Tag: self-help

Categories
Uncategorized

Stress Adversely Affects Unborn Children

It’s a real shame that pregnancy affects so many people because it’s tough being in the womb when your Mum is finding that life is not as easy as she hoped it would be. Mum-to-be can’t smoke to ease her frazzled nerves. And almost anything she consumes has the potential to end up in you, so drinking and drug taking (prescribed or otherwise) have to be monitored carefully or, preferably, stopped altogether.

Now, according to a recent Dutch study by Eva Loomans, a psychologist at Tilburg University, you can’t even get stressed or depressed without your unborn child suffering. The problem is that stress and/or depression appear to cause low birth weights. There was also a small, though statistically significant, connection with babies born pre-term. Being born early has the potential to cause health problems throughout your life.

Now, you and I both know that stress is a part of modern life. We cannot escape from it, but these pregnancy problems arise when the stress interferes with normal functioning. When the worry causes you to change behaviours; to avoid situations, or just people; or it stops you from living normally; that is when it becomes a health issue. This state of affairs applied to around 25% of 7,700 women who took part in the study.

A lot of people suffer from stress, anxiety, worry or depression. But if they happen to be pregnant it affects their unborn child too. Of course, if you are pregnant or thinking of starting a family, all this knowledge is going to do is to add to your worries because now you not only have all your current worries, you also have to worry about your worry damaging your baby’s health too.

What you need is a solution.

The doctors may give you medications, but there is always a danger that they will probably affect your child as well. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 situation. The worry is making you worry more and the medication to solve that problem is going to do as much or more harm than the worrying is already accomplishing.

A good idea is to learn a different approach to life and living – an approach that reduces the amount of worrying you do and frees you up to spend that worry time doing something much more interesting instead.

There are a lot of tools you can use to help you start with this. I’m in the process of creating products and writing books that will guide you through many of these so I’ll just introduce you to a few here.

Meditation

Learn how to meditate. Meditation is one of the best tools I know to reduce stress and anxiety. You can learn to meditate on your own or listen to a guided meditation.

So far I’ve produced two Guided Meditations. Chakra Meditation, and Spirit Guide Meditation. They are both beautifully relaxing meditations available in CD format from Amazon.com and as an MP3 download from my website.

Self-Hypnosis

Self hypnosis is a great way to reduce stress and improve your life. I’ve created a self hypnosis MP3 Download that helps you to learn how to do this quickly and easily so that you can begin to take control of your life and discover that those external pressures do not have to impact you so strongly. As you work with self-hypnosis regularly you will find that your life begins to change and you feel lighter, more energised, and able to see solutions where previously you only saw problems.

Freedom

I have written a book that looks at a lot of stress causing problems, and it’s yours for free. It’s called Freedom and you can get your free copy at the top right of this page.

Hypnosis

If you feel that you need some help and don’t have the strength of mind to take control of your own destiny at this point, then find a good hypnotherapist and sign up for a course of treatment. It will help you to find your way out and back into the world again.

Books

Get down to your local bookshop, or library, find the Self-help section and take home whatever grabs your attention. I’ve organised a selection of titles that I’ve found amazingly helpful during the darker times of my life so check out my self help books page.

Release from Worry

The first step is to realise you have a problem. The second is to recognise, that with some help and guidance, you are the best person to solve it. No matter how difficult life is for you right now, if you are pregnant or thinking of having a baby, then you owe it to your future family to take action now to resolve the anxieties and concerns in your life. Even if you suffer from severe depression, these steps will help to begin the process of lifting you up and back to life in the light.

Understanding that you can change your mind, and then discovering exactly how to do that is your key to freedom and release from your suffering.

Michael

Categories
Uncategorized

Worrying is a Choice – Find Out How to Choose Not To

Worry takes up a lot of time. When I started to stop worrying, I found myself wondering what to do with all the ‘space’ in my head. There was a tendency to want to find something to worry about. I’ve noticed this too with clients who come to visit for help with anxiety and stress. The worry is such a habit that it feels really uncomfortable when it isn’t there.

But that’s true of any habit.

Once a habit is removed it leaves a space. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, so if you don’t fill that space with something else, the habit will return.

So the easiest way to reduce the amount of worrying you do is to do something else.

