You may have read in previous blog posts about the subconscious mind. We all have one and it accounts for over ninety percent of the mind. You may also have read that this area holds our memories and experiences along with our beliefs, rues, and automatic thoughts. Hypnotherapy works at this level. Through suggestions made in trance by a professional hypnotherapist beliefs, rules and automatic thoughts can be changed. In so doing behaviours can change. For example, an individual may be calmer and more confident in stressful and unfamiliar situations.
Stress and the anxiety and fear that it creates, often silently, affects your sleep quality, mood, health, and cognitive performance even more than you realise. It is something we all face in our lives at some point so I will be using this to demonstrate how to break free from it with hypnotherapy. However, any life unhelpful behaviours can be addressed though hypnotherapy to raise your productivity, enjoyment, happiness, and success in life. If I could recommend one type of therapy to everyone on our planet this would be it.
Hypnotherapy success rates of over eighty percent are higher than for any other therapy. This is no doubt due to its working with the largest part of the mind, the subconscious, to rewire beliefs, rules and thoughts that drive our behaviours.
In my experience stress showed up because I felt overwhelmed by the number of tasks that I needed to complete in one day. You may well relate to this. I started by working at a cognitive practical level with a high in common sense professional hypnotherapist to prioritise and allocate time to my main tasks over a week, a month, a quarter, and a year. I learned that we overestimate what we can complete in a day but underestimate what we can complete in the other periods. Of course, there are other things that assume our time including sleep, eating and exercise. I found the assessment of my week, one hundred- and sixty-eight-hour exercise split into hourly slots for ease, to be particularly useful.
The hypnotherapy part of the session involved suggestions to my subconscious that I would use the information and knowledge that I had developed about time and workload to update my thinking.
So that was it right? Wrong! I still felt overwhelmed by the tasks list because I had beliefs, rules and thoughts at a subconscious level driving the physiological stress I felt in the here and now as well as anxiety about what was coming, the future.
So, what next? Working at a conscious level we had a conversation about the beliefs, rules and thoughts that were relevant to this issue. For example, I believed that I was less productive than my partner. One rule that I had developed over time was to keep busy. A common automatic thought was what is the next thing I need to do? We changed each of these in turn to something more helpful to what I was trying to achieve – a state of calm and feeling enough regarding tasks on my to do list. For example, I now believe that comparison is the death of joy and senseless as you cannot compare apples with pears! Hey, it works for me. I changed my rule about keeping busy to having a balanced day that included exercise and rest. My automatic thought became take a step back before doing anything. Each of these new more helpful thoughts were woven into a concentrate and relax script by the hypnotherapist.