Hypnotherapy is well known for healing trauma and pain relief. Hypnosis is also extremely valuable in working with sports enhancement, weight loss, motivation, self-esteem, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, increased confidence, smoking, phobias and stress related issues.

Category: Brain (Page 2 of 2)

12 Ways That Hypnosis Can Help Change Your Life For the Better

This centuries-old technique of healing can successfully treat numerous nagging issues that are beyond our awareness and control. Could hypnotherapy be the solution for what ails you?

Your conscious mind commands and your subconscious mind obeys according to the rules that are loaded. The conscious mind encompasses your thoughts, habits and emotions. The subconscious mind will use the rules that are loaded connected to your expectations, desires and beliefs are beyond our awareness and control.

It’s a simple and safe intervention – Coined by English physician James Braid, who studied the practice during the 19 th century, hypnosis gets its name from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep.

The practice uses guided relaxation and focused attention to achieve a heightened state of awareness, sometimes referred to as a trance.

When a person is in a hypnotic state, they are more open to discussion and are better able to respond to suggestions, this makes it possible to help them with certain conditions such as smoking, insomnia, overeating, or even the perception of pain. The critical faculty of the brain is turned off, explains Barker, and the subconscious mind is listening – that’s where their habits lie. “I tell them what’s going to happen and then it happens, but first I set up the mind to let it happen.”

Hypnosis is not regulated in South Africa, so the best way to find good hypnotherapist is to look contact them and do the free assessment meeting – see if there is a connection, also see if the intent is focus on healing and ask many questions.

While treatment varies based on each individual’s condition, many conditions require just one session. A typical therapy session lasts about 90 minutes and can cost anywhere from R450.00 to R2100.00.

If you have a bad back, you go to the chiropractor, if your teeth hurt, you go to the dentist, but where do you go if you want to increase the thought capacity of your mind?

Stop Smoking

If you want to find the best way to quit smoking, you’ll navigate a long-list of over-the-counter and prescription nicotine-replacement medications as well as non-nicotine prescriptions to find the right fit. Quitting is vital, of course: Cigarettes are responsible for many deaths. Herbal remedies, behavioral therapy, and acupuncture are other methods people choose to quit smoking.

Hypnosis has been the answer to kicking his two-pack-a-day habit for many.

When you go to a doctor, they give you a pill, but they can’t give you anti-habit pills. To change his thought process and take away the emotional connection to help change his habit into a positive one.

No More Overeating

Making healthier food choices and exercising are key components for weight loss, but in some cases, successful weight loss also requires getting rid of the emotional and unconscious factors that prevent us from losing weight. The use of hypnosis for weight loss requires a different approach than when used for other conditions – it usually takes several sessions rather than just one to determine the individual’s personal triggers.

Before hypnosis is performed, I need to find out if they are all-day snackers or those who reach in the fridge between meals. Everyone is different, everyone has their own vice, and it takes a while to get that out.

HHC sessions start with embedded commands that help his clients control their eating habits. “After five or six bites, you close your eyes and tell yourself ‘that’s enough’ or every time you eat a plate of food you close your eyes and say ‘eat just half of what’s there.’”

Sleep Better

Not getting enough sleep can impair decision-making and memory, and it can lead to chronic health problems such as heart disease, obesity, and depression. While there are a variety of remedies for insomnia including medication, meditation, and cognitive behavioral therapy, getting enough sleep is not something you can talk yourself into doing.

Sleep is primarily managed by the subconscious. Trying to use conscious thoughts to fix this type of problem is like attempting to make a corporate change by going to the receptionist – you need access to the CEO.

Worrying about sleep is also one of the main reasons that you can’t fall asleep. Fear of insomnia is what causes insomnia. When you remove the anxiety and fear of not getting a good night’s sleep, you will get a good night’s sleep. To treat his patients, HHC first asks them to visualize a scene when they slept through the night, and then he uses hypnosis to put them there. – We have the person imagine the great night of sleep that they had in the past and then I have them remove the label of ‘I have insomnia,’ and replace it with ‘I sleep at least eight hours a night.’”