But first we need to correct the error in thinking that says you are supposed to worry, or you can’t help worrying, or it shows you care when you worry about someone.

None of that is true.

I know how, at times, it can feel as if you are powerless to do anything about it once you are in the grip of a big worry – especially stuff like money. I mean if you can’t pay your bills and you are going to be evicted and end up in the streets, then surely that’s worth worrying about? I would disagree. Worry doesn’t actually change anything; all it does is make you feel bad. When you feel bad, that reduces your adaptability and creativity so you are much less able to find solutions. With the money situation, what you want is a solution. Worrying doesn’t solve your problem. Of course if you feel powerless to do anything to change your circumstances then you might as well just worry. But it still won’t help.

But it’s that sense of powerlessness that is so often at the heart of the problem.

The first step out is to recognise that you are never powerless. There is always something you can do. That something can be quite simple. I have done ridiculously simple, easy things, like just sitting in another chair. You’d be amazed at how this simple action can give you a slightly different perspective. This is partly because you engage in physical action and that always helps, and partly because as you change your viewpoint you encourage your creativity to see things from another direction.

Other simple actions you can take are to read something inspirational or listen to something like a guided meditation.

But I don’t want to go to deeply into the psychology of all of this right now. What I want is to give you a very simple tool that you can use to help you to break out of the worry cycle when you get trapped in it.

Before you use this though, you have to be really sure that you want a rest from worrying. Remember you can always go back to worrying. You will realise after you do this a few times that worrying is a choice. Once you realise that worrying is a choice then you can save your worrying for the really important things in your life and for the people you really care about. It won’t change things for them but it will probably make you feel as if you are a loving, caring human being.

So the first idea that I want you to entertain is that time does not exist. The future is a fantasy that you create. The past is a memory and a memory is not a videotape. Memory changes and is malleable so what you remember is almost certainly not what happened – no matter how real the memory seems to you. So what does that leave you with?

It leaves you with right now.

Worrying, most of the time, is about what happened that you wanted to happen differently, or what you don’t want to happen at all.

Consider that memory is just thoughts.

So when you worry about what happened that you wanted to have happened differently – you are worrying about thoughts in your mind.

When you worry about what you don’t want to happen at all, you are again worrying about thoughts, because whatever it is that hasn’t happened doesn’t exist. All it is is a probable future and probabilities are not real.

So all of your worrying is about thoughts.

And the worrying itself is just thoughts.

So ask yourself this – are thoughts REAL?

No, they are not, they are just movements of energy flowing through your brain cells. This energy flow creates the illusion of images, sounds, and sensations, but it is as real as a dream. If your dreams are real then take your worries seriously. If not then treat your worries as if they were dreams.

I hope you’ve realised that all that’s left is right now and right now is a sort of permanent timeless space.

So do whatever you can do right now. Take whatever action to deal with a problem right now. Make a plan of action, right now. And if you are unable to do any of that then ask yourself whether you are safe right now.

Repeat this mantra to yourself until you feel more stable and ready to tackle the important and pleasurable activities that are available to you.

The mantra is:

‘Am I alright NOW?’

Answer that and repeat – regardless of whether the answer is yes or no.

Michael

Categories
Uncategorized

Is Soda Pop at the Heart of the American Obesity Epidemic?

I don’t know what the attraction is. I find the ‘natural’ sugar ones too sweet, and the artificial sugar ones just unpleasant. In fact the only time I drink any of it is when I mix it with beer – which is about six times a year, and even then I only use organic lemonade sweetened with agave syrup and without any other chemical additives.

But this isn’t a plug for organic lemonade. There is an epidemic of sweetened beverage drinking that some are suggesting is seriously damaging to your health – particularly if you are an American. But that’s largely because the obesity problem seems to be worse in the US than anywhere else in the world.

10,400,000,000 gallons of sugar-filled soda pop are manufactured every year in the US.

Each can contains the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of ordinary sugar. Can you imagine putting ten spoons of sugar into every cup of tea or coffee that you drink? It would be unpalatable. The only reason you can tolerate that amount of sugar in a can of soda is that the soda is acidic and the acidity counter-acts the excessive sweetness. In fact cola drinks are about as acid as vinegar. Would you drink a can of vinegar? Would you drink a can of vinegar with 10 added teaspoons of sugar? That’s effectively what you are doing when you drink cola.

