Change your Mind and Future with Hypnotherapy
DSFH, HPD; Reg CNHC, AfSFH, ABNLP, ABH, IARTT, BA Hons (London), PGCE (Cantab)
Change your Mind and Your Future Photo (c) Unsplash Todd Cravens
You can Change your Mind
You have the ability to change your mind.
Literally.
Hypnotherapy from a trained and accredited hypnotherapist, uses hypnosis in a safe, controlled way to help you change the way you think, act, react, and even interact.
Ingrained negative habits, anxieties, fears and phobias can feel like they are part of your personality.
Perhaps you don't think they can be changed. You feel you have tried again and again to face up to your fears (and do it anyway); to diet, to exercise or to stick to a plan.
You never seem to succeed for long and you no longer want to try; even though these negative patterns limit your life.
These most human traits are not character flaws, or personality defects. Often they are patterns of behaviour or habits embedded in your primitive mind from childhood.
Conscious willpower can't change them; but the plasticity of your mind, and the power of your imagination can.
Changing habits and behaviours
Today, you can start re-programming your mind. You can take those first steps towards making more positive and healthy choices for yourself and begin laying the foundations to becoming happier, more well-balanced and more successful.
But how?
How the Mind Works
The Freudian model of the mind may be familiar to you. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to explain how the mind worked. On the surface is consciousness. Our attention is drawn to thoughts in our conscious mind here and now.
This is the tip of the iceberg.
The subconscious
The subconscious is the hidden part of the iceberg.
Buried memories in the subconscious influence our actions and drive our behaviours. Your subconscious is a huge resource that provides you with sufficient wisdom and resourcefulness to enable you to cope with much of life instinctively. When your subconscious mind is working for you, life is easier. You don’t have to overthink. You become less anxious and less likely to become depressed.
Your pre-frontal cortex
Your pre-frontal cortex (part of the conscious mind) is the part that interacts with the world and others and enables you to be aware of your interactions with others.
Your pre-frontal cortex helps you plan forward, analyse what worked and what didn’t and adjust your plans going forward. But, if our highly developed pre-frontal cortex is so highly evolved, why do we sometimes become anxious, depressed and unable to function?
The amygdala - fight, flight or fright
Your subconscious mind has primitive parts called the amygdalae - there’s one deep within the primitive mind in both hemispheres of the brain - which can scupper your best laid plans.
The development of the intellectual part of the brain came about as part of a ‘genetic accident’ that enabled human beings to imagine the future. This evolutionary development also enables you to be inventive and innovative, to solve problems and to create future possibilities.
You have developed the ability to learn consciously, using your intellect, drawing from your experience and imagining outcomes. You know how to reflect back, learn and improve your plans and life on a continuous basis. That's pretty extraordinary, although it’s an ability you may not fully appreciate.
That’s because it can be derailed by anxiety, trauma, depression and irrational fears embedded in your primitive mind.
Fight, Flight and Depression
The amygdala - the flight, flight, depression part of the primitive mind - is the central and most important part of the primitive mind. It is closely associated with the hippocampus, which stores all our primitive, and sometimes inappropriate behavioural responses, and the hypothalamus, that regulates all the chemical responses in the body and mind.
The instinct to survive
The amygdala is essential when you are in real danger and have to act by instinct to survive.
If you saw a sabre-toothed tiger appear in your garden, your primitive mind would respond by fleeing... or fighting. You wouldn't stop to think, "Didn't sabre-toothed tigers die out over 10,000 years ago?'. Like our ancestors, your fight, flight or freeze response would kick in instantly.
That fight, flight, freeze response isn’t so helpful when you have an argument with your partner, discover you are overdrawn or are made redundant. Yet, thanks to an overactive amygdala, you may react to these situations with the same panic and fear as if you were under physical threat.
You know you shouldn’t. You wish you wouldn’t. But you don't seem to be able to help it.
