To sleep, perchance to dream...

INSOMNIA

To lie awake in bed, desperate for sleep after a busy day but unable to drop off, is one of the most frustrating and upsetting things.  We’re all familiar with the thoughts that run through our mind: ‘I really need to sleep. Tomorrow will be hard enough without a sleepless night!’ and ‘I am so tired, why can’t I drop off?’ Then we have the unrelated thoughts that keep us awake, the ones where we go over the day’s events or worry about the work we need to do tomorrow. We can’t seem to switch off, to drift off into some much-needed sleep.
Most people have occasional episodes of insomnia but they are able to make up for it the following night. If it’s a more regular occurrence the exhaustion starts to pervade every aspect of our lives and we start to make decisions based on the insomnia rather than our real selves. We start to turn down social invitations: ‘I’ll be too tired to enjoy it: I don’t feel in the mood to socialize.’ We fret about work projects thought the lens of sleeplessness: ‘I hope I don’t mess this presentation up, I’m too tired to give it my full attention’. We start to snap at the people closest to us or we start to feel sad and hopeless.

The first step back to the real you starts with an explanation of what is happening in the thought process centre of your mind. Once we have an image of that, it becomes easier to see the path back to restful sleep.

Here’s an image for you. Picture a young child, perhaps 7 or 8, who can’t sleep. Imagine sitting next to them and saying ‘You must sleep: you won’t enjoy school tomorrow if you don’t sleep!’ So the child closes their eyes and waits, mulling over your warning. You wait for a moment, watching them and then say ‘are you asleep yet?’  The child, eyes shut tight, says ‘not yet’. You wait some more and then say ‘What about now?’  There is no way the child can sleep with the warning thought in his head and the constant reference to the problem from you. It sounds obvious doesn’t it? Yet we do it to ourselves all the time and expect a different result.  We lie in bed thinking about our inability to sleep. We dwell on the problems we may face tomorrow because of our tiredness. Insomnia is a problem that grows in size the longer we focus on it.

Our minds have two points of view in our thought processes. The first one is the fastest and it comes from the primitive mind. It is concerned with our survival. This part (the amygdala) plays a role in our freeze, fight and flight responses. If we worry about something this part focuses its attention onto the problem and adds the necessary fuel to help us deal with it, the stress hormone, cortisol. This would be great if you needed to stay awake because of a possible threat to your safety.  If you see an angry dog coming towards you it’s this primitive bit that reacts to the threat, it plays its role in flooding you with adrenaline and you run, faster than you realised you could run.  This part of our mind focuses on problems. It is fabulous at keeping you safe, but when it looks for the problems in life it can’t tell the difference between ‘worry’ and ‘danger’. These two look the same to it, so for
both of these it provides you with the stress hormone it thinks you need. This is excellent for the wild dog bit and not so handy when all you need is to go to sleep.
In the normal course of events, it is the other point of view that gets involved in your thoughts about sleeping. This is the intellectual you, the “real” you. This is the bit that can learn a language, plan a holiday, fly a plane, or whatever else you have set your focus and intellect on. This is your pre-frontal cortex, the bit where you think through a task before you do it. This is why we humans are so inventive: we are able to iron out problems in our imagination before we run into them in life. This bit is a positive, solution-focused point of view.

How Can Hypnotherapy Help with Insomnia?
There is a skill in learning to change your focus, to being aware of thought patterns and learning how to change them. Your hypnotherapist will listen to how insomnia affects you and together you will formulate a goal that you wish to aim for. There are certain mental exercises that will assist you in dealing with the accumulative stresses that result from repeated episodes of insomnia. We call this ‘emptying your stress bucket’, and we do this in two ways, by exercises and by trance. As we start emptying your stress bucket, it becomes easier for you to feel more in control, especially of the negative thought patterns that perpetuate insomnia. 

The trance state is a perfectly natural state. You will be in full control: it feels like becoming fully absorbed in a story on the radio. When we allow our minds to be in this trance state, the two parts of our minds come together in a positive way so that we are able to make a forward-looking mental plan to reach our goal. This allows us to make an inner mental rehearsal of things going well. This planning allows us to change the way we go to sleep.
We provide a CD for you to listen to when you get into bed at night.  The CD is a relaxation tool that helps you relax the body and the mind, because if your mind is ruminating on problems, your body will tense up. What we think affects what we feel physically and vice versa.