Cure Dental Phobia

The high-pitched whir of the drill, the pinch of the needle, or simply embarrassment of having someone look inside your mouth are just a few of the reasons that people avoid going to the dentist. While the industry is striving to use new dental technology to make a trip to the dentist’s office less stressful, dental anxiety affects about 10 to 20 percent of the world’s population.

Fear has kept many of my clients out of the dentist chair for years.

The fear can come from a negative experience at the dentist or hearing about someone who has had a negative experience. Whatever the case, it can be debilitating and once its programmed, the mind can run in default mode.

To help clients get over the anxiety of going to the dentist she uses neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which helps the brain “rewire” certain thought processes and get past loops of automatic thinking. “When they start to feel anxiety about going to the dentist, they can use NLP to interrupt the anxiety and re-wire the phobia on their own.”

Ease Chronic Pain

Pain is a signal that is helpful to us, but in the case of chronic pain, the nervous system may still be relaying the pain signal even after the body has healed. There are several ways your mind can make pain worse. “We can use hypnosis to turn it down.” HHC recalls a patient with chronic back pain who couldn’t sit still in the chair. “He described the pain as being a grizzly bear gnawing on his spine.” When she asked him what he wanted to do, he said he wanted to “put it into hibernation.”

HHC worked with the client to help him imagine the bear crawling into a cave on a cold day, curling up and going to sleep. While hypnosis is not magic, it can feel like it sometimes.

Manage Bereavement

Whether it’s dealing with a national tragedy or the loss of a loved one, the feeling of loss or bereavement can be debilitating, causing anxiety, insomnia, and depression. Letting yourself feel the loss through crying helps your body and mind, hypnotherapy offer help for those coping with loss – including talking about the death of your loved one, taking care of your health, reaching out to others who are dealing with the loss, accepting your feelings, and celebrating the life of the one you lost.

Coping mechanisms for dealing with loss are personal. Hypnotherapy can help by providing positive suggestions to help cope with the symptoms of grieving and help with finding ways of dealing with loss as time passes. HHC helps people cope with loss by having them put a “timer” on their bereavement. “Normally, they let me know when they are sick and tired of being sick and tired of bereavement.”

Relieve Anxiety

There are things only someone living with anxiety can understand, like how debilitating and desperate the condition can be. Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental disorders, affecting many people. While anxiety is usually treated through medication or therapy or a combination of both, many people also turn to hypnosis.

A hypnotist works to identify the root of stress or anxiety, whether it is situational, physical, or based on an issue from the past.

The subconscious mind is what makes you feel anxious and drives bad habits. When someone comes to see us about nail-biting, nail-biting isn’t usually the problem, it’s anxiety. When a man came to see HHC about a speech impediment, he treated him for anxiety. His problem was not speech related, his problem was in his mind. During the session, HHC had the man regress back in time to when he was six years old. He had climbed onto the roof of his house and his father yelled at him for being on the roof.

While the some research does not support the claim that stuttering is caused by an emotional event HHC believes it was this incident – the anxiety of being yelled at by his father combined with the fear of being on the roof – that contributed to his speech impediment.

During the session, I kept the memory the same, but changed the reaction of his father from being angry to one where he held his arms open and loved him rather than yell at him. When he came out of hypnosis, his stammer was gone.

Stop Tinnitus

Ringing, buzzing, hissing, whooshing, or whistling sounds that nobody but you can hear are signs of tinnitus, a condition that is experienced by many people. While tinnitus can be temporary or ongoing, there is no cure for most types of the condition. Treatment options include hearing aids, behavioral therapy, sound therapy, and TMJ treatment.

Hypnosis is also an option to stop tinnitus. The mind causes tinnitus. It happens because the person is expecting it to happen and once you remove the thought of expecting it, the sound disappears.

