The Power to Empower

It’s easy to think back to our own childhood and remember the good bits and the bad, but can we as parents ever really get back in touch with what it really feels like to be a kid? Sure we can empathise when a child says they are afraid or upset, but it’s hard to recollect the powerful, complicated and often unexplained feelings that our children and teens have when interacting with the world around them. This is where specialist children’s hypnotherapy can make all the difference.

Hypnosis helps young people deal with issues of low self-esteem, motivation for learning and anxiety. Russell Hemmings is an expert in dealing with all these worries and the ramifications they can have on family life. His supportive and nurturing therapies teach kids and their families a range of strategies to help them deal effectively with the problems they are experiencing, giving them the tools they need to maximise their true potential. If you’re concerned that your child may need help, just click or call and act now to ensure a brighter future.

The skinny on sugar

I found this excellent video recently and thought I would share it with you because it reveals some really eye-opening facts about our diet, sugary drinks and the world’s obesity epidemic.
It reveals very clearly why sugar is one of the root causes of the growing obesity rate – really quite scary stuff.

It’s from American Dr Robert Lustig. It’s rather long – about 90 minutes – but it’s really worth a watch. And it’s had more than 3 million views so the GREAT news is people are listening.

Many of the people I see for weight loss are actually addicted to sugar.
We all like a sweet treat once in a while, but for some people sugar is like a drug. In the last 50 years sugar consumption has tripled.
Grabbing a cupcake or downing a can of fizz can be that little sugar fix that helps us get through the day when our energy levels are flagging, but what we may not consider is that sugar actually acts like a drug on our brains. This is because when we eat it the ‘pleasure’ chemical dopamine is released, which instantly lifts our mood. However, when that sugar rush is over, it can leave you feeling tired and cranky, causing us to seek out the sugar hit again.

Even more worrying is the fact that what also tends to happen is that our waistlines begin to expand. It’s no coincidence that as sugar consumption has increased dramatically, so too has the incidence of Type-2 diabetes, which has shot up by a massive 50% in the last seven years.

If you have a sweet tooth and you know your sugar cravings are having a detrimental effect on your life, then hypnotherapy can help you to break the addiction. By re-programming your brain to crave other foods, it transforms the way you eat and makes losing weight inevitable as part of the process of rejecting an unhealthy diet and embracing one that will make you thin, healthy and full of beans (rather than cake!).

Hypnotherapy: Not just for celebrities

For a long time celebrities have been using hypnotherapy to help in their careers.
Whether it’s to overcome performance anxiety before a stage appearance, improving concentration levels before a big sporting event or using the therapy for weight loss, stars the world over have been turning to hypnotherapy for help.
And their results have been well documented.

Singer Lilly Allen famous lost a lot of weight using hypnotherapy. Actor Matt Damon had therapy to help him quit smoking and golfer Tiger Woods turned to hypnosis to get “in the zone”.
Stars who suffer with performance anxiety regularly turn to a hypnotherapist to overcome the debilitating condition.
And more recently, TV cook Nigella Lawson hit the headlines when she lost a lot of weight using hypnotherapy.
It doesn’t matter whether you are successful and confident in your career and personal life, speaking in front of an audience can send even the strongest of us rushing for the wings, trembling with fright.
Performance anxiety is not about being weak. It’s an emotional reaction to feeling vulnerable and exposed. What if people laugh or criticise? What if you can’t remember what to say and clam-up on stage? All of these fears provoke the fight or flight response, and flight tends to dominate!
And of course the build-up to the performance itself has only served to heighten those sub-conscious fears, so that when the day dawns you’re ready to run.

That’s why so many well-known faces turn to Cognitive Behaviour Hypnotherapy for help. From the likes of David Beckham to Winston Churchill, many performers and members of high office have tapped in to the benefits of hypnosis to help them get over their issues.
The therapy allows you to tackle the psychological and emotional underpinnings of your fears and re-patterns your responses to frightening and stressful situations so that you can take to the stage or make that presentation with confidence.

BUT. The beauty of hypnotherapy is that it is there for anyone to access. It is not just for the rich and famous.
I have so many great stories of clients realising their dreams after sessions with me. From weight loss and phobias to sporting achievements and academic success.
See a selection of my hypnotherapy success stories here and if you have an issue you need solving, drop the clinic a line.

 

Are you addicted to technology?

It’s a familiar story these days.
You go on holiday and can’t switch off your smartphone for even an hour incase you miss an email/text/status update.
You stand at the school gate phone in hand and you won’t go anywhere without your tablet/laptop/netbook.

