Beyond The Swinging Watch - Hypnosis and Psychology in Everyday Life

  “I can’t seem to relax” Busy and stressful day to day life means that many know they need to relax but find it difficult to actually do it. Sometimes people tell me that they struggle to relax because they can’t ‘switch their mind off’. A person may believe they are unable to relax because their mind simply races through all the things they have done that day and the plans for the next. It feels like their mind does not switch off and as a result become more stressed. Did you know that thinking and relaxing are two different things? It is perfectly possible to benefit from relaxation even when your mind is thinking about other things. When relaxing almost always our mind will wander, and this has little effect on the benefits of relaxation. Hypnosis is best described as deep, focused relaxation. A person is not asleep and is perfectly aware of what is said and what is going on around them; the idea of being unconscious is a myth. I often tell clients who are experiencing hypnos...

  How do you feel about the idea of having a blood test?   How about the thought of the upcoming Covid-19 vaccination? For someone who has an extreme fear of needles in a medical setting (trypanophobia) answering those two questions would, most likely, have produced feelings of mild fear even though they there are no needles near them. The phobia may have begun as aichophobia, the fear of sharp objects, but has substituted to focus on medical procedures and needles in particular. Like all phobias, trypanophobia is an irrational fear. The person suffering from the fear knows that it is irrational. Nevertheless, the fear, panic and a feeling of being out of control happens whether they try to suppress it or not. In fact, if they do try and suppress it then the extreme panic is usually stronger in intensity. Long-Term Effects Being unable to have an injection, for example, means they are going to be unwilling to seek medical help for other problems, just in case they have to ha...

  By the time anxiety symptoms have become an intolerable problem, sufferers have come to a conclusion about what the cause is and how to overcome it. The problem? All efforts to overcome the anxiety have either failed or the benefits have been short lived. In my experience, there are five-first steps of understanding that help a person begin the process of dealing with their anxiety for good. Understanding that Stress and Anxiety are Two Different Things Very often the terms stress and anxiety are used interchangeably, but in practice they mean to very different things. Stress : A physical and psychological response to the demands of current circumstances. This is most commonly experienced when the demands of the situation are greater than the individual believe they can cope with. Anxiety: A physical and psychological response to unconscious pressures. This is most commonly a build up of emotion experiences from an individual’s formative years. The symptoms a person experiences ...

  James has an important meeting with a work client but he is stuck in traffic and worries that he is going to be late. Of course he wants to make a favourable impression and being late is not ideal. On top of this he had a row with his partner about whose family you were going to spend Christmas with and he said some things he now wishes he hadn’t. Also preying on his mind is the phone-call appointment he has booked with the doctor about some blood test results. This has been worrying him because the doctor asked to speak to him, and he can’t shake off the nagging thought that it could be bad news. An interesting difference in how people respond to stressful events is the type of personality traits they exhibit. The personality traits will influence the typical way a person will react to events they face. In general terms, Psychologists refer to personality as a set of characteristics, attitudes and temperament. The interesting thing about personality traits is that they tend to...