Unlock Your Full Potential with Hypnosis Today
Blink VuMu – Creating Healthier Patterns
I wrote about the technique of interrupting overthinking using ‘Blink VuMu’ a while ago, and many of you have found it helpful. Since then I have realised that there are many more uses to this technique than just ‘overthinking’. This article explains the broader applications of this technique and some ways of incorporating it so that you create healthier patterns in your life.
The concept of Blink VuMu is that you blink to create a pattern interrupter in any of the automatic patterns you are running. This might be anxiety, it could be a strong feeling that overrides your logic, or it could be your critical inner voice telling you unhelpful things. Once you have interrupted the pattern, then you can ask yourself the important curious questions of whether the pattern you are running is valid, and if the answer is yes, whether it is useful.
The next step is to then ask yourself what is more useful, or the most useful pattern you could adopt instead. Another question that can be helpful to ask yourself is ‘What would this look like if I had already solved the problem?’
By asking yourself these questions you create new pathways and approaches that are more helpful, and are more connected to the reality of the world, rather than the stories we can create in our imagination and react to.
In a step by step format it looks like this:
Step 1) Blink wildly for 5 seconds (count back from 5-1)
Step 2) Get curious – How am I doing this?
Step 3) Ask yourself the following questions
Q1) Is this Valid? YES/NO
Q2) Is this Useful? YES/NO
Q3) If not, what would be a More Useful, or the Most Useful response I could offer right now? Or, if I had solved this problem, what would it look like?
The more you practice this approach, the easier it is to interrupt your thinking, check the validity of your feelings, and stop the inner critical voice from running the unhelpful patterns.
If you would like to explore this further, you may find this video explanation useful – Blink VuMu – a technique to create healthier patterns.
You may also like to book an appointment with me to learn how to apply this to your life and create a new path forwards.
How Hypnotherapy Can Support Cancer Patients: A Gentle Approach to Managing Pain and Anxiety
A recent study has brought to light the significant benefits that hypnotherapy can offer to patients undergoing cancer treatment, along with the pressing need for greater awareness among medical professionals about these advantages. In my own practice, I’ve had the privilege of working with several clients who were diagnosed with cancer and undergoing treatment during our sessions. Through clinical hypnotherapy, I’ve been able to assist them in managing their anxiety, taking control of their pain, improving their sleep, and alleviating their depression.
A cancer diagnosis can be one of the most stressful moments in a person’s life. If you’ve had previous experiences with anxiety, depression, trauma, or stress, the weight of the diagnosis can feel overwhelming. In our sessions, I focus on helping clients establish new neural pathways, equipping them with tools to better manage their experiences, and ultimately, regain a sense of control. This process can become a powerful part of your recovery, potentially transforming your outlook on life as you move forward.
How we experience pain is often tied to the emotions we attach to it. Individuals who don’t have an emotional response to pain frequently report feeling less pain compared to those who do. This is where hypnosis in a clinical setting can be incredibly effective – by helping you change your emotional response, you can regain control over how you experience the physical symptoms and discomfort from your medical treatment. I’ve seen remarkable results in this area, with one client even leaving me a voice message the day after major surgery, calling me a miracle worker. The work we had done on managing her pain had been so effective that she experienced no distress, even when nurses were struggling to find veins for catheters.
Having a gentle, non-invasive treatment option to address the emotional and physical impacts of diagnosis and treatment can be immensely beneficial to many patients. If you or a loved one are facing this challenge, I encourage you to reach out. Together, we can explore how I can support you in managing this journey.
Rediscover Your Calm: A Strategic Approach to Overcoming Anxiety and Depression
Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or burnt out? These are common feelings that often lead people to seek help from mental health professionals. But when you dig deeper, anxiety and depression are often at the root of these experiences, no matter what label you give them. Understanding how these challenges manifest and how a strategic approach can effectively address them is crucial in choosing the right therapy for you.
Contrary to popular belief, anxiety and depression aren’t hereditary or fixed conditions. They’re learned processes—patterns of thinking and reacting that we pick up as we grow, often from those around us. If you were raised by an anxious parent, you might have unconsciously adopted their anxious responses. Over time, these responses can become so ingrained that they feel like the only way to react to certain situations. But here’s the good news: just as we learned these patterns, we can unlearn them and create new, healthier ways to respond.
Strategic Hypnotherapy works on the premise that learning a new response is similar to learning any new skill. Think about how you learned to ride a bike—you didn’t just hop on and start cycling perfectly. You learned each step, practiced them, and eventually, it became second nature. In the same way, you can learn the steps to respond differently to anxiety or depression. Hypnotherapy helps by reinforcing these new, more helpful responses in your subconscious, making them feel natural and automatic.