The world really is at our fingertips 24/7 these days and we have the ability to communicate in some form, every minute of the day if we choose.
Of course, this has many benefits, but recent research has thrown up a rather worrying downside.
There is a growing reliance of the younger generation on their phones/consoles etc. And in some cases it has been shown to be as powerful as any other addiction.

The study, carried out by The University of Maryland, called The World Unplugged asked more than a thousand teenagers around the globe to go without any kind of technology for 24 hours. Worryingly, 50% of the students actually dropped out saying it was too hard. The remainder experienced some eye opening effects. A “clear majority” of almost 1,000 university students, interviewed at 12 campuses in 10 countries, including Britain, America and China, were unable to voluntarily avoid their gadgets for one full day, they concluded.

The University of Maryland research described students’ thoughts in vivid detail, in which they admit to cravings, anxiety attacks and depression when forced to abstain from using media.
Professor Susan Moeller reported that initially students expected to suffer simple frustration, “but they didn’t expect to have the psychological effects, to be lonely, to be panicked, the anxiety, literally heart palpitations.” One student even reported that he felt symptoms similar to phantom limb syndrome, which is often suffered by people who have had limbs amputated.

The study concluded that withdrawal symptoms experienced by young people deprived of gadgets and technology could be compared to those felt by drug addicts or smokers going “cold turkey”.

Of course the worrying thing for parents is that the time their children spend on gadgets is often time taken away from other important things like learning, exercise and spending quality time with family and friends.
If you are worried that your child may be addicted to gadgets, hypnotherapy can help them regain the balance in their lives. This gentle therapy helps anyone suffering from an addiction by re-training the brain to change damaging behaviours and be able to focus on what’s really important.

Are you a diet butterfly?

Why is it that the minute you decide to go on a diet, you instantly feel hungry?
Well there are many reasons. Some are physical and some emotional – but they can all de-rail a diet almost as soon as you start it!
When you start restricting your calorie intake, your body goes into survival mode, thinking it needs to prepare for a period of starvation. Overcoming this feeling takes a lot of will power and often dieters will cave in to temptation, because the desire to satisfy those cravings is so overwhelming.
On top of this, the emotional impact of denying yourself a source of pleasure or comfort can make you feel irritable, emotional or very lethargic. This in turn leaves you open to weakness and the whole cycle starts again.

Hypnotherapy can help you stop sabotaging yourself. It works by turning off the cravings and re-educating your brain to think differently about food.
In my clinic I see so many people who have very complex relationships with food. No two people are ever the same and that is why I spend the first part of a session chatting about food and how clients feel about it and how it fits in to their daily lives.
After unpicking these issues, I am then able to tailor the hypnotherapy treatment to suit their particular need.
And the results are astonishing.
Often clients can’t actually believe that their food cravings have disappeared, but they know it’s worked when they see the weight begin to come off. When losing weight, we all need that extra support to succeed and hypnosis let’s you find the strong person inside who can rise to the challenge.

Dieting: The Truth

Did you know that 70% of all women and 30% of all men have been on at least one diet at one time or another?
Often people start off with good intentions and they begin to shed the pounds. But as rigid eating plans become boring or the whole diet just feels too hard to fit in with family and lifestyle, their willpower crumbles and they end up reaching for the comfort food and become even bigger than they were before.
Perhaps what is even more damaging though is that many dieters see the lapse as a sign of failure and they begin to butterfly from one diet to another in the hope of discovering the secret to success, but inevitably repeating the same patterns, because they don’t realise the secret is really inside of them.

Losing weight requires a long-term commitment to behaviour change. Old habits die hard and often people need to draw upon extra support in order to be successful. That is why hypnotherapy is so effective in helping people to achieve their target weight. It works by re-programming patterns of behaviour in a person’s subconscious and helps people to overcome the need to overeat – whatever the source of that need.

This is Corina. Her life has changed through hypnotherapy for weight loss.
I thought I’d let her share her experience in her own words:

“I just wanted to drop you a line to tell you how much I appreciate what you have done for me. Losing the weight has completely turned my life around and I am so glad I decided to have the therapy. Having you there to support me every step of the way, through the up times and the down, was invaluable – I couldn’t have done it without you. The hypnotherapy techniques you have taught me, I will take through my whole life and I can say with real certainty, I will never go back to my old ways – why would I when I feel this good?!
My life has changed in so many ways. I feel full of energy and have a real zest for fresh challenges. I have just landed a new job and I know this is because I feel an inner confidence that I didn’t have before. I have always loved sports and now I have the get-up-and-go to take part, which makes me feel good in myself.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.”