treating...
IBS
IBS is highly prevalent in the Western world, but despite the advancement of many theories, no clear cause has yet been established. IBS may be a conglomeration of disorders with similar symptoms but multiple different root causes. All cases of IBS should be checked out by your doctor, so that physical problems are not the cause, and to establish it may be psychological, and stress related.
Dr Peter Whorwell at Manchester's Withington Hospital, uses hypnotherapy to help his IBS patients. He maintains that hypnotherapy is effective in the treatment for two reasons, one is it lowers anxiety and two, it acts as pain management, and decreases the sensitivity in the gut. NICE has receommended hypnotherapy for the treatment of IBS.
The symptoms of Irritable Bowel may include:
- Abdominal pain and spasm
- Diarrhoea
- Constipation
- Bloated stomach
- Rumbling noises and wind
- Urgency - a need to rush and open the bowels
- A feeling of incomplete emptying of the bowels
- Incontinence if a toilet is not nearby
- A sharp pain felt low down inside the rectum
- Nausea, belching and vomiting
Also see IBS Page
Stop Smoking
The physical side of addiction to smoking is less than 10% the remainder is all in the mind - the subconscious mind where behaviour patterns are stored. Your smoking is not a conscious behaviour, which is why trying to quit with conscious will power alone just isn't enough. Hypnotherapy can access the subconscious mind, suggest new perspectives on the habit, and remove your desire for smoking.
Smoking is one of the major causes of stress and anxiety because it increases your blood pressure levels. You may think having a cigarette is calming you, but it is in fact stressing your body. Once a person regains control by quitting smoking, they are able to regain control in other areas of their life.
People who smoke throughout life are 80% more likely to suffer severe anxiety and clinical depression in middle age than non-smokers, because it depletes the body of the motivational hormone Seratonin.
Smoking does not just cause lung cancer and heart disease. There are many poisonous substances in cigarettes, including Benzene, Formaldehyde, Carbon Monoxide, Arsenic, Acetone, and Nicotine, which many people don't realise is used commercially in insecticide. This puts a strain on the liver, pancreas, bladder and kidneys, and you risk your chances of developing cancer in these areas too.
I find doing 2 sessions instead of 1 two hour session works more effectively as it helps the client relax especially if they've never had hypnotherapy before.
Also see Stop
Smoking page
Phobias
It is generally accepted that phobias arise from a combination of external events and internal predispositions. Some phobias such as arachnaphobia (fear of spiders) and ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) however, may arise more easily due to an evolutionary trait that conditioned humans to fear certain creatures that could cause them harm.
In a famous experiment,
Martin Seligman used classical conditioning to establish phobias
of snakes and flowers. The results of the experiment showed that
it took far fewer shocks to create an adverse response
to a picture of a snake than to a picture of a flower, leading to
the conclusion that certain objects may have a genetic predisposition
to being associated with fear.
Many specific phobias can be traced back to a specific triggering event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age. Social phobias and agoraphobia have more complex causes that are not entirely known at this time. It is believed that heredity, genetics, and brain chemistry combine with life-experiences to play a major role in the development of anxiety disorders and phobias.
I myself was cured of
a phobia of driving, which I had for 13 years, using hypnotherapy
and NLP techniques. I am now back behind the driving wheel and enjoying
every moment.
Also see Phobias in depth
Performance Anxiety
Whether you are budding
pop star or have to perform presentations for your company, hypnotherapy
can help with reducing your anxiety. Using specially designed NLP
techniques to help lower your emotional response and gentle guidance
and visualisation to motivate, it is the perfect solution to help
get rid of performance nerves, stage fright and fear of public speaking.
Also see Performance Anxiety page
Weight Loss
We lose weight when we consume fewer calories and burn off more during exercise, unfortunately, life is usually not as simple as this and we find ourselves cutting corners, eating the wrong foods and making excuses. Poor self-image, fussy diet, and issues such as Anorexia add to the problem.
By making careful choices, monitoring our eating habits and our body mass, gaining control over our habits and emotions, hypnotherapy can help you achieve your ideal weight. The number of sessions involved will depend on your targets and how motivated you are.
What hypnosis will NOT do regarding bingeing
Hypnosis is not about reprogramming the brain, but allowing your subconscious mind know what is best for you and relay it to your conscious mind. A session will not automatically turn a switch in your head and you'll wake up NOT bingeing. It will instead help you to gain control and understand the mechanisms that are making you binge. You can then monitor all aspects of your life and put in place the habits you need to loose and maintain your perfect weight.
Also see Weight in depth
Sports Performance
Improve your performance in sports.
Many sportsmen and women use hypnotherapy to focus on their skills and to enhance their performance. From athletics to boxers (Bristol's world champion middleweight boxer Glenn Catley used hypnotherapy to help him gain his world championship title) It is also excellent for concentration and helps with improving your golf, darts and pool matches too.
Create positive focus and new automatic response patterns to achieve your full potential.Whether you need to deal with the pressure of competition or simply wish to overcome nerves or negative behaviour patterns
Hypnotherapy allows you to remove the triggers and negative responses that can be encountered due to pre-competition nerves or self-belief issues. Through simple relaxation and various other techniques, you can become focused on what you really want to achieve.
Also see Sports Page
For more details see Nailsea Cricket Club
Anxiety and Depression
Hypnotherapy will work for any mind or stress related problems. By learning how the mind works and by understanding how we are affected by our states of mind, we can get back on the road to recovery in no time. Where as counselling can often go back over old wounds, which the client may not want to uncover, hypnotherapy instead focuses on what the client wants to achieve, and how they want to achieve it.
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Panic attacks
- Insomnia
- Lack of confidence
- Self esteem
- Exam nerves
- Grief
- Divorce
- Separation
- Unwanted habits
- Physical and mental exhaustion
- Recovery after a nervous breakdown
- Unnecessary fears and worries>
- Work stress
Also see more on Anxiety or more on depression
Goal setting and getting motivated
Using positive thinking
and realistic goal setting, you can become focused to achieve anything.
From alleviating exam and interview nerves, to really sorting out
what you want in your life. Examining what you can do and using
focused, positive visualisation to achieve it. We can't make a brain
surgeon out of someone with a GCSE in ICT, but we can help you gain
insights into your weaknesses and more importantly your strengths.
Bed Wetting
Bedwetting in children and adults can be the result of stress and depression. When someone is depressed, they have a tendency to sleep deeper and longer, so the mechanism that sends messages from the full bladder to the brain, take too long for the person to regain consciousness. Quite often the anxiety caused by bedwetting prolongs the symptoms and the person falls into a self-fullfilling cycle. Using hypnotherapy to reduce the anxiety, and to regulate the sleeping, I also look at what the person is doing to help or make worse the symptoms and suggest methods of overcoming some of the problems.
Bed wetting early on in the sleep cycle (first 90 minutes has been linked in the USA to sleep walking activities. Sleep walking in turn has been linked to self esteem issues, and unresolved feelings of stress and helplessness which are sometimes played out. Again the subject is totally unaware they are doing anything even if they appear half awake, so if someone gets up and tries to urinate in a cupboard instead of the toilet it could be they are sleep walking.
Hypnotherapy can be effective to help the stress/sleep elements and can help with gaining self esteem.
For more information see Bed wetting page
Past Life Regression
Many people come to a hypnotherapist wanting to find out why something happened in their life thinking it has to do with previous lives. There is no evidence to support this idea. I have done research into this area and find that the brain likes to make sense of things it doesn't understand, and using regression it allows the creative part of the brain to work, but that's as far as it goes, follow up research into alledged past lives have found no evidence.
Tinnitus
Tinnitus in older people is often caused by natural hearing loss due to aging, which lessens the sensitivity of the hearing nerves. In younger people, tinnitus can sometimes occur as a result of hearing damage that is caused by excessive noise, such as loud music. Whatever the reasons you may be suffering with tinnitus, diagnosis must be done by your GP.
Stress is not a direct cause of tinnitus but it can sometimes make the symptom worse. Some people may report that their tinnitus is worse during stressful events in their life, such as bereavement. The treatment that is recommended for you will depend on whether your tinnitus has an underlying cause. For example, if your tinnitus is caused by a severe or long-term ear infection, antibiotics may be prescribed. If it is caused by a build up of earwax, then eardrops or ear irrigation (where a pressurised flow of water is used to remove the earwax) may be recommended. However, in most cases of tinnitus, there is no cure and so treatment is aimed at managing the symptom on a day-to-day basis.
This is where hypnotherapy can come in. Firstly it helps reduce the stress which often makes it worse. During therapy you can learn various techniques to relax and distract you - mindful meditation techniques can help change what you focus on.
I also give out a relaxation CD to listen to when going to sleep. Often people notice their tinnitus more at night, when the background noise has died down and the inner noise becomes more noticable. The CD helps focus the hearing to the music and the words, and it's designed to help you relax into a good sleep. Moreover, if you are distracted by the noise when you wake in the night you can use it again to help you get back off.
I have experienced tinnitus for years, thanks to my fondness for very loud rock music, so I use my own CD on a regular basis and it helps me sleep.