But what exactly is the problem here – apart from the damage the acid does to teeth and stomach, and the damage the sugar does to teeth and the waistline?

The body, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is an interesting thing – especially when it experiences pleasure. But one of the really handy things that the body does is to keep you alive. It does this with loads of feedback mechanisms that allow corrections to be made when the chemical/hormone balance starts to shift away from optimum.

Food is satisfying. It creates a full feeling. As digestion proceeds it allows vitamins, minerals, fats, sugars and other stuff to seep into the system. The body also knows when it’s eaten because of this feedback system. So it knows if it is still in the process of digesting. Consequently, if you eat a big meal, you probably don’t want to eat another big meal shortly afterwards. The body is satisfied.

Sweet drinks don’t have that effect and the body fails to identify the calories as food. So the calories in these drinks are added to your calorie intake without any apparent bodily awareness of them. This is one of the reasons they lead to weight gain. There is also a suspicion that these drinks may stimulate desire for sweet high-carbohydrate foods. In other words they trick you that you are feeling hungry and needing something sweet when you don’t.

“The public now firmly believes that foods containing saccharin are effective in weight control, and has been persuaded by the soft drink industry (through the Calorie Control Council) that these benefits outweigh any possible health risks.”
Samuel S. Epstein MD

You can’t get out of it by drinking Diet versions of these drinks either. Rats who were fed saccharin ended up much fatter than rats who were fed sugary foods. There is a lot of uncertainty about the impact of artificial sweeteners so although they help you cut down the calorie intake from the soda, they may well be stimulating you to eat more unhealthily later on.

That’s not the only bad news.

A study of 90,000 women who regularly drank at least one soft drink a day suggested that they were 40% more likely to develop type II diabetes than women who didn’t drink this much soda.

Colas are high in phosphate. Now the body needs phosphate for bone building and health, but it needs phosphate in balance with calcium. When this balance is upset, perhaps with daily cola intake, the possibility of severe skeletal problems developing is very real.

“It appears that increased soft drink consumption is a major factor that contributes to osteoporosis.”
Michael Murray ND and Joseph Pizzorno ND

A recent Harvard study found that daily consumption of sugary drinks increased the risk of heart disease in men. Drinking two 12oz sugary drinks correlates with a 42% increase in the risk of heart disease. That risk rockets to 69% if you drink three cans per day. The American Beverage Association, as you would expect, issued a statement in response: “Drinking sweetened beverages does not cause an increased risk of heart disease – not based on this study or any other study in the available science.”

I think denial falls more into the territory of psychology than scientific research. Mind you denial is pretty much what you’d expect as the response to any threat to a $40,000,000,000 per year industry.

So there you have it. There is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that sugar-filled soda is seriously bad for your health if you drink it regularly. There is also considerable support for the idea that diet soda may well cause you to endure cravings for sweet sugary foods and so, in the long-run, make losing weight much more difficult than if you drank fruit juices, water, or coffee and tea – without sugar naturally. But if you go down the route of fruit juices as an alternative be aware of the differences. A fruit drink has added sugar and frequently artificial sweetener too. Fruit juice is just juice. If in doubt check the ingredients list.

So the next time you fancy a cola, ask yourself if you really do long for 12oz of vinegar mixed with 10 teaspoons of sugar?

Found this interesting? Please feel free to add your thoughts on this subject below.

Michael

Categories
Uncategorized

Does Your Comfort Zone Stop You From Doing What You Want to Do?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

What exactly is a comfort zone? To be honest, I’m not at all sure. It’s one of those terms that are bandied about in a way that makes me think that even if I don’t know what it means – I probably should, so I’d better pretend that I do.

I’m not a great one for pretence so I have to own up to having an idea of what it means, but would hesitate to provide a definition. The idea of a comfort zone is largely based on exactly what it sounds like it means – the zone in which I am comfortable. But that’s when we get into the first area of confusion. I’m usually comfortable in my armchair, next to the radiator reading a fascinating book; or watching something really entertaining on tv. I’m also usually comfortable in my armchair when I’m watching something really not that interesting on tv and I fall asleep.