Anxiety is often rooted in future-based thinking. If you struggle with anxiety, you might find yourself fixated on worst-case scenarios, constantly worrying about things that haven’t happened and may never occur. With a strategic approach, we help you learn to distinguish between thoughts that are useful and grounded in the present and those that are simply unhelpful fears about the future. This process empowers you to live more fully in the moment, with a greater sense of control and calm.
Depression, on the other hand, tends to be tied to past-based thinking. If you’re dealing with depression, you might spend a lot of time replaying past events, focusing on what went wrong and how you’ve been affected. Unfortunately, we can’t change the past, but we can change how we relate to it. A strategic approach helps you learn how to let go of the past and move forward, building a future that reflects the life you truly want to live.
If you’re ready to break free from the cycles of anxiety and depression and start creating the life you desire, I invite you to take the first step. Book a free 20-minute consultation today, and let’s explore how Strategic Hypnotherapy can support you in this journey. Your path to calm, balance, and a brighter future begins here.
Stop Overthinking by Asking for What You Need
If you are an overthinker then you are familiar with having thoughts whirl around your head as you work through all the ‘what ifs’, including many that are almost completely impossible, and none of which are good outcomes, because you don’t spend your time creating positive scenarios do you?
This makes you spiral as you imagine outcomes that are worse than anything that could actually happen, and means that you are in a state of anxiety about things that you have created in your own mind. The good news is that you can stop this pattern with a simple step. Identify what you need and ask for it. And you can, can you not? I will illustrate what I mean with an example.
A friend of mine noticed that her partner was quite distracted and wasn’t making plans to do anything together with her as they discussed what events they had coming up over the next few weeks. In her overthinking mind she started to worry that he was not happy with their relationship, found spending time with her to be a chore, and wasn’t giving her priority in his life. This then spiralled into her thinking about what would happen when their relationship ended, whether she would feel able to meet other people with a view to a relationship with someone else, how she would tell their children, what their finances would look like, who would get the dog, etc. Over the course of a few days she became more and more distressed as she thought about this scenario, and became more withdrawn from communication with him as she tried to protect herself from the pain of rejection.
Except that he hadn’t rejected her. When we spoke about this I suggested that she think about what she needed – did she need more information, did she need a conversation, did she need a break? At the heart of it she needed to know whether he was unhappy in their relationship. After some encouragement she asked him. And discovered that he was really happy with his relationship with her, was completely unaware of her thoughts and feelings that things were falling apart, and had been distracted because he was exhausted after finishing a big project at work. He had taken her quietness as her understanding that he needed some down time to recover, and had been completely oblivious to her distress. Sound familiar? If she had asked for what she needed earlier in the process, she would have saved herself a lot of distress and worry, and understood what he needed and how it impacted her. Her sleep would definitely have been better!
Sometimes what you need is not an answer from a person but a piece of information for a work project, or a decision from a business about a contract. Recognizing that this is what is needed can be enough to stop the overthinking as it helps you to understand what is within your control and what is out of your control. If you can’t make a decision about something until you have that piece of information, then no amount of rumination at 3am is going to change the outcome.
Next time you find yourself stuck in the overthinking loop, try asking yourself ‘what do I need’ as a pattern interrupter, and say it out loud to help you move forward.
Interrupt your Overthinking – ‘Blink VuMu’
Are you a prize winning overthinker? This is a helpful technique to interrupt that pattern when you identify that you are over-cooking a thought, or thought process. It is called ‘Blink VuMu’ not just because it is an usual name, but because the name is the pattern to follow (see the bolded letters as your clues!):
Step 1) Blink wildly for 5 seconds (count back from 5-1)
Step 2) Get curious – How am I doing this?
Step 3) Ask yourself the following questions
Q1) Is this Valid? YES/NO
Q2) Is this Useful? YES/NO
Q3) If not, what would be the Most Useful response I could offer right now?
• The value of this question set is that you can recognise that a reaction can be both valid and not useful.
• The first question allows you to say “YES” and validate your response. However, even as you do this, you have already stepped away and are analysing from a more dissociated position.
• The second question is more likely to get a “NO” response as you recognise the contextual value of your reaction.
• The third question starts you down a line of becoming more strategic and re-framing your thoughts, looking at it from different perspectives and breaking the pattern in a useful way.
As you practice this technique you are creating a new neural pathway, and a new habit, which will give you a more strategic outlook as you create your future. Give it a try!