Email or phone us here at North Cardiff Hypnotherapy for more information, or come and see us for an initial consultation.  We will help you shift your focus onto the solution and away from the problem. When we do that we can break the vicious circle of insomnia and the worry about lack of sleep leading to insomnia and get you back to you at your best.

What Can I Do Before My Appointment?
First check with your Doctor that there is no illness affecting your sleep quality. Then develop good bedtime habits. Don’t use your computer in bed. Switch your phone off. Don’t watch TV in bed. Your mind needs clear clues to your intentions. If you suffer from insomnia then your mind may be ‘primed’ to expect being in bed to be a trial, a time of frustration because of your sleep problems.
 
Here’s an exercise to ‘prime’ your body to relax and rest.
Lie in bed and imagine you are running a relaxing body scan, think about the muscles of your face, check you’re not frowning or clenching your teeth. Think about your neck and shoulder muscles, allow them to relax and settle comfortably on the pillow. Imagine this wave of relaxation travelling all the way down your body, think about your arms, then your legs relaxing, settling, and becoming more comfortable. Now focus on your breathing, don’t try to change it, just notice it, and focus on it for a few moments.
Now ‘prime’ your mind to relax.The old story of counting sheep has a core of truth in it. Counting is calming, count slowly, every time your mind wanders, bring it back to the counting. Another calming mind exercise is to picture your favourite outdoor place. Maybe it’s a beach. Picture walking on this beach, what can you see? Think about the colours. What can you hear, the sound of the waves or the wind and perhaps seagulls? What can you touch? What does the sand feel like on your bare feet? Soft warm and silky or perhaps it’s cool and firm? Make your beach image detailed in your mind.

Finally, be kind to yourself! Getting cross with ourselves for having a problem is a very human response, ‘Why can’t I sleep? Everyone else seems to manage it!’ However, if a friend said ‘I’m having real problems sleeping’, we would be kind and sympathetic. We understand the value of support for others, so let’s practice it on ourselves.

Hypnotherapy provides very real strategies to help aid restful night’s sleep and get you back to feeling like you at your best rather than a tired shadow of the real you.

What is Hypnotherapy and is it the same as Hypnosis?

What is Hypnotherapy and is it the same as Hypnosis?

Sometimes people contact us just because they are interested to find out what hypnotherapy actually is. Some people have heard that hypnotherapy is helpful with something that worries them but they’re not really sure what it means. This newsletter is just for you.

Hypnotherapy is a two part process; the first part is talking. This conversation is professionally guided by your therapist and has several different components. The atmosphere is relaxed and non judgmental. The second part is the trance part. Each session lasts around fifty minutes.

 However the first time we meet is a little different. It is called The Initial Consultation and is a mixture of fact finding, you telling the hypnotherapist what you would like hypnotherapy to help with and us explaining the process. We also explain how our minds can construct a thought that can really be very unhelpful (‘I’m afraid of flying’ for example) and what we can do about it. Once you have an idea of how our minds ‘feed a thought’ then we will show you how to change that thought for something more positive. It is part of the hypnotherapist’s skill to help you move from telling us what your worry is to seeing a way forward. Anyone can get stuck in a ‘mind rut’ where they think that their thoughts (and the feelings those thoughts produce) are permanent, and that only a change in events will help. We will show you how to shift your focus to help you see that what makes the difference is not the event itself, but our reaction to it.

At North Cardiff Hypnotherapy we practice Solution Focused Hypnotherapy. This means that we show people how to focus their thoughts on the solution to their problem as we understand that thinking solely about the problem creates more stress. For example, if you have a social anxiety and are very shy when with a group of people, a problem focused thought pattern would be thoughts like

‘I can’t go to that party, I never know what to say to people.’

‘No one will talk to me if I get a job with other people, I’ll feel isolated and stressed so there is no point going for the interview.’

‘I can’t explain to my boss that my work load is too big, I’m no good at conversations like that, Ill just get upset’

Here the internal dialogue is rehearsing how bad something will be in the future and this creates anxiety.

A solution focused approach is to gently change this dialogue by focusing on things that are going well. What are the things in your life that are going well at the moment, things you don’t want to change?