Literally changing your mind
The good news is, you can literally change your mind… with a little help. There are many ways to do it. Hypnotherapy and Neuro Linguistic Programming are two effective therapeutic approaches that can help you literally change the way your subconscious mind works. Using hypnotic language, metaphor, alpha brain wave states of deep relaxation, and sometimes simply asking you to describe different outcomes and possibilities, can change your the way you think and respond surprisingly quickly.
When the mind is working effectively, it can assess situations and find solutions. Your intellectual mind will dominate your conscious awareness. R.E.M sleep (Rapid Eye Movement) helps you find solutions to problems you experienced during the day. You may have experienced going to bed at night feeling confused or concerned, and waking up in the morning with the ‘answer’.
That’s your subconscious mind working for you.
Our primitive mind helps as real with threats
While our intellectual brains continued to develop, our original, instinctive part of the mind continued to remain active.
The limbic system, headed up by the amygdala, is responsible for our most basic survival. We need it. Those who are living through war, famine or gang violence are, of course, facing very real threats. Vigilance and physical strength are needed when danger is visceral and ever-present.
However, even if we live in a stable society where we are not at threat of violence, famine or other threatening and uncertain events, our imagination – our ability to think about the future or ruminate on the past – can create and embed profound fears and anxieties which dominate our waking hours.
Add to that watching the news and seeing war or other disasters unfolding, our limbic system can become increasingly overwhelmed. More and more negative thoughts and anxieties can take over. When this happens, our amygdala stops being helpful, and starts to scupper our intellectual minds.
Then we can’t think clearly or rationally.
Why trauma, PTSD, anxiety and depression occur
The bad news is, you can’t control your primitive mind through willpower. The good news is that you can re-programme your subconscious so that it becomes a resource that helps, rather than hinders, you.
We are always looking for patterns. The intellectual part of the mind always looks to improve and plan forward but our limbic system is always on the alert for potential threats.
The nature of triggers
Incoming information through our various senses may trigger deeply embedded fears. The primitive part of us is still on alert for predators and threats. Survival strategies that were once useful, no longer serve us.
When we perceive a threat - and our primitive minds cannot distinguish between reality and imagination - we have seconds to decide if our life is under threat, or not. Our response is instinctive. For some, a door suddenly opening or a car alarm going off can trigger internal panic buttons.
Any negative experience can create sensory, negative responses which can be passed on to, and stored in, our primitive minds. Traumatic events, particularly if they are repeated, create such strong emotional reactions that our limbic system retains the memory and the pattern for recalling it. The event and associated experiences feel life-threatening.
Now we have installed a programme which only needs the trigger to run. This happens at a subconscious level. Any recall or trigger of the experience creates an incomprehensible state of alarm. That’s what causes persistent anxiety, phobias or PTSD responses.
For some people who have sensory issues, and who are easily over-stimulated or irritated, or are just highly sensitive, managing and calming their limbic system is more challenging. In fact, life is more challenging. I often think those people should be applauded just for trying to get on with their lives. They are warriors!
When mind and body eventually can’t cope with living in a constant state of flight and fight, we often need to withdraw from the perceived threat, and that can lead to withdrawing from social connection, isolation and depression.
Changing the pattern
Not everyone exposed to a traumatic event develops trauma. Our personality, early experiences and genetics all play a part. General ongoing stress, however, does leave us vulnerable to developing unhelpful fear responses.
When anxiety or stress levels rise for any reason - and that can happen over time so we barely notice it happening - the influence of the primitive mind increases. Put under enough stress, we might become constantly fearful and panicky. And the source of the stress might be our imagination, or negative thought patterns.
In these circumstances, our primitive mind no longer serves a useful purpose and only adds to the stress and confusion by constantly looking for the cause of the danger. So the fear and panic become further embedded. Then we are in the grip of a vicious cycle.
There are many ways to reduce anxiety
Luckily there are many ways to reduce anxiety and to move memories locked into the emotional, primitive brain back in to the intellectual mind, where you can retain control.