3 steps to avoid taking on other people’s drama
As adults we often find ourselves dealing with friends, family or colleagues who are experiencing big feelings, emotions, or dramas. It can be hard to know how to show up and support them, without taking on the burden of their drama as your own. In supporting clients on how to approach this challenge I refer to one of the best tools I learnt during my parenting journey – emotion coaching. This technique is based on the work of Dr John Gottman and is a useful way to help your children learn to understand and regulate their emotions. It is a technique designed to validate your children’s feelings, to help them name their feelings and to be able to sit with uncomfortable feelings. (Gottman Institute)
As a therapist I have supported my clients to understand that the principals of emotion coaching can be used by to navigate many relationships, whether with their offspring (small or grown), friends, colleagues or acquaintances. A simple three step approach to support your friends without taking on their feelings is set out below.
3 steps to avoid taking on other people’s drama (with a bonus optional 4th step!)
1. Be curious
The first step in managing these emotional interactions as an adult is to use curiosity rather than ‘telling’. This means that instead of telling your friend that you can see that they are angry, you ask them if they are feeling angry. A great phrase for this is ‘I wonder if you are feeling……(insert the feeling you are observing.) By asking them in a curious way you are showing them that you are open to their answer, that you might not be correct, and that you care about them.
2. Validate
Once the other person has defined how they are feeling, the next step is validation. “ I can see how hard that must be”, “ that sounds tough’, or “those are difficult feelings to have”. Validation is about seeing the person’s experience. You aren’t agreeing with it, you aren’t judging it, you are just seeing it for what it is.
3. Let them sit with their feelings
And the final step can feel like you are doing nothing. It is the step where you let them sit with their feelings, offering your supportive presence, but not offering to solve the problem, carry the burden, or fix everything for them. (A good neutral sympathetic humming noise can be a great filler here.) This gives the person time to understand that you have heard them, and you understand their problem, and can see the effect it is having on them. Often this is enough to help the other person. When we step in to solve the problem we can take away their agency to solve the problem themselves.
4. Optional fourth step – ask what they need from you to help solve the problem.
If you feel that the person still needs more from you, then asking them what they need from you to help them, rather than telling them what you will do to solve the problem leaves them responsible for their feelings, but knowing that you are there to support them if possible.
Give this approach a try, and see how it feels and what the impact is. It might take a bit of practice to change from offering a solution straight away, but with time you can make this your default response and still maintain your connections with friends without carrying their burden on top of your own. Let me know how it works for you!
The Impact of Language and Why We ‘Shouldn’t’.
I am sure that you have heard or read that ‘how we speak to yourself matters’ and, if you know me at all, have heard or read me saying ‘be kind to yourself’. It is more than a platitude. Many of my clients speak to themselves in ways that they would never speak to a friend, a family member, or even an acquaintance. They are harsher critics of themselves than they are of anyone else, and often quite unfairly.
The language we use impacts us, and the people we speak to. This in turn impacts our mental health. My current top word for clients to be aware of and remove from their vocabulary when possible is ‘should’. When you use should, how does it make you feel? ‘I should go for a run’ carries a weight of expectation and guilt, when compared to ‘I could go for a run’ which leaves the possibility open, but without expectation. If you say ‘should’ and don’t go for the run, there is a sense of having let yourself down, whereas ‘could’ that isn’t followed by a run involves a decision and a choice. The ‘shoulds’ have emotion while the ‘coulds’ have choices.
When we say ‘should’ to others there is a weight to our words too. ‘You should make the dish that everyone is talking about’ feels different from ‘You could make the dish that everyone is talking about.’ The first sentence is telling them what they should do in your opinion, the second sentence is giving them a choice. Telling people what to do can result in them being defensive, while giving them a choice allows them to make their own decision and removes judgement from the exchange.
The language you use impacts how you see yourself and how you judge yourself, and how realistic or fair that process is. If you are telling yourself that you ‘should’ be doing things that you are not likely to do, whether it is because you don’t want to, it isn’t a priority, you don’t have time, you want to do something else, you don’t have the skills, the money etc, you are setting up your brain to feel ‘less than’. When you speak to yourself this way you are setting the filters in your brain to look at what you aren’t doing, rather than what you are doing. Our wonderful brains are wired to look for evidence to support our filters. If we say that we are not good at technical things our brain will look for the evidence to support that and we will believe that we aren’t good at technical things – ignoring the times that we have been good at them, and the end result is that we won’t want to try new technical things. If we say that we are good at finding solutions, our brain will look for evidence to support that – and we will continue to feel good about what we do well, ignoring the times when we didn’t find a solution, and continuing to be willing to try to solve problems.
