Happy New Year from Leatherhead hypnotherapy.  May 2018 be a good year for everyone.

How many times have we decided that this is the year we are going to change our live?  This could mean giving up smoking, losing weight, changing our job or just being more motivated.  Any of these and more are the making of our New Year Resolutions.  

Some last a day or two before they fall by the wayside.  Many never make it past the list in the front of the diary.  Why, we ask ourselves?  Why don’t we have more willpower?  After all, any of these changes would improve our lives.

The answer lies in our subconscious mind.  We have all heard the quotation ‘Don’t think of elephants’ or something similar at some time in our lives.  When we put an idea into our subconscious then the subconscious acts on that idea.

New Year resolutions tend to be negative, ‘I will stop drinking, I will never eat chocolate again, etc’.  The subconscious reacts to this by focusing our mind on what we don’t want.  We therefore begin to crave the very things we are trying to avoid.  

Far better that we phrase our resolutions in a more positive way.  For example ‘I will eat one more piece of fruit every day’ or ‘I will walk for ten minutes in my lunch break.’  Small steps we can begin to incorporate in our lives to make gradual changes rather than trying to change everything on January 1st.  Taking time to plan our changes in this way means we are far more likely to succeed in turning our new behaviour into a habit.  

Here at Leatherhead hypnotherapy we do our best to help people reprogram their subconscious mind to enable them to lose weight and eat more healthily.  Hypnotherapy can help you stop smoking in just one session and replace the cigarettes with a new behaviour more beneficial to you.  The money saved could mean you can have a holiday or buy something you have always wanted.

Hypnotherapy can help you keep your New Year resolutions in 2018.

Clients who come to my Leatherhead hypnotherapy clinic come for a wide variety of reasons.  They may be suffering from stress, anxiety or they may want to lose weight, stop smoking or it may be a phobia that is affecting their lives.  Many of these clients also complain of insomnia.

Lack of sleep can affect every area of our lives according popular newspapers and magazines it seems that there is an epidemic of insomnia in recent years.  Many articles are written about the need to keep electronic gadgets out of the bedroom, how important it is to go to bed at the same time,  keeping the bedroom to the right temperature, excluding light from the outside.  The advice is endless and then there are the remedies, lavender spray, sleep tea, herbal tablets.  The list goes on and on.  Doctors are reluctant to prescribe sleeping tablets because they become addictive over a time.  Sometimes clients feel nothing will help them.

Sleep deprivation is used as a torture because of the effect on both the mind and the body.  Severe insomnia over a period of time can affect a person’s mental and physical health.

Insomnia has two distinct patterns.  There are those people who cannot fall asleep and lie awake staring at the ceiling.  The second group are those who fall easily asleep and wake at two or three in the morning and then lie awake unable to go back to sleep.

Hypnotherapy can help with sleep as it can retrain the subconscious to enable us to fall asleep and to stay asleep.  Visualising ourselves asleep when in hypnosis watching ourselves asleep as if on a television screen ourselves asleep gives the subconscious a strong message that we can sleep throughout the night.  

Everyone is born with the ability to sleep.  If we can reprogram the subconscious in hypnosis to regain that facility, then in very short time insomnia becomes a thing of the past.  

One method of stopping the brain churning over the day’s events or worrying about the future is to turn your eyes up to the ceiling and begin counting backwards from five hundred.  Between each number blink and mentally say the word “calm”.  Very quickly the eyes become tired and the mind slows down allowing you to fall asleep.  

Years ago the suggestion was to count sheep.  Maybe this wasn’t a silly idea.  Anything that stops the mind’s chatter will help you to fall asleep.  Perhaps granny had the right idea after all.

Please contact me to see how I can help you.

There is a great deal of talk in the media at the moment about Stoptober.  It is a fact that if you can stop smoking for 28 days then you are more likely to stop for good.

Here at my Leatherhead hypnotherapy clinic I have treated many smokers who have stopped for good.  The first few days when someone stops smoking they are dealing with the addiction.  Nicotine is very addictive but after 48 hours when all the traces of nicotine have left the body the addiction fades.

Why then is stopping smoking an ongoing struggle?  This is because smoking is also an addiction of the mind, a habit in the same way a gambling addict is addicted to gambling, without putting a substance into their body.  A smoker is addicted to the action of smoking.

A smoker has many key times when they smoke.  This can range throughout the day from first thing in the morning to the last cigarette before bed.  These times are frequently attached to other behaviours for example when having a cup of coffee or a break from work, after a meal and usually when relaxing especially with an alcoholic drink.  Many people use smoking as both an incentive and a reward.  For example they will reward themselves with a cigarette when a task has been completed or will use a cigarette as a motivator:  ‘When I have had this cigarette I will ….’

Many people who come to me in Leatherhead have given up smoking for weeks, months or even years then they give in to the temptation of just one cigarette and find in a very short time they are back up to their old level of smoking.  Once you have stopped smoking there is no going back.  Just like an alcoholic who can never have just one drink, the smoker can never have just one cigarette.

Stoptober is a good incentive to take that first step.  Hypnotherapy can help to make that habit easier to break permanently. Fill out my contact form, or give me a ring to find out how it can help you.

Hypnotherapy can help people not only to lose weight but to keep it off.  One of the ways that this can be achieved is to join a Weight Workshop.

Unlike the usual weekly weight loss programmes  which focus on calorie counting and dieting, a five-week course of weigh loss by hypnotherapy will help to redefine the way you think about food.

