What is SF hypnotherapy and how can it help you become more resilient?
Because of Covid, so many people are having to adapt to new ways of living and working. These changes are causing enormous stress.
The Centre for Mental Health together with the NHS found in October 2020 that about 20% of people in England need or will need mental health support as a result of Covid-19.
When you are stressed, you may feel overwhelmed by how to manage even small things in your daily life; or feel angry because your situation doesn’t feel fair; you may have problems sleeping and your brain may feel foggy and sluggish; it can be that you have problems interacting with people; or struggle with focusing and being productive at work.
So many people need help to manage and cope with change more easily and with less stress, so they can feel calmer, be more productive and feel more in control.
Why is your brain resisting change and causing you so much stress?
The Primitive Brain
The human brain generally doesn’t like change because we have this very primitive part of the brain from several 100,000 years ago and more and it still believes we live in the Stone Age. It makes sense to the primitive mind that change can be very dangerous. Who knows what will jump out at you behind that metaphorical hill of change? Can you cope with it and survive?
Change also takes conscious thinking effort and thinking guzzles calories. This primitive mind believes food is hard to come by and therefore we are hardwired to conserve energy (and to eat all the calories we can when it’s there…).
Avoiding danger and conserving energy have the consequence of resisting new things.
The Intellectual Mind
Thankfully, we do have a newer, intellectual and creative part of the brain that can convince the primitive one that some particular change is going to be beneficial and therefore override this aversion to use up energy and possibly face danger.
The problem is that many changes due to Covid can be hard to explain to yourself as useful. Instead the primitive mind continues to tell you things like “I don’t know how to cope” or “it will not get better for me”. This keeps you stuck so you don’t expose yourself to those hungry stone age tiger that might still lurk around. It also makes you feel incredibly anxious and stressed out by all that is happening so fast around us. It feels like a threat to your very survival.
To manage stress, we need to know how to use our intellectual brain to see things from a more useful viewpoint. This calms this anxious primitive part down so we can move forward in a way that is helpful to us.
There are ways of working around the primitive mind so you can feel hopeful and in control again. You just need to know how so you can have that energy and focus again to be productive at work or have fun and interesting conversations with your family and friends. Solution Focused (SF) Brief therapy with hypnosis is one very effective way of doing this.
So what is SF hypnotherapy? How can it help me become more resilient?
What is hypnosis?
Hypnosis is quite ordinary in many ways. It’s a trance state and we go in and out of trance many times every day. You are in trance when you do something and find yourself losing track of time, being very focused and not noticing so much of what goes on around you.
Have you ever been to the cinema and that long 2½ hour film just flew by? Or meant to drive somewhere only for your subconscious mind to take over and instead take you on your usual route to work / nursery / shop instead? Not talking about realising that you’ve just spent 1 hour (or more!) on Facebook or Pinterest…
So basically, trance is a focused state of mind. It can be very valuable in itself as this state can help to empty your internal stress bucket (depending on what you’re doing while in trance) leaving you with more capacity left for other things. In hypnosis, I induce and strengthen trance and then guide my clients to really use that state in a way that supports them. This can help you change so you can feel more in control and achieve e.g. better relationships, be more productive at work, sleep better.
What is good about hypnotherapy?
In hypnosis your critical faculties are slightly lowered. This means that your conscious mind is less likely to pop up and say things like “you’re not smart / experienced / rich / educated / good / whatever enough” when you are trying to change into ways that are healthier and more fulfilling for you. Every thought you have happens because neurons connect in your brain. When you think new thoughts, new connections are made – you are effectively rewiring your brain. In hypnosis it is much easier and quicker to change as you are not arguing against yourself!
Learning also happens faster when you are clear on your underlying motivations – your true whys; emotions – how it feels to be who you want to be; and sensory experiences. Solution Focused Brief therapy is ideal for exploring this before hypnosis.
The type of hypnosis I use (dissociative, non-directive) further amplifies your change because it accesses that part of the brain that daydreams and is creative (the Default Mode Network, DMN). Your brain is more active when accessing the DMN than during any other activity (yes, that includes logical problem solving!).
One very pragmatic reason why e.g. the Google HQ’s environment is so famously diverse with bowling alleys, rest areas, places to train and many other fantastic features, is that it allows people to relax and not focus logically on problems. This activates the DMN so they can come up with innovative ideas.
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them" Einstein
EEG (ElectroEncephaloGram) shows that during Solution Focused hypnosis, those areas that are involved in daydreaming and creativity are very active, and Alpha and Theta waves also increase. This means that you can come up with new solutions that are useful to you; not just do more of what you’ve done before.
The result is that the brain rewires itself to become who you want to be, much faster and more easily than if you are trying to do this by logically talking to yourself.
What Hypnosis is not!
A Magical Super Power?!!
It is not a super-power that can take over your mind and tell you to do things you don’t want to do. Despite what you may have seen on stage or TV, it is not possible.
If it really was possible, imagine what some devious politicians / CEOs / marketing agencies would already have used it for! Why waste all that effort, time and money on ad campaigns, propaganda, putting people with different ideas in prison etc if you could just mass-hypnotise them?
When it seems like someone has been hypnotised to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise, what has happened is that on some level the subject has agreed to go along with this. An example is stage hypnosis where it can give an audience member an excuse to let go of inhibitions and just have fun. If something is against your values and beliefs, you just will not listen to or agree to do it - even if in hypnosis. This is both for good and for bad, as we often don’t listen to logic or truth either if we believe something else to start with.
So what about being influenced?
That said, we are constantly bombarded with suggestions that absolutely influence our choices. We are often very suggestible. If we weren’t, advertising campaigns etc would not work of course.
There are a number of psychological explanations to why we are suggestible in different situations, but hypnosis is not one of them. The slippery slope is when we don’t have too many opinions about whatever it is someone is trying to sell us on. We need to be aware of what we actually want and believe so we don’t just get swept up by what other people want us to believe. But that is not hypnosis; that is about biases, upbringing, peer pressure and other psychological qualities.