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Quick Body Scan: A Simple Path to Calm
The concept of ‘body scan’ is a simple but effective tool that can help you to connect with the present and calm your mind. When used effectively it can amount to a form of meditation, but it is so convenient and easy to do that we can use it in many situations where we might not normally think that meditation will work.
When your mind is in overdrive, overwhelm, or over-anything, having a simple technique to reconnect yourself with the present and move past your feeling of ‘stuckness’ is useful. This is often referred to as ‘grounding’, and can help to calm and clear your mind. The body scan technique may help you to do this.
The simple goal of scanning your body in this exercise is to focus on the physical sensations throughout the body, bringing awareness to the present moment. The purpose of body scanning is not to change or improve any feeling, but instead to simply notice the sensations. It is a technique that doesn’t require any additional tools as it uses your most accessible tool, your own body.
What is body scan?
You might think of a body scan as a mental X-ray slowly traveling up or down your body, observing each part of your body as you go. Some people include the concept of isometric exercises, which involves imagining tensing and releasing each muscle group as you scan it. This can add another dimension to the exercise and help to shift it into a truly meditative state.
I have included two different versions here – the first is the ‘quick, on-the-go’ version that you can use anywhere, anytime to bring yourself back to a grounded state. The second is the more detailed version for meditation and relaxing. Let me know if you use either or both and how you find them!
Quick on-the-go version
When to use:
– When you need to calm your mind, distract yourself from unhelpful thoughts, or break a thought pattern and create room for a new one.
Where to use:
– anywhere you can take a few moments to focus on yourself and your body safely
How to use:
- Be aware of your surroundings. Take note of where you are and what is in your surroundings. If you can move to a place to sit or stand safely out of the way, then this is ideal.
- Breathe. Take a deep cleansing breath, to centre yourself. If you can do a round or two of box breathing, do this. Whether you close your eyes or not is up to you.
- Choose where to start. I recommend beginning at the feet and moving up through your body, but you might like to start at your head and move down – it is your choice where you begin. Focus on the first spot as you continue breathing slowly and deeply.
- Be aware. Open your awareness to the sensations attached to that part of your body, and notice how it feels. You might imagine the sensation of tensing and releasing that part of your body and notice how that feels. You could spend 10 seconds or 60 seconds focused on that part of your body – it is up to you.
- Release. Release your awareness of that part of your body and move it to your next area of focus.
- Moving through the exercise. Continue the exercise along, up or down your body in a way that makes sense to you, whether you move from bottom to top, top to bottom or up one side and down the other.
- Breathe. When you reach the point that you are feeling calm and able to move to the next strategy, activity or part of your day, repeat a deep, cleansing breath (or another round of box breathing) to help continue to the calm.
Body scan as meditation.
When to use:
- When you want to create a calm state before you start the day, or when you are ending the day.
- When you need to calm your mind, distract yourself from unhelpful thoughts, break a thought pattern and create room for a new one.
- When you are looking to meditate and clear your mind.
Where to use:
– anywhere you can safely sit or lie calmly for 10 minutes or more, uninterrupted and comfortably, with your eyes closed.
How to use:
- Get comfortable. Lie down or sit in a position that allows you to stretch your limbs easily.
- Focus. Close your eyes and begin focusing on your breath. Notice the sensation of your breath filling and leaving your lungs as you inhale and exhale. You could do a few rounds of box breathing to start the process.
- Choose where to start. I recommend beginning at the feet and moving up through your body, but you might like to start at your head and move down – it is your choice where you begin. Focus on the first spot as you continue breathing slowly and deeply. In choosing the part of your body to focus on you might choose to be as detailed or as general as suits you. For example, you might choose to think of your toes as a whole, or to focus on each toe individually.
- Be aware. Open your awareness to the sensations attached to that part of your body, and notice how it feels. You might imagine the sensation of tensing and releasing that part of your body and notice how that feels. You might choose to actually tense and release that part of your body. You could spend 10 seconds or 60 seconds focused on that part of your body – it is up to you.
- Release. Slowly release your mental awareness of that specific part of your body and redirect it to your next area of focus. Some people find it helpful to imagine releasing one body part as they breathe out and moving on to the next as they breathe in.
- Move along. Continue the exercise along, up or down your body in a way that makes sense to you, whether you move from top to bottom or up one side and down the other.
- Note drifting thoughts. As you continue to scan your body, note when your thoughts drift. This will probably happen more than once, so don’t worry. You haven’t failed and can easily get your thoughts back on track. Just gently return your awareness to where you left off scanning.
- Return. When you have completed the scan of your body, allow yourself to slowly release your focus and bring your attention back to your surroundings.
Final Thoughts
Body scanning is a simple yet powerful technique that helps bring awareness to the present moment, offering a sense of calm and clarity. Whether you use it as a quick reset during the day or as part of a longer meditation practice, it can be a valuable tool for breaking unhelpful thought patterns and creating space for a more relaxed and focused mind. Try incorporating it into your routine and see how it helps you feel more grounded and at ease. If you want to watch a video explaining how it works, you will find one here.
How to Use Box Breathing to Calm Your Mind
How many times when you are feeling stressed do you hear someone say ‘just breathe’? If you are like me your automatic response might be ‘I AM breathing!!!’ However, different patterns of breathing can impact you in ways that aren’t always obvious at first! Box Breathing is a tool you can use anytime, anywhere, to lower your stress, connect with your calm, and break the patterns of overwhelm. It is portable, convenient and practical!
Why does breathing help us to calm our body and mind?
