient of his/her past experiences, the mind doesn’t perceive it as a reason to be afraid anymore and as a result of the absence of fear, the body doesn’t panic either as there is no reason there to warrant such a reaction.

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