Achieve Your Goals with Positive-Hypnosis's Hypnotherapy

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Stress can have a negative impact on your health and well-being. Our hypnotherapy program can help you reduce stress, manage anxiety, and improve your overall quality of life in dealing with:

Anxiety & stress

Anxiety can affect our whole life. It can affect how we feel, how we behave and can cause physical symptoms. It feels a bit like fear but whereas we know what we are frightened of, we often don't know what we are anxious about. Anxiety is often triggered by stress in our lives. Some of us are more vulnerable to anxiety than others, but even those who become anxious easily can learn to manage it well. We can also make ourselves anxious with "negative self-talk" when we keep telling ourselves the worst will happen.

Whatever the cause of our anxious feelings or stress, clinical hypnotherapy is an effective intervention. It can help to create a state of deep relaxation, allow for identification and alleviating triggers that cause the condition in our subconscious mind and changing behavioural patterns for benefit, giving us back control (see what Anxiety UK has to say at http://www.anxietyuk.org.uk/get-help/what-kind-of-treatmentis-best-for-me/clinical-hypnotherapy/)

Below we describe some of the common forms of anxieties and stress inducing situations where clinical hypnotherapy can help:

a. Performance anxiety, public speaking and performance enhancement

Anxiety can limit how well we perform and have a detrimental impact on our selfconfidence. This may occur in specific (often unfamiliar) situations such as a public speaking and presentation giving which can impact on progression at work or fulfilling social responsibilities. Also, anxiety can be a barrier to our success. People are often unable to achieve levels of performance that accurately represent their true potential due to self-imposed stumbling blocks. There are two fears that can impair how well we perform. They are the fear of failure and the fear of success. Either can be equally bad for our performance. Hypnotherapy can help facilitate positive self-talk and shift our perception from negative to positive, thereby reprogramming us for success. By inducing a more relaxed and focussed state of mind, this will allow achievement of our goals and 

mitigation of negative or constraining behaviours. Positive thinking encourages positive 

performance. Hypnosis guided by a therapist and supported by learning self-hypnosis, 

can help us to remove the subconscious associations which triggers limiting self beliefs 

and enable us to gain control of our thought patterns for a more positive and confident 

future.

b. Social anxiety, inhibitions and shyness

Social anxiety is a fear of how others might see us, what they think of us, and feeling that 

whatever we do is being noticed and judged. It can also be a feeling of unease when 

meeting new people or dealing with authority figures http://www.intuity.org.uk/panic-attacks.htm. Social anxiety often starts in childhood and progresses over time. Negative life experiences can reinforce this feeling of anxiety. If a person is shy, unsure of themselves or repeatedly put in situations where they feel judged as inferior, then they can develop negative beliefs about themselves as well as self-limiting inhibitions. 

Although social anxiety and shyness are very similar, they are not the same thing. Social anxiety involves feelings of fear about social or performance situations, but it does not necessarily involve the avoidance of, or withdrawal from, these situations. Some people may appear to be very outgoing; but on the inside they are terribly anxious and simply very good at hiding their feelings. In contrast, those who are shy tend to withdraw from or avoid social contact because of feelings of social anxiety. People who are shy always experience social anxiety, but those with social anxiety may not always act shy.

Symptoms of shyness and social anxiety can include:

• Being very sensitive to being observed, scrutinised or criticised

• Avoiding eye contact 

• Being uncomfortable with large groups of people

• Blushing, stuttering, feeling panicky or anxious in a social setting

If you want to be able to speak in public without fear, make presentations with confidence and look forward to a life free from social anxiety, hypnotherapy can help. 

c. Blushing

Blushing is a natural and involuntary physical response to emotional feelings such as 

embarrassment, guilt or nervousness which everyone experiences. However, blushing cancreate feelings of anxiety which can make the blushing worse, which then increases feelings of anxiety (creating a vicious circle). Sometimes blushing is situational, such as when you are the focus of attention.. Clinical hypnotherapy can help to reduce blushing in a number of different ways. It targets our unconscious mind to create new, positive unconscious reactions to the external triggers which causes blushing and also by helping us to feel less uncomfortable in situations where we are prone to becoming flushed. A clinical hypnotherapist can help build confidence and assertiveness so to reduce feeling of vulnerability and reduce the blushing response.

d. Exam & interview nerves

Exam and interview nerves can affect all of us, no matter how clever we are or how well we have prepared. Exams are used to assess our abilities for university places; jobs, driving a car etc. and the strain of this can be overwhelming as we have to prove ourselves to others. Nerves can get out of control and cause anxiety, creating a vicious circle,leading to more nervous feelings. If you are suffering from exam (including driving tests) or interview nerves, then hypnotherapy can help you to overcome your anxieties and any fear of failure. As well as increasing your confidence, concentration and motivation, hypnotherapy can help you increase your memory and learning ability. Usually, you will be taught self-hypnosis to feel more relaxed and in greater control.

e. Panic attacks

Panic attacks can be very frightening and are related to anxiety. They can occur without warning and with varying intensity and frequency. Our bodies are designed to respond to danger; we have an inbuilt defence mechanism known as the "fight or flight" response, a natural alarm system which helps us to avoid immediate danger. This response can often be triggered inappropriately in people with a phobia or extreme fear of a specific thing. In many cases, a trigger might not be known. 

Possible symptoms of a panic attack include:

• Shaking and trembling

• Rapid, pounding heartbeat or chest pain

• Difficulty breathing and hyperventilation

• Sweating, flushing, nausea or dry mouth

• Dizziness, blurred vision or faintness

• Feeling of losing control, detachment from reality or even fear of dying

• Sensation of needing to escape from the place where the attack occurs

Clinicalhypnotherapy can be very effective at resetting the level at which the alarm is triggered and lowering anxiety, so that panic attacks are controlled or no longer occur. It can reduce anxiety by rebalancing of the sympathetic nervous system that generates the physical responses. 

f. Anger management

Anger is a very normal emotional response when it is needed to protect ourselves against 

perceived attacks or threats. It becomes a problem when it is out of control and affects our lives and those around us. Anger can result from actual or perceived situations and is usually associated with a sense that one has been treated unfairly by someone else or the wider world. Anger is also an expression of other emotional factors in our lives. It can be a way of dealing with stress, fear, sadness or depression, or when we do not feel in control of our own lives. Hypnosis can help us see the emotions behind anger and help direct us toward more useful behaviours. By using relaxation techniques and identifying the causes of anger, clinical hypnotherapy can be used to gain greater self-control and deal positively with difficult situations which may have previously triggered feelings of anger.

Relaxation techniques & self-hypnosis

Self-hypnosis is a technique which can be taught to you by your hypnotherapist and which you can use to guide yourself into a state of relaxation or different state of consciousness that is beneficial in itself. It can also be used to help you achieve beneficial changes in order to meet your specific goals (that should be discussed and agreed with your Practitioner). 

Self-hypnosis is a way of utilising your inner resources to deal with any challenges in life as well as attaining positive change for the future and can be used with psychological and physical issues in addition to self-improvement. A deep state of relaxation has been shown to allow an individual to be more open to new ideas of change through the use of suggestion, communicating directly with the unconscious part of the brain and avoiding the self-limiting constraints of the conscious. 

We teach relaxation techniques, usually through the adoption of self-hypnosis and trance, that can enable you to achieve this deep and fulfilling state of relaxation.