By changing ‘shoulds’ to ‘coulds’ you start the process of changing your internal filters, and allowing yourself to be more decisive. A ‘could’ allows you to set yourself up achieve the things that you want to do, weighing up the pros and cons. It allows you to quieten that inner critical voice that contributes to feelings of anxiety, stress, depression and overwhelm, and can improve your mental health.
Does Anxiety give us magical powers?
A client recently commented that she was reluctant to talk about the good things that could happen as it could ‘jinx it’. My response to her was ‘Wow – let’s talk about your magical powers! If you can stop something good happening by talking about it, can you make something good happen by talking about it too? Or are your magical powers only limited to stopping the good stuff in life?’
She of course laughed and said that she doesn’t have magical powers but understood the point that I was making. If what we say and don’t say could impact our future negatively, why can’t it also impact our future positively? The reality is that when we have a well-trodden anxiety response we look at the future through the lens of all the things that can go wrong, and we forget to also look for the things that can go well. When we are looking for the things that can go wrong, we subconsciously look for evidence to support our expectation. When we expect things to go badly we see the missed parking spot as a sign that we don’t deserve good things, or the rainy day as a sign that the universe is against us. We see a person walking slowly in front of us as deliberately trying to make us late, and the neighbours playing loud music as them trying to stop us from enjoying our TV show.
If we look for the good in each day and reframe our thoughts, we start to look for the evidence to support the expectation that good things happen. The missed parking spot becomes a chance to find another spot that is closer to where we are going, the rain is an excuse to break out our favourite umbrella or be grateful for the garden being watered. The person walking slowly is a chance to smile at them as we walk past, or to be grateful that we are healthy enough to walk faster than them. The loud music next door can be an excuse for a dance party in the kitchen, or to knock on the neighbour’s door to have a chat. Saying that ‘good things will happen today’ can change our whole demeanour so that we are looking for good things to support our statement.
Using our magical powers for good and setting ourselves up to find the moments of joy in each day is a powerful way to reframe our thinking and improve our mental health. How can you reframe your day today?
3 Steps to Interrupt Anxiety
Interrupting Anxiety: 3 Simple Steps to Change Your Response
Anxiety can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to control your life. By learning to interrupt the anxious process and changing your response, you can regain a sense of control and calm. In this post, we’ll explore three simple yet effective steps you can take to shift your perspective and manage anxiety.
Step 1: Look Up
When anxiety strikes, it’s common to feel trapped in a cycle of negative thoughts and worries. One way to break free from this cycle is by changing the ‘how’ that you are using to generate that anxious feeling. Simply looking up can help shift your response from the overthinking and create space for a different response.
Try this:
- When you notice feelings of anxiety creeping in, take a moment to lift your gaze upward.
- Focus on something above eye level, whether it’s the sky, a tree, or a ceiling.
- Notice how this simple act of looking up helps to expand your field of vision and brings a sense of openness and perspective.
By looking up, you’re signaling to your brain that it’s time to break free from the patterns of anxious thinking and see what else is possible.
Step 2: Drop Your Shoulders
Anxiety responses often manifest physically, leading to tension and tightness in the body. Dropping your shoulders is a simple yet effective way to release some of this tension and change the pattern of anxiety.
Here’s how to do it:
- Take a deep breath in, allowing your shoulders to rise towards your ears.
- As you exhale, consciously relax your shoulders, letting them drop down away from your ears.
- Repeat this process several times, focusing on the sensation of tension melting away with each breath.
By dropping your shoulders, you’re sending a signal to your body that it’s safe to relax and let go of the physical manifestations of anxiety.
Step 3: Wiggle your toes
When we have an anxious response, we follow a pattern we have learned over many years. Creating interruptions to that pattern sends signals to our brain that we can respond in a different way. Moving a part of our body that isn’t usually part of the pattern of response can interrupt this pattern and promote a sense of calm and ease.
Try the following:
- Take a moment to breathe in, then as you breathe out, wiggle your toes, one at a time.
- Consciously wiggle each toe, focusing on moving it back and forth, independently of the other toes.
- As you work your way through each toe on each foot, notice where your thoughts are going.
By wiggling your toes, you’re encouraging your body to shift out of the pattern you associate with anxiety and towards a more relaxed and balanced state. By focusing on each toe individually you are interrupting the repetitive nature of your thoughts, and clearing your mind to create space for a different response.
Managing anxiety doesn’t have to be complicated. By incorporating these three simple steps into your routine – looking up, dropping your shoulders, and wiggling your toes – you can interrupt your anxiety pattern and change your response to stressors. Small changes can have a big impact, and with practice, you can change your patterns of response and work to create new, and more helpful, patterns.