Make Chemotherapy more Tolerable

One of the earliest documented uses of hypnosis with a cancer patient occurred in 1829, when M. le Docteur Chapelain used hypnosis to relieve the suffering of a patient with breast cancer. The doctor used hypnosis as an anesthetic during a mastectomy and during the operation, the patient was said to be “calm and evidenced good pain control.” While today anesthesia is the preferred means for surgery.

Hypnosis still plays a role in the treatment of cancer and is often used to reduce stress and anxiety as well as minimize the side effects of chemotherapy such as nausea and vomiting.

Primarily we help them deal with the symptoms and help them change how they are processing pain, who often works with cancer patients. HHC cannot give them false hope, but we can put them in a comfortable state and help them with healing. HHC says that often cancer patients are shuffled from doctor to doctor, making them feel as if they are just a number.

HHC make custom recordings for our clients to listen to during their chemotherapy treatment–it’s a personal experience with a hypnotherapist that can go a long way.

Improve athletic performance

Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Mike Tyson are just a few well-known professional athletes that have turned to hypnosis to help with their athletic performance. Athletes have long used hypnosis to eliminate negative thoughts, de-stress and relax the mind and body, and help with focus and concentration so they can “be in the zone.”

This mental training can increase confidence, consistency, and ability, and it applies to all levels of athletes, including those recovering from injury and those just learning a sport. Most athletes go to a hypnotist to improve their performance, but actually they are going to improve their mind.

Hypnotherapy can change your thought process and turn your bad habits into positive ones.

HHC uses golf as an example.  – It takes a lot of mental endurance to be a successful golfer.

You have to alter your perception and reality and you have to mentally play the game as well as physically – the critical mind is closed, but the subconscious mind is in a heightened state.

Quicker Recovery from Surgery

HHC uses hypnosis to help people post-surgery to shorten their recovery time and in some cases, wean themselves off pain killers prescribed by their doctor. HHC had one person come to us post-surgery and tell me she didn’t want to live because she had been cut off from her opioid prescription. HHC used hypnosis to interpret the pain signal in her brain. Thoughts and emotions travel in pathways, and that’s how habits are made.

At first it is just a pathway through the woods but over time that pathway eventually becomes a trench that you can not get out of.

Through hypnosis, HHC teaches the brain and nervous system to take a different pathway. After three sessions, my patient said to me that she wanted to live.

Ease IBS

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) affects many people. While the exact cause of IBS is not known, the impact from the disease can range from mild to debilitating. Stress, although not the cause of IBS, can worsen the symptoms of IBS.

While treatments range from probiotics to following a diet that minimizes trigger foods – known as a low-FODMOP diet – to antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy, hypnosis has also been shown in studies to be an effective treatment for IBS.

Hypnotherapy uses relaxation techniques followed by hypnotic suggestions to help patients learn to control their symptoms. The results of the studies showed that patients experienced improvement in their quality of life and in the common symptoms of abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, and bloating.

If you have any questions about our Hypnosis Sessions please e-mail us here: info@hypnotherapycenter.co.za.

Please click here to make an Appointment!

Ref:. www.thehealthy.com

Your words and actions can actually shape your brain

Anything that contributes to chronic stress can gradually eat away at your brain – this includes verbal aggression, social rejection and neglect. We are free to speak and act, but we are not free from the consequences of what we say and do.

We humans are a social species. We live in groups. We take care of one another. We build civilizations.

Our ability to cooperate has been a major adaptive advantage. It has allowed us to colonize virtually every habitat on Earth and thrive in more climates than any other animal, except maybe bacteria.

Part of being a social species, it turns out, is that we regulate one another’s body budgets — the ways in which our brains manage the bodily resources we use every day. For your whole life, outside of your awareness, you make deposits into other people’s body budgets, as well as withdrawals, and others do the same for you. This has pros and cons, as well as profound implications for how we live our lives.

Your family, friends and even strangers contribute to the structure and function of your brain and help it keep your body humming along.