So does comfort zone mean my armchair? It is after all, very soft and comfortable with a back that’s high enough to support my head and shaped to facilitate that thing that blokes do which is to slide slowly down so that the back is horizontal with neck bent at right angles to watch tv.

The whole of my house is a comfortable place for me to be, and my garden too. Yet I remember a time when going outside was distinctly outside my area of comfort. This was several decades ago when I was suffering from severe anxiety and agoraphobia/social phobia. But, back then, if I imagined myself in other places, I found that open countryside on my own was tolerable, but supermarkets, queues, and cinemas were intolerable. Mind you, in those days I never felt that comfortable indoors either.

So I think that an aspect of this idea about an area of comfort is to some extent geographical. By that I mean there are specific locations where you feel safe, and locations where you don’t. The safety aspect might be a real physical danger, like going for a walk along the seafront in a hurricane, or it might be imagined, like a supermarket or cinema. Yet what I also realised, back in those dark days, was that sitting in my comfortable spot reading or watching tv was not actually comfortable when thinking about supermarkets or cinemas. Thinking about those places generated feelings inside of me that were very like actually being physically in those places. So the geographical location of armchair ceased, in the moment of experiencing those thoughts, to be within my comfort zone.

And that’s when we move into a territory that I’m much more familiar with – the territory of the mind.

I would suggest that a comfort zone is a feeling state – how we feel when we are actually in a place, or how we feel when we think about a place. Add to that how we feel when there are people around us too. I’ve felt quite comfortable in empty places and quite uncomfortable in those same places as soon as another person walked in and I came under scrutiny. I’ve also felt comfortable in places in which there were a few people and then uncomfortable as the numbers of other people increased past my – dare I say it – comfort zone.

I think I’m getting the hang of this. I think I’m in my comfort zone, no matter where I am, when I’m at peace within myself. I’m out of my comfort zone when anxiety starts to make itself felt. What I’ve noticed is that anxiety can make itself felt anywhere so no location is always in my comfort zone. But anxiety is always generated as a result of thoughts that I am thinking. So if there was a way to control anxiety more effectively my comfort zone would grow quite quickly.

That’s exactly what happened to me, only it wasn’t that quick. But back then I didn’t understand as much as I do now.

Something else I noticed about comfort zones. And for this we need some visual aids.

Here we see what we might consider to be an agoraphobic’s comfort zone. It’s small and very restrictive in that almost any movement brings you right into contact with it. It’s also very sharply defined, and as you might expect, the sharper the definition, the more intense the anxiety.

Here is the same person after spending some time working on enlarging their comfort zone. Not only has the comfort zone enlarged considerably, creating a much greater range of comfortable movement; it has also begun to blur and soften. It is no longer so hard-edged or clearly defined.

This is what you notice as your area of comfort becomes bigger. The boundary is not nearly so clearly defined. This quite naturally happens and as you push your boundaries further and further away the boundary itself becomes more difficult to see. The end result is that you feel comfortable most of the time with only one or two areas of specific discomfort – doctors’ or dentists’ offices perhaps.

The difficulty is changing the small sharp one into the big blurry one. The smaller the diameter of the zone you start with the more difficult it is to create any movement at all. I say that not to discourage you, but to re-assure you, so that set-backs do not cause you to give up. If you know something is going to be difficult, but you choose to do it anyway, then you are not surprised or discouraged if change does not come easily.

My comfort zone once was tiny. It is now big enough that no one would know there was ever a problem.

The trick, the shortcut, if you like, is to understand the nature of anxiety itself. But I’ll leave that for now, while you consider whether or not you want to expand your comfort zone, or leave it just where it comfortably is.

If you’ve enjoyed this post then please leave a comment below, and don’t forget to share it with that friend who you know this might benefit. It might be the first step on the road away from their pain.

Michael

Categories
Uncategorized

Does Losing Weight Have to be a Battle?

One phrase that springs to mind when I think about weight loss is ‘fight the flab’. This phrase was coined by DJ Terry Wogan many years ago when he used to have a slot on his Radio 2 show about Fighting the Flab. I never used to take a great deal of notice of the content because my weight was under control – but the phrase has stayed with me. It’s interesting that it does highlight one hugely important aspect of weight loss. It focuses on how many people regard their overweight bodies as some sort of enemy that needs defeating.

