Stress Management, real-life solutions

In my Leeds private practice, I used to see an average of one in five people for stress-related conditions. Since the credit crunch recession, these numbers have increased to one in two. This is hardly surprising when we live in an era where the media constantly reports on what is now known as “the credit crunch”, where petrol and food prices are increasing, mortgage rates are rising, and, unsurprisingly, many people’s individual stress levels are on the rise.

We live in an information age where we have access to twenty-four-hour news, twenty-four-hour shopping, and the Internet. Little wonder that more and more people find themselves in greater states of anxiety. The idea of “a job for life” has now been shown to be really just an idea, so job security is often just a myth. With changes in the housing market, the phrase “safe as houses” has also proved to be another myth, as people realise that everything in life is increasingly in flux. Years ago, most people didn’t even know what the term “carbon footprint” meant, whereas now individuals such as AL Gore have brought attention to the need to protect the environment. All of these factors can and often do create greater amounts of stress for people.

How we think and what we think determines how we feel. How we feel determines to a large extent what we believe and how be behave in life. Problems such as anxiety and stress and other such issues all occur when an individual finds that they find themselves in “a problematic emotional loop” or “stuck state” and in all instances it “feels” like there are few if any choices available. In my Leeds private practice and during the Human Alchemy, NLP and Hypnosis trainings, my style of working is always to create environments where people can discover new possibilities for thinking, feeling, and responding in new ways.

Unhelpful Internal Dialogue

I saw a client recently who had in recent times experienced what she called “panic attacks” I made the comment “what she called'” because I am a firm believer that proper medical assessment and advice should be sought before using such diagnostic terms.
With all clients, my approach is to determine what they are “doing”. When I asked her what she was thinking to herself and “how” she was thinking it, all became clear. Each day, she would think or say to herself, in an anxious voice, “What’s wrong with me?” which, of course, trains the brain to scan for potential problems according to her own imagination.

The “What if?” question

The “What if” question is when people ask themselves, “What if X happens?” This “X” factor will always be a problem, so the mind only pays attention to “problems” and ignores everything else, successfully creating a series of stuck states. Of course, the very phrase “what if?” is an anticipatory phrase, and anticipation is an important ingredient in creating anxiety states. If this “what if” phrase is repeated in a fast, anxious voice, someone may only notice how they feel and not realise what is creating these feelings. The voice tempo exercise I developed, referenced in Steve Andreas’ book, can help address negative self-talk.

Making Unhelpful Pictures

When Richard Bandler and John Grinder first created NLP, they noticed that people form internal pictures that determine how they feel. The creators of NLP discovered that they could quickly shift clients’ states and beliefs by altering their own internal visual representations. The Fast Phobia Method uses this approach to, in many cases, dramatically shift a client’s stuck state into one where they no longer experience the same fear. In an era of HD TV and twenty-four-hour news, many people will discover that their senses are literally bombarded with pictures of problem scenarios, whether this is people queuing outside banks to withdraw savings, picketing over the fuel protests, handing in petitions to Downing Street, famine overseas, or other such scenarios.

By using NLP and hypnosis, we can quickly change unhelpful associations to create better states of well-being for clients. The beauty of this approach is that this is an accelerated process for change, where most private clients discover major benefits even in the first session