The second part is the hypnosis bit. Hypnosis is the Greek word for “sleep”, but it is not a particularly accurate term for what we do.  We sometimes call it a trance state or a ‘replicated REM state’and it describes a state of focused attention where you are able to reduce your attention to stimuli from the wider environment. This doesn’t mean that you are no longer able to hear other sounds around you, just that you are less interested in them. It’s a little similar to what happens when you meet a friend in a busy loud café. Soon your friend has your full attention and you find it easy to focus on the chat you’re having.  Trance or hypnosis is a completely natural state. Have you ever found yourself staring out of a window completely lost in thought? Perhaps you can recall that feeling of being utterly absorbed in a novel and losing track of time. It is this type of daydream state that we aim to replicate in our therapy rooms.

We all experience a daydream state many times a day and  if someone asked us what we we’re thinking about as we looked as if ‘we were miles away’, we would probably reply fairly vaguely ‘Oh anything really, nothing much, I was daydreaming’.

The hypnotherapist’s skill lies in getting their clients into this relaxed state of focused awareness.  People cannot be hypnotised against their will. Our clients have to cooperate with the process. Imagine it being like someone relaxing on the sofa listening to a story on the radio. The listener has to focus on the story but this is not a difficult thing, quite the opposite. There is something very relaxing about reclining somewhere comfortable and listening to a story.  The saying ‘radio has the best pictures’ is true because the images your mind conjures up are perfect for you, they exactly match what you think the story should ‘look’ like. We have always instinctively understood that listening to a story is relaxing. That’s why we read to children before bed.

So what will the hypnotherapist’s ‘story’ be about? This part is sometimes called Guided Imagery.

The first part will be about the physical process of relaxing. If someone says to you ‘just relax’ often we think ‘I would if I could!’ so the hypnotherapist uses a mixture of specific suggestions and images to describe what relaxation would feel like to you.  We then move on to use language that will deepen this relaxed state.  It’s not possible for me to tell you exactly what we would say to any one individual as our skill involves being in pace with your current experience and then guiding your imagination towards the imagery that, in our professional opinion, will be the most useful for your particular goal.

Why does this work? Inside the prefrontal cortex of our brain there is a marvellous little thing, our imagination. It is a virtual reality simulator where we can try out an idea before committing to it. In his excellent TED Talk (do watch it, details below) Dan Gilbert says it gives people ‘experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life’. Many people will use their imagination to look at the worst possible outcomes and then spend time worrying about these possible future events. Using your imagination for this negative forecasting has a physical effect on the body; we feel queasy and have a racing heart, butterflies or sweaty palms at the thought of giving a speech in public just by imagining it. In hypnotherapy we use the imagination to help us plan a way forward that is positive. A future that focuses on solutions and not one that focuses on problems.

Our clients can remember what we’ve said and they are in full control. If a client didn’t want a trance to continue they would just open their eyes and stop listening. ‘The hypnotic state is an experience that belongs to the subject’, Milton Erickson said in 1980 (he is often called the father of modern hypnotherapy).

At North Cardiff Hypnotherapy we are always happy to answer any questions that you may have about hypnotherapy and whether it may be useful to you.

Dorothea Read and Jade Painter

Clinical Hypnotherapists at NORTH CARDIFF HYPNOTHERAPY

References:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy?language=en

Ernest L. Rossi (Editor). The Nature of Hypnosis and Suggestion (Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson, Vol. 1).  ISBN-10: 0829005420; ISBN-13: 978-0829005424. Publisher: Irvington Pub; Reprint edition (Aug. 1980).

Bibliography:

David Newton  DHP HPD SFBT(Hyp) SFBT Sup (Hyp) FAPHP MNCP SHS SQHP Sup Hyp.  Hypnotherapy Practitioners Diploma Course Notes. Published in-house by The Clifton Practice, Bristol.

Feeling SAD this Winter?

Feeling SAD this Winter?

As the excitement of Christmas comes to an end and we all return to work and think about New Years Resolutions, it can be difficult to muster up motivation. But it may not just be a festive hangover.  

SAD has hit the headlines many times in recent years as awareness grows, but it’s not a new phenomenon. The Royal College of Psychiatrists suggests that for thousands of years, people have noticed that the seasons can affect our mood. It was not until the 1980s, however, that the term Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) first appeared. It is used for people who, although they sometimes can become depressed in the summer, regularly become depressed in autumn and winter.  

SAD has symptoms much like depression, but it has a clear pattern, starting in Autumn or Winter and stopping in the Spring and Summer. The kinds of symptoms that people might experience include loss of energy, low mood, which is often worse in the morning than later in the day, wanting to socialise less, a kind of need for hibernation, feelings of exhaustion for no real reason. People with SAD can often find themselves eating and sleeping more, too. There are subtle differences between SAD and depression, and it’s always a good idea to talk to your GP if you’re worried.