It’s almost as if we think that our bodies have somehow betrayed us by accumulating so much weight, especially when everyone else is so slim. That’s when the battle begins, and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s a battle you can’t win. The reason it’s a battle you can’t win is quite simple and it is down to the way minds work. Anything you push against you create more of.

What you resist persists.

So the very act of deciding to push against your fat ensures that it will remain.

Now, I realise that sounds like a recipe for doing nothing, but we both know that that doesn’t work either. So how do you make some changes and reap the reward of a slimmer more attractive body without hating the way it is now? This is tricky territory, because it is the dislike of what is that is the motivational force that gets you to take action. It might be when you can no longer get into your already oversize clothes and you refuse to move up another size; it might be when you look in the mirror one day and see what’s really there; or it might be that you’ve been to the doctor and the choice is lose weight or lose life. But it is something that moves you from the place of tolerating your excess weight to not tolerating it that causes you to choose to make some changes. Without that dislike of what is, where would the motivation come from? Without that, why would you even bother? If you liked yourself the way you are, then surely you would just leave things as they are and continue to enjoy your unhealthy lifestyle?

The solution of course is to love yourself.

When you love yourself you don’t stuff your body full of fattening and unhealthy foods in the way we might stuff a turkey just before we pop it in the oven. When you love yourself you recognise that, like it or not, a body is designed to move – lots. So that means making exercise a top priority, for without exercise, weight loss is just a huge uphill struggle. When you exercise out of love for yourself and your amazing body, what you will find is that the exercise itself becomes a pleasurable, and eagerly anticipated, activity. I walk between two and three miles a day, except when the weather is unkind. Those days when I can’t get out I can feel my legs ‘complaining’ about the lack of activity.

Now exercise itself doesn’t shift a huge amount of weight, but it does shift some. For instance an hour’s walking at a reasonable pace can burn around 500 Calories. Do that every day and you’ve burned off the equivalent of 1lb of excess fat in a week. But that isn’t the only reason I encourage exercise – exercise does so much more for you than burning calories, but that’s a little off the subject here. If you want to find out more about the hidden benefits of exercise then download a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever

So by making exercise a daily priority; by choosing an exercise form that you enjoy; by engaging in a daily exercise routine long enough for it to become a habit; you side-step the battleground and you totally avoid the should I/shouldn’t I debate that always ends up by turning the TV on and grabbing a snack from the kitchen – because all of that thinking about exercise has made you hungry.

But it isn’t just exercise that’s going to make a significant difference to your weight. There’s something else that I’ve discovered in my many years of working in the weight loss industry. Clients who are overweight rarely love themselves. Most of them don’t even like themselves very much.

If you like yourself, start working on changing that to loving. If you don’t like yourself, then make that your first target.

So how do you do that?

You can start by recognising a Truth. The truth is that right now you are the weight you are and right now nothing in the world is going to change that – in this instant. You can recognise in this instant that you’d like to change your weight, but it won’t change instantly. If you can recognise that Truth and recognise that you are the way you are right now, and you can do that without feeling any negative emotion, then you have moved into a state of acceptance. Acceptance is the place from which you can make changes with very little effort.

I need to stress that acceptance is very different from resignation. Resignation is a giving up; it is a sense of powerlessness over your own destiny. Acceptance is an understanding that all change starts here. Acceptance allows you to move in any direction you wish to move and make any change you wish to make.

Start to appreciate the things you do. Choose to see that every single thing you do is worthy of appreciation by you.

Just in case you think I’m sending you on an ego-trip – I’m not. I’m not suggesting that you think you are in any way different from anyone else. I’m not suggesting you brag about what you do or demand that others appreciate what you do. I’m just asking you to notice what you are failing to notice. What you are failing to notice is your loveliness. Your loveliness is expressed in everything you do and the more lovingly you do it, the more lovely it is.

Loving yourself is being kind, being generous, being supportive, being gentle. When a child makes a mistake a loving parent does not berate the child. A loving parent simply demonstrates how to do it appropriately. It is a sharing of knowledge and wisdom. When a child falls over a loving parent just helps it up and gives encouragement for success. A loving parent never encourages a child to give up. A loving parent never sees failure – just learning.