When we are stressed we tend to tense up, take shallow breaths, lift our shoulders, tense our muscles slightly, and start the unhelpful thought patterns that disconnect our logical brain from our emotional brain. This can activate the part of our brain that creates a fight or flight response. By slowing our breathing, focusing on deeper breaths, and counting at the same time, we can shift from that automatic pattern of tension and stress and connect with our parasympathetic nervous system. This means that we may reconnect with our logic, and give ourselves time to think of different strategies to help manage the situation. The very fact that we are counting creates a mini-meditation and a break from the whirling thoughts in our mind.
How does Box Breathing work?
Box Breathing is called that because a box shape has 4 sides. (This technique is also known as square breathing, 4-4-4 breathing and other names for that reason!)
The process is that you:
1. Slowly take a deep breath over 4 seconds
2. Hold that breath for 4 seconds
3. Slowly breathe out over 4 seconds
4. Wait for 4 seconds
5. Repeat the process 1 – 3 times
Additional tips
To build your practice of box breathing you might also do one, some or all of these steps:
- Look for a quiet space to sit uninterrupted
- Close your eyes
- Place a hand on your chest to feel the breath rise and fall
- Practice 5 minutes of box-breathing each morning before you start your day
Summary
Box breathing is a tool that can be used to calm yourself down when experiencing moments of stress, anger, frustration or anxiety. It is also a technique that you can practice to enhance moments of calm, building your ability to use it for the times when you might need it. And if you prefer to learn by watching – here is a video of me explaining the technique! Youtube
Harnessing Hypnotherapy to Reduce Stress
In our fast-paced world, stress seems almost unavoidable. Juggling responsibilities, work demands, and personal commitments often leaves little time for us to breathe and reset. While some stress can be motivating, excessive stress takes a toll on both mind and body, leading to burnout, anxiety, and even chronic health issues. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you might find relief in a surprising yet highly effective tool: hypnotherapy.
Hypnotherapy is a therapeutic approach that works on a deep, subconscious level to help clients relax, reframe their stressors, and develop healthy coping mechanisms. In this post, let’s explore how hypnotherapy can help you relieve stress and regain control.
Understanding Stress and Its Impact
Stress is your body’s response to perceived threats or demands. When you’re stressed, your brain signals a fight-or-flight response, leading to the release of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. While helpful in short bursts, ongoing stress keeps your body in a state of heightened alert, causing physical symptoms such as muscle tension, headaches, digestive issues, and sleep disturbances. Mentally, stress can lead to feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, and eventually burnout.
Traditional stress management techniques—like exercise, meditation, and mindfulness—can help, but they often only scratch the surface. Hypnotherapy, on the other hand, works on a subconscious level, where deep-seated beliefs and automatic responses to stress are stored. By addressing these underlying factors, hypnotherapy offers a more holistic, lasting solution.
How Hypnotherapy Eases Stress
1. Deep Relaxation
During hypnotherapy, you’re guided into a deeply relaxed state, which itself can help reduce stress. This state, known as a trance, allows your body to release physical tension and feel at ease. In this calm state, your brain produces alpha and theta brainwaves, which are linked to relaxation, creativity, and even healing. This physical and mental relaxation is not just temporary; with repeated sessions, it helps “rewire” your brain’s stress response to react with calm instead of panic.
2. Rewiring Automatic Responses
Many people have automatic stress responses—they get anxious before a big presentation, feel tense in social settings, or worry incessantly about small tasks. These responses are usually based on subconscious beliefs and patterns that have been programmed over time. In a hypnotherapy session, we can uncover these triggers and reframe them, helping you respond more calmly. Through powerful visualisation and suggestion techniques, hypnotherapy can teach your subconscious mind to adopt healthier responses, reducing your stress reactions over time.
3. Building Resilience
Hypnotherapy doesn’t just address the symptoms of stress; it also helps you develop resilience. Resilience is the ability to handle life’s challenges without becoming overwhelmed. Using tools like guided visualisation, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and positive reinforcement, hypnotherapy helps build mental and emotional resilience, giving you the strength to handle stressors without being derailed by them.
4. Managing Physical Symptoms
When stress manifests physically—as headaches, muscle tightness, or sleep disturbances—hypnotherapy can be a powerful tool to address these symptoms. Through body scanning and relaxation techniques, hypnotherapy helps reduce physical tension, relieve pain, and improve sleep quality. By reprogramming your subconscious response to stress, hypnotherapy can also help alleviate chronic symptoms that have been resistant to other treatments.
5. Creating Lasting Lifestyle Changes
During hypnotherapy, we can work together to identify any lifestyle habits that contribute to your stress, such as procrastination, lack of boundaries, or unhealthy coping mechanisms. Hypnotherapy can help shift these habits, replacing them with healthier choices and patterns that support a balanced life. This empowers you to make meaningful changes in your daily routine, reducing stress long-term.
What to Expect from a Hypnotherapy Session for Stress
In a hypnotherapy session, you’ll start by discussing the sources of your stress and identifying specific goals. Then, we guide you into a relaxed, focused state where we can access your subconscious mind to explore and reframe the automatic responses contributing to your stress. Each session builds upon the last, helping you gradually shift your perspective and responses, with effects that extend well beyond the session itself.
With time, many clients report feeling calmer and more in control, not just in obvious moments of stress but in everyday life.
Finding Calm in the Chaos
If stress is holding you back from living fully, hypnotherapy could be the solution to help you regain control, find calm, and handle life’s challenges with ease. It’s a natural, non-invasive way to rewire your responses, build resilience, and finally feel at ease.
For anyone looking to take a meaningful step towards less stress, I invite you to book a free 20-minute consultation. Together, we can explore how hypnotherapy might be a fit for you and start a journey towards a more balanced, fulfilling life. You deserve to feel calm and centred—let’s navigate that path together.
Feel free to reach out, or find more tips on managing stress on my Instagram and Facebook pages.
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.
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!
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?