So who gets it? SAD is more common in women – about three times more common – and research suggests the further away you live from the equator, the more likely you are to suffer. Feeling low in mood in the winter is common enough that many of us can relate to these symptoms, but if your symptoms are bad enough to interfere with your life, you may well have SAD. In the UK, about 3 people in every 100 have significant winter depression.

If you are suffering from SAD, hypnotherapy can help. At North Cardiff Hypnotherapy, we teach you how the brain works and why you might be having the thoughts and feelings you have during the winter months. The Solution Focused approach of North Cardiff Hypnotherapy encourages people to think in new and more positive ways. We use relaxation techniques and guided imagery, encouraging people who have SAD to use the power of their mind in a positive and meaningful way. This helps to refocus the mind and work on changing our perception of our experiences. Clients are often relieved to learn that there are different ways that the symptoms of SAD can be managed. People actually enjoy the process of solution-focused hypnotherapy sessions, which often works quite quickly.

Hypnotherapy is a safe and effective therapy, which can help with a number of emotional and physical issues. However, if you have any serious concerns or worries about your physical and mental health it is always advisable to consult your GP first.

If you’d like to ask any questions about your feelings or how hypnotherapy may be able to help you, email northcardiffhypnotherapy@gmail.com or take a look on www.hypnotherapy-wales.com.

Is it possible to be happier?

‘I’ve always been a worrier’

‘My life is very stressful, I can’t change that’

‘I always think of the worst case scenario’

‘I have always had a very vivid imagination’

Do any of these thoughts sound familiar?  Negative thoughts can become automatic and this can become a vicious circle for us. These negative thoughts breed anxiety and depression and the anxiety and depression lead to more automatic negative thoughts. Our thinking becomes ‘stuck in a rut’ and we feel anxious and sad.

Here’s the good news, we can stop this, break the circle and change it.  The way to stop our thoughts repeating their negative patterns is make a new pattern. Imagine you have a large field that you walk through each day. The grass is long when you first started this daily walk, but day by day as you follow the same route you are treading the grass down, a pathway starts to appear. The walk becomes quicker and easier, so much so that you don’t make another pathway, you stick to this one. But if you needed to, for whatever reason, you could make a new pathway, it would be a little harder at first but soon it would be your well-trodden path and the old one would start to be overgrown.

We can learn to stop our thoughts travelling down the same route, we can learn a new pathway and soon that will become our usual route. Scientists call this neuroplasticity.

How to we make this new path? How do we feel less anxious and happier?

1. Notice the negative thought habit.

Sometimes we assume that our negative thoughts are true, that they present us with an accurate unbiased view of the world. They don’t. That little negative voice has a point of view, that’s all. Think about how many times you’ve disagreed with someone’s point of view. Just because it’s your thought from your mind doesn’t make it true. We humans have a brilliant imagination. Close your eyes and imagine you’re sitting on a tropical beach, the sun on you face, the sound of the waves lapping the shore…We can do this but (sadly) it doesn’t make it true.

2. Our brains sometimes get things wrong.

Our fear/flight mechanism, our adrenaline, can sometimes kick in when we have no intention of running or fighting. Remember that feeling before an exam at school? The sweaty palms and the racing heart, the feeling of dread? Those bodily sensations are there to get you to run away from that wild animal, not a maths test! Picture the bit of your mind that is ready for danger, the bit that comes out with the negative running commentary on your life. Picture the fear on his face, eyes darting about looking for problems. This bit of your mind needs you to take a friendly interest in his worries, not be cross, not to join in with his panic. Your mind has another voice, the intellectual voice, the real you. We can take a moment to ‘hear’ that voice: just breathe.

3. Breathe.

‘It can’t be that easy.’ Just trust for a moment. Breathing will relax you. It will help you focus on the present, which is calming. Breathe in for the count of 5 and out for the count of 7. This is the opposite of what we do in fight/flight mode. Just breathe 5/7 and stay with it for the moment. Think about the breath.