Neuro Linguistic Programming is one discipline that uses a series of tried and tested therapeutic techniques to address minor traumas, anxieties, phobias and negative beliefs.
Hypnotherapy is part of the NLP arsenal of tools, along with the Rewind Technique, Time Line Therapy (TM) and Coaching techniques. There are also, as you know, pharmaceutical solutions and you may need to consult your doctor if your fears and anxieties are out of control; at least temporarily.
Getting back in control
Ultimately, the way most people change the negative patterns that lead to stress, fear, anxiety and depression, is to reverse the process that caused them. Thinking positively can feel impossible but, over time, with support and the right interventions, you can reduce stress and anxiety and get back control.
There are, of course, really challenging situations that cause stress. We all know that death, divorce and moving house can be some of the most stressful events in our lives. Seeking support when going through a major transition in life helps us cope better with the inevitable stress and anxiety that will come. Being supported helps us cope better and get over set-backs or major life challenges more quickly, and helps to prevent any lasting impact on our health.
Why do we over-react?
What about bankruptcy, redundancy or a car accident?
We wouldn’t be normal if we didn’t react to these life changing events at all. But to become clinically depressed, permanently anxious or fearful are not appropriate or helpful responses.
But how often, in reality, is your stress and anxiety caused by the way you perceive life’s challenging events, rather than the reality?
Anxiety, usually the initial response to stress, is a natural consequence of living in the dangerous world inhabited by our ancestors.
Depression was a response to the uncertainties of the food supply in a primitive world; hunkering down, withdrawing and using minimal energy was useful.
In the modern world we have adapted these responses to stress from other sources. Losing our job may feel like we will never provide for our families. Getting divorced may be interpreted by our subconscious that you will never be loved. Being overdrawn may feel like you may starve. Some people are not able to adapt as the situation improves.
Changing the way we think, act and react
Before our initial and instinctive responses to these common set-backs sends us in to a spiral of despair, we need to change our perceptions and change our chemical and primitive responses.
Knowing that we can access a set of tools to change the way we think and feel, gives us hope we can change. And even the very act of hoping can change our brain chemistry and our stress levels.
The science of anxiety
I like to imagine the amygdala as a very small vibrating creature; the hypothalamus as a tiny machine regulating the chemical responses in my body, and the hippocampus as a filing cabinet full of files storing all my bad memories and fearful behaviours. This helps me create a way of instantly calming my system.
If something triggers irrational fear, I imagine wrapping my amygdala in insulating cotton wool to dampen the vibration, filling my hypothalamus with calming gel to soothe my chemical responses, and I imagine the unwanted files in my filing cabinet flying out and dissolving to clear out my bad memories.
Imagination or reality?
This works for me, because our subconscious minds can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. Hypnotherapy and NLP use hypnotic language and your own imagination to change the way your perceive and experience challenging events and help you move from your primitive mind back to your conscious mind, where you are back in control.
Forgive your primitive mind
The more we understand how our mind works, the more we can learn to take charge of our future. Right now, you can reflect back on all your successes, your resourcefulness and the ingenuity that got you to where you are today.
Then, you can forgive your primitive mind for doing what it has evolved to do, and find ways to help and support you to fulfil your best hopes, dreams and plans.
The good news is you can keep changing your mind. Starting today.
Hypnotherapy - Frequently Asked Questions
Some people have concerns about hypotherapy, often because hypnosis is not well understood, or they associate hypnosis with stage hypnotists (who often have teams of 25 people to help them create the illusion of mind control).
Here are some links that will help answer your questions.
Sense-Ability Hypnotherapy & Coaching Frequently Asked Questions
Jane Pendry
DSFH, HPD; Reg CNHC, AfSFH, ABNLP, ABH, IARTT, BA Hons (London), PGCE (Cantab)
Sense-Ability Hypnotherapy & Coaching
UK, Europe, USA
jane@sense-ability.co.uk
+44 (0) 7843 813 883
www.sense-ability.co.uk
Online across the UK & Europe