So end the battle now. Eat appropriately, exercise more and support yourself in your goal to lose weight by appreciating the love you are expressing for yourself by taking action to move in the direction of a healthy weight for you.

If you enjoyed this article, or have any questions for me about losing weight, then please comment below.

Michael

Categories
Uncategorized

The Search for Alternative Health.

I’ve been reviewing my bookcase over the last few days. My bookcase, if you ignore the gardening, photographic, and tarot books, is full of self-help and spiritual volumes. It was these I was looking at with a view to seeing what was actually helpful to me. I found it quite interesting just looking at the titles (it took a while because ‘bookcase’ is actually three bookcases in three different rooms) and I realised that they reflected my personal journey and how my interests and focus had changed over the 15 years or so I’d been buying this stuff.

The only authors I own more than one volume of are Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and Esther & Jerry Hicks. They have all been favourites at one time or another. Deepak Chopra approaches health from a medical background with a scientific basis and I highly recommend Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Wayne Dyer is a psychologist whose books, read in order of publication, take on a deeper spiritual perspective as time goes on. Esther & Jerry (why am I thinking about ice cream?) leave the physical world pretty much alone and focus on what they call the Law of Attraction, or what I used to call creating your own reality.

Now the creating my own reality is the thing that really grabs my interest and I knew it was happening long before I came across Ask and It is Given. In fact my own book Mirror Mirror – The Looking Glass Self delves into this territory from a spiritual perspective. But you know what, it was like I had all the pieces of this huge jigsaw, but didn’t have the box and so had no idea what the picture was and then Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires showed me the picture on the box. Can’t say I’ve got it working properly just yet, but I’m certainly moving in that direction.

But this is what I find with a lot of these self-help and personal development books – they are a great read; they inspire me; my thinking changes for a while and then it slowly drops back to the way it was when nothing seems to be changing. Or what I usually experience is that change happens almost immediately but then I can’t reproduce it and I’ve spent a lot of years looking for why that is.

Now trying to attract money or the perfect relationship, say, is pretty much a read about and take whatever action the book says. So that’s when we get into all that visualisation and emotional processing and looking for the blocks and the things that are in the way because they all pretty much say that if you don’t experience your abundance then the only reason for that is that you are somehow preventing it from arriving. That’s the best get out clause ever. Do this, but if it doesn’t work it’s your fault. I’m hugely sceptical of a lot of things, but my own experiences suggest a lot of truth in this particular ‘catch-22’.

There is also another niggle that I have with all of this. When results don’t appear after a reasonable amount of time – and for me a reasonable amount of time is always as soon as possible – is it because I’m not doing it right/hard enough/long enough or is it because it’s crazy to think I can influence the material world with my mind and I’ve been suckered into believing something that just isn’t true? Is it my desire for a solution that I can orchestrate and control within my own mind, and without having to interact with anyone else, that is blinding me to reason and sense?

Sometimes things just don’t work and I wonder sometimes if this is just an industry that’s tapping into our desire for easy magical solutions to life’s natural problems.

The trouble is, of course, that my own experiences, and probably yours too, have shown me that there is some sort of a creative connection between my mind and the exterior physical world. My research has also shown me that there is an overwhelming body of evidence that supports the idea that what you do in your mind can bring about miraculous, or less spectacular but still amazing, changes in the body.

Now one of the problems with the search for healing is that you pretty much need it to work and you need it to work straight away – especially if you’ve got a health problem that’s trying to kill you. In these circumstances you can’t really afford the time to fool around and spend years looking for all of your inner blockages and childhood frustrations that are causing the ill-health. You just need it fixing.

One thing I’ve found worked at healing a couple of minor problems that I had was using the tapes that Brandon Bays has to accompany her book The Journey. The Journey tells Brandon’s story of how she used her mind to remove a large life-threatening tumour in the space of around 6 weeks. Then she details the processes that she has devised and that have worked with other people too. I like this because it’s very like what I do with hypnosis to heal physical problems and I have to admit I have had some successes with that – but not with anything life-threatening, and that’s largely because people with life-threatening problems, quite rightly, tend to visit doctors rather than hypnotherapists.

