What if there was a way to program your mind so you could stop smoking, or eat more healthy ? What if you could find permanent happiness simply by purposefully reprogramming your subconscious mind ? Is it possible to use self guided hypnotherapy to reprogram your brain to think differently ?
Our minds are our greatest asset – or can be our biggest problem. Everything we do is the result of what our brain tells us – and for most people their lives are a constant tug of war between their conscious and subconscious thoughts.
How many times have you wondered why you did something despite consciously knowing you didn’t want to do it? Smoking, overeating, underachieving, anger, depression – no one forces us to suffer from these serious issues. No one makes the decision for us to eat that tub of ice cream or act out in rage over a small thing a neighbour or friend did. It all comes from how our mind interprets its current surrounding and how it tells us to behave.
For example, researchers have long known that poor eating habits had little to do in most cases with actual feelings of hunger. Instead people for a wide variety of deeply embedded psychological reasons – stress being one of the most common – eat to soothe deep emotions in their subconscious mind – and thus the term comfort food.
The premise behind self guided hypnosis is that it is possible through suggestive techniques to change how the subconscious mind manifests itself in conscious thought. The debate on whether or not hypnosis actually works dates back to the time of the Egyptians and continues today. As with many alternative therapies, medical science struggles to quantify the actual success rate in hypnotherapy treatment.
As researchers strive to understand how the human mind works, the psychiatric community is learning more and more about the power of hypnosis and the two layers of the human mind. The subconscious mind is a complicated series of memories, emotions and beliefs – and plays a key role in how a person’s personality develops. The key to self guided hypnosis is to reprogram those elements in a matter that you consciously choose. For example – if you want to feel a more permanent sense of happiness – it is quite possible to reprogram your subconscious mind to focus on happiness – after all – what is happiness and where does it come from if not from the mind of the person who either feels happy or unhappy ?
How Self Guided Hypnotherapy Works…
Self Guided hypnotherapy in most cases involves the use of recorded sound tracks listened to through headphones. Typically there are three stages of the hypnotic process. The first stage is to relax the body through controlled breathing and a conscious effort to relax the muscles which in turn allows the brain to slow its thought processing allowing it to be open to suggestion.
The second stage is to use autosuggestion to program both the conscious and subconscious mind. This can be achieved through methodical speech, using carefully prepared scripts and emphasis on certain words in the recorded therapy session. It is in this stage where hypnosis gets it’s biggest challenge from those that don’t understand it – but there is nothing mystical or magical about hypnosis or self guided hypnotherapy – it is the simple science of programming the brain to think a certain way.
The final stage is most often called the “Return Stage “ where the patient is brought back from the state of relaxation ( called a trance ) to the conscious alert world.
Research has shown that there is no negative side effects from hypnotherapy – the worst that can happen is no results are achieved at all.
Does Hypnotherapy Actually Work ?
For many individuals, hypnotherapy has been a true blessing – while others claim it has had no effect. One of the most important starting points for a person to gain full benefit from hypnotherapy is found in a person’s willingness or openness to the actual treatment. If a person goes into a hypnotherapy session with the firm belief that this is a foolish endeavour and won’t work – the patient creates a self fulfilling conclusion – and there is very little chance that it will work for them or that they will receive full benefit from the hypnotherapy session.
If on the other hand the patient is open to the hypnotherapy session and releases their conscious mind so the subconscious mind can be open to suggestion and programming – the results can be quite spectacular. With no resistance holding the mind back from being open to change and suggestion – the therapy can take almost immediately.
It should also be noted that wanting the hypnotherapy session to work with a great deal of desire can actually hinder the results as the mind doesn’t relax enough to accept the suggestive process. This is due to the patient staying in a state of alertness not conducive to the programming of the subconscious mind.
Hypnosis and hypnotherapy fall under the classification of Neuro Linguistic Programming ( NLP ) which involves the process of creating a model of behaviour and then applying a series of techniques to match the subject or patient’s behaviour and personality traits to that prototype – thus you will often hear the term “modelling “ when discussing NLP techniques.
Hypnotherapy Treatments for Physical Ailments
As the Hypnotherapy industry grows, it is being used not just for conditions of mental conditioning – but also for treating diseases and afflictions such as irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, muscle tension and a host of other ailments doctors suspect are being caused not by physical problems in the body – but by the way the patient’s mind controls the body.
For example – a person who is experiencing migraines may in fact be found to be continually grinding their teeth – a condition that can be caused by stress or worry. Stress has long been known to affect the digestive tract – and has been closely linked to heart disease. People who complain of chronic neck pain have been treated not for an actual problem with the spine or muscles – but the tension being caused by the mind putting undue stress on the muscles themselves, resulting in a state of rigid tightness.
Hypnotherapy for Treating Addictions.
For several decades now alternative medicine practitioners have been using hypnotherapy to assist people with addictions to smoking and alcoholism. The premise is that despite these addictions manifesting themselves in actual serious physical withdrawal symptoms – the patient can reverse these symptoms through hypnotherapy.
The root element of all of these treatments is the strengthening of the resolve in the conscious mind being provided by the subconscious mind. It is rare that a person going into the hypnotherapy session expecting the treatment to simply cure their desire to smoke, that it will take. Instead, the premise is that the patient through the hypnotherapy treatment will increase their resolve both in conscious thought as well as subconscious primary thought.
Hypnotherapy for Treating Weight Loss and Eating Disorders
Hypnotherapy has proven to be highly effective in treating obesity as well as anorexia – both of which have had their causes traced to psychological behaviour, beliefs and habits. Patients using hypnotherapy in addition to professional medical therapy and counselling have found the results to be much more significant than simple counselling alone.
One of the reasons hypnotherapy works so well for eating issues is that by its nature, it reprograms the subconscious mind to change it’s wants and desires. For people that overeat the cause of their eating is often found in the fact they find comfort when consuming particular foods. This is of course only a secondary factor to the real root cause which can be anything from suppressed memories to a way for dealing with stress that returns them psychologically to a time when they were younger and the stress wasn’t present – or their parents were there to make the problem go away.
For patients suffering from eating disorders such as bulimia or anorexia, their aversion to eating is often rooted in a desire to look thinner but again this is only a cause and effect symptom indicating deeper psychological issues.
In both cases though, hypnotherapy has been shown to help the patient make progress in the healing process.
Programming for Success
other area where hypnotherapy has become an important role player is in human performance. This is a wide spectrum of consideration – encompassing everything from athletes to executives but the goal is always the same – to gain maximum efficiency from their efforts.
Golf is a sport where the mind plays a vital role in the success of the player in both the accurate repetition of their golf club swing, as well as their mental approach to the game in high pressure situations such as major tournaments where millions of dollars can depend on a single putt or swing of a club. On the amateur level, golfers have been using hypnotherapy for decades to help them control their minds – and therefore their game.
Many professional teams across major leagues have started to employ psychologists and psychotherapists to assist their players in reaching their goals. The value of this type of performance programming was never more evident than in the recent 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics where the Canadian Government approved the use of advanced performance counselling for their athletes which included hypnotherapy – and the result was that for the first time in their history, they won the most Gold Medals of all the participating countries. In comparison, in 2006 they finished with 7 Gold Medals – and 2010 14 Gold Medals – a full 100% improvement in results.
Hypnotherapy for Everyday Life.
It is said you are the captain of your own mind – and you can either guide your vessel to safe waters filled with prosperity, or you can abdicate the responsibility and let fate decide the outcome. All elements of the human experience can be improved upon using hypnotherapy and this website is about helping others achieve their potential in life.