4. Talk about what is going well.

 When we talk to our friends about our stresses and worries we can make things worse. It’s the metaphorical equivalent of picking a scab. We will slow down the healing, maybe get an infection and leave a bigger scar. Think about the word ‘remind’. When we talk about our anxieties we re-tell the story to our mind, we relive not just the narrative but also the feelings that go with the story, the sadness or the fear. Think about looking at an old holiday picture. The way you smile as you remember you and your friend on that beach, you relive a little of the happiness you felt then. The same is true for an unhappy mental ‘picture’. So breathe and think of something that’s been good this week, even if it’s something very small then tell someone about that good thing. Tell us: tweet us @cardiffhypno. Message us on facebook, North Cardiff Hypnotherapy. We would love to hear your happy thought.

5. Take a walk                  

Get rid of that nervous energy that your body thought you needed to fight off a wild animal. Go for a brisk walk that will burn off the adrenaline, leaving you feeling calmer, more confident and more in control. While you’re walking think about what you can see, describe it to yourself, the colour of the sky and the scenery. What can you hear? What can you feel? Is it cold? Put in as much detail as you can. Our brains (brilliant things that they are!) will see that we are drawing other things to our attention and will turn down the alarm signals they’ve been sending. They will notice that you are thinking about the present.

Lao Tzu said

‘If you are depressed, you are living in the past, if you are anxious, you are living in the future, if you are at peace, you are living in the present.’

6. Accept Ambiguity.

It’s ok not to be able to predict tomorrow. Trust yourself. You can’t control the events in your life but you can control your reactions to them. You can feel calm, confident and in control.

While you’ve been reading this yourself you’ve started to build that new pathway. You’ve introduced the idea to yourself of changing your mind. You can think yourself happy.

North Cardiff Hypnotherapy will be running a half-day workshop on happiness where this is one of several happiness themes we will be exploring. Our aim for the day is that it will be fun and will leave you with some really useful tools for your path to greater happiness.

The 'How to be Happy' workshop will be running 10am-1pm on Sunday 11th January 2015 at Jego salon in Llanishen village. Places will be limited, so email northcardiffhypnotherapy@gmail.com to find out more and reserve your place.

Becoming a Non-Smoker.

Does the title make you feel a little anxious? Most people give up smoking several times before they are finally successful. The residual memory of failing makes us worried to try again. We assume that the outcome will be the same, that we will fail. We also have that deep down anxiety:  we know that smoking causes cancer, heart disease, bronchitis and many other problems such as infertility and impotence. All this frightening information is bombarded at smokers all the time, so relax for a moment and read on.

The New Scientist looked at studies covering 72,000 smokers and ex-smokers in America, it concluded that

‘Hypnosis is the most effective way of giving up smoking’. The New Scientist also said ‘Sadly, willpower counts for very little’.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618450.700-how-one-in-five-have-given-up-smoking.html

People carry on smoking to feed their addiction to nicotine, but just because something is addictive doesn’t mean that it is impossible to stop. What it means is that one part of our mind starts to give us ‘prompts’ to get us to have another fix of our drug,  Imagine that scared, anxious part of your mind, the bit in all of us that is resistant to change. We all have it, so what message does that bit of your mind give you to get you to light up?

‘My life is too stressful to quit, this is my calming down technique’

‘I don’t really want to give up, I’m not really addicted, I only smoke when I have a drink’

‘I’ve been smoking since I was 13, it’s too late for me, anyway my great aunt lived to be 102 and she smoked all her life’

Maybe your message is different, but you can still ‘hear’ that intellectual voice in your mind, the one that knows, with certainty, that smoking is deadly. The inner voice that tells you lots of people do give up, people do become non-smokers. The intellectual bit that knows you want to give up. That you would feel happier as a non-smoker.

Think about those two points of view, your inner pro-smoking lobby and the non-smoking lobby. Which one is stronger? It’s whichever one you choose. It sounds too simple, I know. With hypnotherapy we help you calm the part of the mind that looks after danger, stress and fear. Using trance we help you to find a positive, forward- looking way at viewing your habit. We help you change your point of view from seeing smoking as a big problem in your life to seeing becoming a non-smoker as your solution. Whenever we find a solution to a problem, and act on it, we feel calmer and back in control.

Dorothea and Jade are always happy to answer any questions you may have. Please feel free to email or phone.  There is no obligation to book an appointment.

When you’re happy that you have the information that you need, and you’re ready to breathe in some clean fresh air, a smoking cessation session lasts around one and a half hours and costs £100.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Dorothea Read and Jade Painter

North Cardiff Hypnotherapy

www.hypnotherapy-wales.com