Leatherhead hypnotherapy periodically runs a five-week weight loss course that covers all aspects of losing weight with hypnotherapy.  In a small group of no more than about 12 people the weight loss programme uses a combination of hypnosis, Neuro Linguistic Programming  (NLP) and visualisations to help you understand why you eat the wrong foods, eat too much food and eat for the wrong reasons.

During the five weekly sessions you will learn about relaxation, how to visualise the wrong foods and how to replace them with healthy eating.  In the final session you will learn how to do self-hypnosis to enable you to continue controlling your weight until a target weight is achieved.  Self-hypnois will also  help you maintain that target weight in the future.

This is not a diet.  Hypnosis for weight loss works with the subconscious mind to discover where and when eating patterns were formed.  For example if we are given sweets as children to comfort us and to stop us crying, when we are grown ups and something goes wrong the subconscious kicks in and we reach for the chocolate.  

Over the five weeks we will produce a whole picture to help you lose weight and keep it off.

Many clients come to my Leatherhead Hypnotherapy Clinic suffering from anxiety. They may be anxious about a forthcoming event like making a speech or taking a test. Some, however, suffer from anxiety that begins to affect their whole lives.

Anxiety can affect our emotions, our behaviour and our physical health. It can create a feeling of fear that makes us avoid situations that have caused anxiety in the past.

A recent client came to see me because she wanted to pass her driving test. She had now failed three tests and was beginning to believe she would never get her licence.

After our initial consultation here at my Leatherhead clinic I learned that when she was 17 during her first driving test a lorry had jack knifed in front of her. In her panic she had jumped out of the car and run back to the test centre vowing never to get behind the wheel of a car again.

Recently having moved to Leatherhead and now in her mid thirties with two children she desperately wanted to learn to drive. She had failed two more tests when on each occasion her anxiety had got the better of her.

Using an NLP technique to rewind the memories of that first test and a session of hypnosis with positive suggestions and visualisation about driving, her driving instructor noticed the difference in her straight away.

The day before her test she had another hypnotherapy session here at Leatherhead Hypnotherapy and felt extremely calm, relaxed and confident. The next day she took her test at Reigate driving test centre and passed easily. The original event, which had left her feeling so anxious, had been dealt with and four weeks later she is driving with confidence.

When we avoid the situations that make us feel anxious often this itself ensures we feel anxious and we start to worry about the next time. There are many ways hypnotherapy can help with anxiety regardless of the original cause of the problem.

Is the question asked by so many people who come to my Surrey Hypnotherapy clinic in Leatherhead.

The answer to this lies in what happens when we start to smoke. The first cigarettes we have are usually quite horrible, often they make us feel sick or even dizzy and we struggle to finish them.  The majority of people start smoking to impress their friends usually aged about fourteen or fifteen when we are at school.

Therefore we persist until we have learned how to smoke.  Once we have learned how to do something our subconscious mind turns it into an automatic function something we do without thinking about it.  Imagine how complicated our lives would be if we had to remember how to do everything, think back to when you learned to drive and how difficult it all seemed until one day it became automatic and the only time we ever think about driving is if we change our car.

This is what happens when we smoke it becomes automatic, these programmes are then saved in our subconscious memory bank and cannot be removed.  When I treat a client here at my Leatherhead Hypnotherapy Clinic for stop smoking I explain that we can leave these programmes in our memory bank and they will stay there unless we deliberately recall them.  When we are adults and we have children or grandchildren it is amazing how we remember those nursery rhymes and games from our own childhood that have been stored away.  

A recent client from Dorking told me she gave up smoking the day she discovered she was pregnant with her son at his twenty first birthday party she told him off for smoking, and he handed her the packet and dared her to smoke one.  Sadly she did and within two weeks she was smoking up to twenty cigarettes a day.

Anyone who gives up however they choose to do it whether with hypnotherapy or just plain willpower, when faced with the urge to have a just one cigarette must always remember they won’t be choosing to have just one cigarette, but they will be choosing to become a smoker again.

Talk to me today about how you can become a non smoker.

Are your New Year Resolutions already history? Many clients who come to Leatherhead Hypnotherapy started the New Year with plans to loose weight, stop smoking or get fit. Sometimes even all three. Most of these plans have now been abandoned.

One client here at my Leatherhead hypnotherapy clinic said ‘I give up smoking every Monday morning, it lasts until coffee time if I am lucky’. Why do our resolutions fail? We start out with such good intentions. We join the gym or fill the fridge with healthy food then at the first obstacle we give up and revert to our old habits.

Habits are ingrained in our subconscious mind, whether it is to have a cigarette on our way to work or a chocolate biscuit with our morning coffee.

These habits are important to us. Our subconscious had decided that these treats make us feel better. When the weather is cold and grey we reach for the chocolate bar. When work is stressful and deadlines loom we nip outside for a cigarette. When we plan to go to the gym but our favourite programme is on the television we slump on the sofa.

In hypnotherapy we can reprogram the subconscious mind to adopt new habits which are more beneficial for us. We can leave those old habits behind and learn a new way of thinking. 

Instead of seeing the chocolate biscuits as a reward we can learn that refusing the biscuit and beginning to lose weight is a reward in itself. This can lead to us feeling better about ourselves. Skipping the cigarette break in favour of tidying the clutter on our desk can reward us with not only feeling healthier but also working more efficiently.

Here at Surrey hypnotherapy in Leatherhead we can help you get your New Year Resolutions back on track.