How do the people around you influence your body budget and rewire your adult brain? Your brain changes its wiring after new experiences, a process called plasticity. Microscopic parts of your neurons change gradually every day. Branch-like dendrites become bushier, and their associated neural connections become more efficient. Little by little, your brain becomes tuned and pruned as you interact with others.

Some brains are more attentive to the people around them and others less so, but everybody has somebody. Ultimately, your family, friends, neighbors and even strangers contribute to your brain’s structure and function and help your brain keep your body humming along.

This co-regulation has measurable effects. When you’re with someone you care about, your breathing can synchronize, as can the beating of your hearts – whether you’re in casual conversation or a heated argument. This sort of physical connection happens between infants and caregivers, therapists and clients, even people taking a yoga class or singing in a choir together.

If you raise your voice or just your eyebrow, you can affect what goes on inside other people’s bodies.

We also adjust each other’s body budgets by our actions. If you raise your voice or just your eyebrow, you can affect what goes on inside other people’s bodies, such as their heart rate or the chemicals carried in their bloodstream. If a loved one is in pain, you can lessen their suffering merely by holding their hand.

Being a social species has all sorts of advantages for us humans, including the fact that we live longer if we have close, supportive relationships with others. Studies show that if you and your partner feel that your relationship is intimate and caring, that you’re responsive to each other’s needs and that life seems enjoyable when you’re together, both of you are less likely to get sick.

And if you’re already sick with a serious illness, such as cancer or heart disease, you’re more likely to get better. These studies were conducted on married couples, but the results appear to hold for close friendships and for pet owners too.

We also get sick and die earlier when we persistently feel lonely – possibly years earlier, based on the data.

In general, being a social species is good for us, but there are also disadvantages. We also get sick and die earlier when we persistently feel lonely – possibly years earlier, based on the data. Without others helping regulate our body budgets, we bear an extra burden inside.

Have you ever lost someone through a breakup or a death and felt like you’d lost a part of yourself? That’s because you did – you lost a source of keeping your bodily systems in balance.

A surprising disadvantage of shared body budgeting is its impact on empathy. When you have empathy for other people, your brain predicts what they will think and feel and do. The more familiar the other people are to you, the more efficiently your brain predicts their inner struggles. The whole process feels natural, as if you were reading another person’s mind.

But there’s a catch – when people are less familiar to you, it can be harder to empathize. You might have to learn more about the person, an extra effort that translates into more withdrawals from your body budget, which can feel unpleasant. This may be one reason why people sometimes fail to empathize with those who look different or believe different things and why it can feel uncomfortable to try. It’s metabolically costly for our brains to deal with things that are hard to predict.

A hateful word may cause your brain to flood your bloodstream with hormones, squandering resources from your body budget.

No wonder people create so-called echo chambers, surrounding themselves with news and views that reinforce what they already believe – it reduces the metabolic cost and unpleasantness of learning something new. Unfortunately, it also reduces the odds of learning something that could change a person’s mind.

We also regulate each other with words – a kind word may calm you, like when a friend gives you a compliment at the end of a hard day. And a hateful word may cause your brain to predict threat and flood your bloodstream with hormones, squandering precious resources from your body budget.

The power of words over your biology can span great distances. I can text the words “I love you” from the US to my close friend in Belgium, and even though she cannot hear my voice or see my face, I will change her heart rate, her breathing and her metabolism.

Or, someone could text something ambiguous to you like “Is your door locked?” and odds are that it would affect your nervous system in an unpleasant way.

Your nervous system can be perturbed not only across distances, but also across centuries. If you’ve ever taken comfort from ancient texts such as the Bible or the Koran, you’ve received body-budgeting assistance from people long gone.

Books, videos and podcasts can warm you or give you the chills. These effects might not last long, but research shows that we all can tweak one another’s nervous systems with mere words in very physical ways that go beyond what you might suspect.

The power of words is not a metaphor; it’s in our brain wiring.

Why do the words you encounter have such wide-ranging effects inside you? Because many brain regions that process language also control the insides of your body, including major organs and systems that manage your body budget.