Another problem I’ve discovered is that illness is not always the best time to seek out new alternative treatments. That sounds a bit daft, I know, but when you are sick the anxiety the illness causes makes it difficult to concentrate on mental exercises like visualisations. Pain also makes it difficult to focus and if you have something like a cold or flu there is very little energy in the body to apply to self-healing.

So what is one to do?

Clearly the answer is to put the information into practice when you are well so that you never get sick.

But that brings to light another difficulty that I’ve found. When you are well there is little to drive the motivation to spend time engaging in regular activities, like meditation or visualisation, when you could be doing something much more interesting instead. I’ve found time and again that minor problems that don’t interfere with life are ignored until they go away. It’s only when a health problem interferes with the smooth running of my life that I then invest time and energy in doing what I hope will bring about healing.

And when self-healing activities are only ever instigated when there is a serious problem there is also that problem of a lack of belief in one’s own ability to create the change – which of course prevents anything from changing.

If you practise diligently on the small problem, then when you have a big problem, you will know that you have the ability to heal yourself and your chances of success increase tremendously. This is because belief plays a huge part in the ability to self heal. If you have no doubts that you will succeed then you increase your chances of success tremendously. By dealing with small problems as and when they arise you also very much decrease the chances of the big problem ever appearing.

And don’t forget, you don’t have to do it on your own. Don’t neglect the help and support of the medical world. That doesn’t stop you from doing the mind-work that you need to do, and the relief that medical assistance provides may actually free up some of that worry space, or that pain space, so that you can use it for self-healing.

If you like the idea of using your mind to affect your world I highly recommend you check out The Sedona Method and The Silva Mind Control Method. They both produce inexpensive and helpful books and very expensive and helpful CD courses.

If you enjoyed this, or have any questions about self-healing then please leave a comment below.

Michael

Categories
hypnosis Panic Attack

Seven Steps Towards Freedom from Panic Attacks

Your trolley is half full, mind trying desperately to remember that item you know you’ve forgotten, something for dinner, or was it the bathroom, looking along the rows of checkouts, shortest queue… fastest queue… it’s so busy… so many people… can’t move… can’t get past… palms starting to get a little slippery on the handle… it’s hot in here… where’s the exit… not too far away… people in front… people behind now… feeling trapped… why can’t she scan faster… why can’t you have your card ready to pay instead of spending 10 minutes rooting around in the bottom of your bag keeping us all waiting… heart rate increasing… mouth getting a little dry… people looking at me… finding it difficult to breathe… can’t get any air in… going to faint… need to escape… need to get out…

If any of that sounds familiar, then you probably know all about panic attacks. Well you probably know all about them from the inside. You will also know all about how after that first time you experienced one – whether it was in a supermarket, cinema, theatre, aircraft, out in a busy street…, you became wary. Wary of going out; wary of trusting your body not to let you down; wary of people being around you, especially strangers.

You’re not sure but you think you might have been having a heart attack, or a severe drop in blood pressure, or a brain tumour. So you visit your doctor who checks you out very thoroughly and pronounces that you are as fit as a fiddle. ‘You’ve probably just had a panic attack’, opens the door and bids you farewell as if you’ve been wasting his/her valuable time, or as if this collapse of your whole world is the most trivial of health problems and ranks with a minor cut or bruise.

But you know that something is wrong. Seriously wrong.

And quite suddenly your world was no longer safe. But the worst part of it was, that deep down, you knew it wasn’t your world that was the problem. It was you. Your body was no longer reliable. You couldn’t trust it to keep you safe and comfortable. And the nightmarish aspect of it all was that you couldn’t predict when it would let you down. I mean you’ve shopped in supermarkets quite happily all your life, but now they are dangerous places and perhaps best avoided, or only visited with a trusted and close friend so that if anything happens there will be someone with you to deflect the embarrassment.

Then you have another.

Step 1: Decide right NOW that you will do whatever you need to do in order to free yourself from this problem.

That’s when life gets really difficult and your world starts to close down quite quickly. You can never be sure when the next one will hit so you avoid anything that even slightly reminds you of the circumstances surrounding a previous Attack.

Step 2: As soon as you notice yourself hyperventilating (rapid breathing/breathlessness/difficulty breathing in), just close your mouth – and keep it closed.

