Jun 22

Mind-Body Connection: How it Works

Posted in Background

How is it that I can sit in a room with someone and just talk to them, and it helps them change the state of their body – control pain, allergies, asthma, blood pressure or even bleeding?

That’s the question I asked – and answered – in my talk last weekend at the joint conference of the NZ Association of Professional Hypnotherapists and the NZ Association of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

I’ve been putting my main focus on this site on the personal development side of hypnotherapy lately (and branching out from hypnotherapy into other personal development tools and techniques, as well). But if the body and mind are one system – and I argue that they are – then taking care of your physical being is also part of your personal development.

So here, in a break from the continuing How Not to Change Your Life series, is some background on mind-body interaction and what that means for your ability to take charge of your own wellbeing.

It’s not a recording of my exact talk (and the people who were there participated in a Q&A session afterwards, which was excellent – I definitely was not the only person with relevant knowledge in the room). But it’s based on the slides I used, with minor changes, and my narration over the top.

Most of my colleagues don’t have a lot of scientific background (and I’m just a well-informed layman myself), so it should be accessible to you even if you aren’t a professional in the field.

Next week, back to the How Not to Change series – I’ll be talking about letting the urgent override the important. Don’t miss it.

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Jun 7

How to be Free From Fear

Posted in Techniques

It’s my birthday next month. I’ll be 44. And I’ll be climbing the walls.

The walls in question are at an indoor climbing center. And the reason is that I’m celebrating overcoming my fear of heights.

When I was about 10, my mother rigged up a rope ladder into a tree for me, at my request. But after she’d taken all that trouble, I couldn’t get more than about two rungs up it. I was too scared. I just couldn’t make my limbs move. (To her credit, she didn’t give me a hard time about it.)

Years later, when I was at university, I had one class on the seventh (and highest) floor of the Arts Building. The stairs were enclosed with glass and looked out over the back of the building, so you could see all the way to the ground. I could get up to the fifth floor still free from fear, and even to the sixth floor with a bit of anxiety, but the seventh floor was too much. I got a dropping feeling in my feet just looking down from there. For that one class, I always took the elevator.

One time, though, a woman who I knew slightly – she was in a couple of my classes, and I knew her name, but we’d never spoken – joined me in the lift. It turned out that she was afraid of enclosed spaces. She had a panic attack there inside the elevator, and when we reached our floor and the doors opened, she ran out, literally screaming.

Now, what would you think if you saw an attractive young woman run screaming from a lift that also contained a young man? I stood there like a fool while a group of students opposite fell about laughing, and mumbled something incoherent about claustrophobia.

Fear isn’t funny when it happens to you, or even to the person standing next to you. That’s why I was so glad to discover that there was a solution, a way to be free from fear.

The Fast Phobia Cure

During my training as a hypnotherapist, our teacher, the venerable Roger Saxelby, asked for a volunteer so he could demonstrate the “Fast Phobia Cure”. Now, I’d got a lot better with heights over the years, but I still wasn’t that comfortable going up a ladder, for example, so I put my hand up.

He took me through a simple sequence of imagining being in a movie theatre, watching a film of myself in my fear situation (being up high). The film would start and end with me in perfect safety, feeling fine, and the middle part, which involved the heights, would be run through very fast – and backwards, and in black and white.

After a few repetitions, I could bring colour in, slow it down, and eventually play the whole thing forwards at normal speed and feel perfectly comfortable.

And since then I’ve been able to climb up a ladder with no issues, free from fear, though I’m still very safety-conscious. I can even go up the Sky Tower (Auckland’s slightly mumbled answer to the Seattle Space Needle) in the lift that has the glass panel in the floor, and feel fine.

free from fear

Creative Commons License photo credit: Sara. Nel

Fear holds you back, courage moves you forward

Since I’ve been working on How Not to Change Your Life and How to Be Amazing, I’ve become more and more aware of how much fear holds us back from being the amazing people that we could be.

So, as part of my birthday celebration, I’m going all Hobbit on you and giving you a gift.

I’ve put together a “How to be Free from Fear” pack from resources I’ve produced over the past couple of years. It includes an ebook which consists of:

That ebook is free. It does require you to sign up as a member of my How to Be Amazing site, but there’s no charge.

I’ve also packaged together four audio tracks to help you further with overcoming fear. They are:

  • Therapeutic Relaxation (which I mention in the Emotional Circuit-Breakers ebook)
  • the Trauma Trasher (to help you overcome past traumatic events)
  • the Fast Fear Fixer (another name for the Fast Phobia Cure)
  • a talkthrough of my Paramount Pictures Technique for crushing fear like a beer can.

You can get those for $17 USD from the How to be Free from Fear page on Howtobeamazing.com. That’s also where you go to download the free ebook.

If you’re not already a member, sign up from that page. If you are already signed up to the How to Be Amazing mailing list, you automatically have member access, but you’ll need to click the “send me my password” button – it’s a randomized password, you won’t guess it, and I haven’t sent them out.

So: grab the free ebook. Grow your courage. And happy my-birthday to you.

(I’ll post some pictures of me on the climbing wall once I have them.)

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Jan 4

How to Stop Smoking

Posted in

This page pulls together my most useful posts and other information and links about smoking and how to stop smoking. As a hypnotherapist and health coach, I see a lot of people who want to quit smoking cigarettes, and I’ve studied the topic and become a bit of a stop smoking expert.

I have a series of videos in which I interview a client whom I helped to quit smoking (How to Get Unstuck), and she makes a great point: Stopping smoking is not just the best change you can make for your health. It’s a personal development issue. Quitting smoking is about taking back control of your life. It’s not just a medical issue, it’s an emotional issue too, as my article Smoking and anger management explores.

Not only anger, but also anxiety and depression are linked to smoking. In fact, one study found that people who smoke tend to have reduced quality of life. But smoking is widely used for stress management, creating a vicious cycle. (Smokers also sleep less soundly and become increasingly socially isolated, both of which are harmful to general and mental health). Even secondhand smoke can be linked to depression.

What’s more, every year, hundreds of thousands of people fail to stop smoking in my small country alone – millions worldwide. Help to quit smoking is badly needed.

So I’ve now released a free stop smoking ebook which is also part of an affordable online course for people who want help to stop smoking. The course is called Smokefree Life, and you can get it through that link, for about the cost of a couple of packs of cigarettes.

As well as material drawn from the posts and links I’ve set out below, it includes other useful quit-smoking methods, tools, tips and techniques, 5 relaxing hypnotherapy audio tracks and some of my best advice on stress management and motivation.

How nicotine works

When you smoke a cigarette, nicotine is absorbed through your lungs into your bloodstream and reaches your brain. (Most of the poisons in cigarettes are there to help it get to your brain more quickly.) In the brain, it stimulates receptors which directly affect the dopamine system, which is your motivation and reward system. This is one reason it’s so hard for many people to stop smoking cigarettes, because they fool your brain into wanting them (even if you don’t like them). How Stuff Works has an excellent summary of the whole process.

Ways to quit smoking

Smoking is a complex behaviour, and there is not just one method to stop smoking. Controversy rages, of course, over the best stop-smoking method: is it drugs, behavioural counselling, hypnosis? Despite the extreme positions you’ll find on all of those ways to stop smoking, there is evidence for all of them, and none of them is a magic bullet. Quit Smoking Methods sets out to list them all (with user contributions, some of them bizarre). Here are the ones I know most about.

Nicotine Replacement Therapy

I used to be opposed to NRT, but I’ve now changed my mind on nicotine replacement therapy. Like every other treatment, it doesn’t work for everyone quitting smoking, and it needs to be provided by someone who knows what they’re doing, and used correctly, if it’s going to be effective. But, with those disclaimers, I don’t believe it’s harmful and I do believe it’s helpful. I give it to my clients if it’s appropriate for their situation, based on a standard test that’s also in my ebook How to Stop Smoking (I’m authorised to give out NRT subsidy cards).

(For an alternative view claiming that NRT is harmful, see Ginzel et al from the Journal of Health Psychology, 2007.)

Stop-Smoking Drugs

Other drugs, such as varenicline (Chantix or Champix), are sometimes prescribed by doctors to help in stopping smoking. Among my most popular blog posts are two questioning the effectiveness and safety of varenicline: Just say no to stop-smoking drugs and more bad publicity for Chantix/Champix. The advice I hear is that (like anything else) it doesn’t work for everyone, but the people it does work for it works for really quickly. But it can have bad side effects, like any drug that messes about with your brain chemistry. Sounds like a last-resort option to me.

Hypnosis to Quit Smoking

As a Registered Hypnotherapist I’m obviously interested in helping people quit smoking with hypnosis. But does it work? (People ask me that all the time.) I go into the evidence in several articles here:

Support from others

Support from other people is very important if you want to stop smoking cigarettes. Some people are even using social media to help them quit smoking.

How to quit smoking

So, you might be asking, can you help me quit smoking? I’m glad you asked.

Start out with 10 tips to stop smoking and Dealing with recovery effects from smoking. (“Recovery effects” are also known as withdrawal symptoms.) They’re just two of my free online resources to stop smoking.

If you find you need more help, though, take a look at my free stop-smoking ebook, How to Stop Smoking, and my stop smoking online course, Smokefree Life. I’ve deliberately kept the course very affordable so that as many people as possible can get stop-smoking help (if I made it free, though, you wouldn’t have as much motivation to complete it, so I do charge something). A quit-smoking ebook, a simple, research-based method to quit smoking, a self-check, a quit plan template, and 5 hypnotherapy audio recordings in MP3 format are all included, and it covers questions that a lot of people have such as how to quit smoking without gaining weight, quit smoking withdrawal symptoms and the benefits of giving up smoking. Click here to find out more.

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