These brain regions are contained in what scientists call the “language network” and guide your heart rate up and down. They adjust the glucose entering your bloodstream to fuel your cells. They change the flow of chemicals that support your immune system.

The power of words is not a metaphor; it’s in our brain wiring. We see similar wiring in other animals; for example, neurons that are important for birdsong also control the organs of a bird’s body.

Words, then, are tools for regulating human bodies. Other people’s words have a direct effect on your brain activity and your bodily systems, and your words have that same effect on other people. Whether you intend that effect is irrelevant. It’s how we’re wired.

Does this mean that words can be harmful to your health? In small doses, not really. When someone says things you don’t like, insults you or even threatens your physical safety, you might feel awful.

Over time, anything that contributes to chronic stress can gradually eat away at your brain – this includes verbal aggression, social rejection and neglect.

Your body budget is taxed in that moment, but there’s no physical damage to your brain or body. Your heart might race, your blood pressure might change, you might ooze sweat, but then your body recovers and your brain might be a bit stronger afterward.

Evolution gifted you with a nervous system that can cope with temporary metabolic changes and even benefit from them. Occasional stress can be like exercise – brief withdrawals from your body budget followed by deposits create a stronger, better you.

But if you are stressed over and over and over again without much opportunity to recover, the effects can be far more grave. If you constantly struggle in a simmering sea of stress and your body budget accrues an ever-deepening deficit, that’s called chronic stress. It does more than just make you miserable in the moment.

Over time, anything that contributes to chronic stress can gradually eat away at your brain and cause illness in your body. This includes physical abuse, verbal aggression, social rejection, neglect and the countless other creative ways that we social animals torment one another.

It’s important to understand that the human brain doesn’t seem to distinguish between sources of chronic stress. If your body budget is already depleted by the circumstances of life – like physical illness, financial hardship, hormone surges, not sleeping or exercising enough – your brain becomes more vulnerable to stress of all kinds. This includes the biological effects of words designed to threaten, bully or torment you or people you care about.

When your body budget is continually burdened, momentary stressors pile up, even the kind you’d normally bounce back from. It’s like children jumping on a bed — the bed might withstand 10 kids bouncing but the 11th one snaps the bed frame.

Simply put, a long period of chronic stress can harm a human brain. When you’re on the receiving end of sustained verbal aggression, studies show you’re more likely to get sick. Scientists don’t understand all the underlying mechanisms yet, but we know it happens.

These studies of verbal aggression tested average people across the political spectrum, left, right and center. If people insult you, their words won’t hurt your brain the first or second time or maybe even the twentieth.

We are free to speak and act, but we are not free from the consequences of what we say and do.

But if you’re exposed to verbal aggression continually for months or if you live in an environment that relentlessly taxes your body budget, words can physically injure your brain. Not because you’re weak or a so-called snowflake, but because you’re a human.

Your nervous system is bound up with the behavior of other humans, for better or for worse. You can argue what the data means or if it’s important, but it is what it is.

It’s the fundamental dilemma of the human condition: The best thing for your nervous system is another human and the worst thing for your nervous system is another human. Scientists are often asked to make our research useful to everyday life, and these findings about words, chronic stress and disease are a perfect example. There is a real biological benefit when people treat one another with basic human dignity.

A realistic approach to our dilemma is to realize that freedom always comes with responsibility. We are free to speak and act, but we are not free from the consequences of what we say and do. We might not care about those consequences or we might not agree that those consequences are justified, but they nonetheless have costs that we all pay.

We pay the costs of increased health care for illnesses – like diabetes, cancer, depression, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease – that are worsened by chronic stress. We pay the costs of ineffective government when politicians spew vitriol at one another and make personal attacks instead of having reasoned debate. We pay the costs of a citizenry that struggles to discuss politically charged topics with one another productively, a standoff that weakens our democracy.

As our society makes decisions about health care, the law, public policy and education, we can ignore our socially dependent nervous systems, or we can take them seriously. Our biology won’t just go away.

Excerpted from the new book about The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Newer posts »