The only problem you have is Fear. Fear of what might happen to you. Fear of dying. Fear of ending up in hospital. Fear of being carted away in an ambulance. Fear of lying on the floor with a circle of people around you. Fear of acute embarrassment. Fear of not being able to ever go back to that place in case someone recognises you.

So just forget for a minute what the fear is about, because that’s just cosmetic. Fear is the problem.

Step 3: Just accept that during a panic attack you are frightened. Don’t pretend anything else is going on.

Now, if you were out wandering alone in the African bush and there just 30 feet away was a full grown rhinoceros, you wouldn’t be at all surprised if your heart rate increased suddenly. If it then took a step towards you, you wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find your breathing rate increasing, your mouth getting a little dry, your gut feeling uncomfortable and so on.

Interestingly these are exactly the same ‘symptoms’ that you experienced while having a panic Attack. In the supermarket it was an embarrassment. Here it could save your life. Increased heart rate gets more oxygen to your muscles so you can run or fight, or climb a tree, rapid breathing gets more oxygen in your blood, dry mouth is an indication of a withdrawal of fluids from your extremities so that in the case of injury you won’t lose so much blood. Gut discomfort so that if the worst comes to the worst you can easily create a smelly distraction to give you time to escape (this evolved in the days before underwear was invented). Your body is working perfectly to keep you safe. And you feel pleased that it does so.

Yet when your body does exactly the same thing in the supermarket, you are unhappy with it. Maybe we should get supermarkets to stock rhinoceroses!

You can’t have a panic attack if you are smiling.

Step 4: Next time you feel those first warning signs, have a look round, with a smile on your face, and ask yourself ‘Where’s the rhinoceros?’

What causes all those ‘symptoms’? It’s adrenaline, released by the adrenal glands sitting on top of your kidneys. Adrenaline is a hormone and consequently is produced in tiny amounts that have instantaneous effects on a whole range of body processes. Now what you might not know is that your mind can’t tell the difference between fact and fantasy. Just picture yourself cutting a juicy, bright yellow lemon in half, picking up a piece, holding it under your nose and breathing in that wonderful fresh scent and then gently squeezing it until sour lemony juice drips onto the tip of your tongue. I’ll be very surprised if you don’t get an increased saliva flow – yet there’s no lemon, just a mental image. Your brain really can’t tell the difference between real and imagined, fact or fantasy.

Adrenaline is produced in response to danger – perceived or real. So if a mild fear thought about say, finances, relationships, getting home in time, problems at work, socially and so on wanders through your mind, you might not notice it, but your adrenal glands will. Now physiologically sensitive people will notice the effects immediately, focus on them and worry what they mean. This is another fear thought and releases more adrenaline. Then you notice the intensification of symptomology and think ‘oh my God! I was right to be worried, it’s getting worse’. This is another fear thought, releasing yet more adrenaline, and so the whole process snowballs and before you know where you are you are in the middle of a full blown panic attack, and you have no idea where it came from because you weren’t noticing all the individual little steps that happened so fast it seemed instantaneous.

Step 5: Remind yourself that you aren’t going to die. No matter how bad you feel, no one has ever died from a panic attack.

Step 6: Remind yourself you are ONLY feeling the effects of an adrenaline release.

You may not know why the adrenaline was released. You may not be able to track down the thought that released it, but all you are dealing with is an adrenaline release that is either escalating, or reducing. When it starts to die down, because you haven’t done the physical stuff, like running away or fighting, you will still feel uncomfortable, this is when you may feel light-headed, get jelly-legs or feel a bit wobbly or nauseous. It’s still just adrenaline you’re suffering from. You’d be more likely to die without it than with it.

Step 7: Carry a notebook and pen with you at all times. If you experience yourself having a panic attack, get the notebook out and start to make a note of all the symptoms you are experiencing and make a pact with yourself that whenever you do this you will continue writing down your symptoms (you could score them on a scale of intensity of 1 to 10 as well if you like) until they start to reduce. As soon as you notice them start to lessen you can go from wherever you are to somewhere ‘safer’, but you must stay in the place where the symptoms first became noticeable until they start to diminish.

When you do this you break the Fear Cycle.

When you break the Fear Cycle you are on the road to freedom.

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy