Anyone who has ever suffered with anxiety or depression will know how life-altering it can be. How it can dominate everything. From going to school – or no longer being able to - to going out with friends. From applying for a job you really want to actually, just facing the day. Anxiety is the total loss of intellectual control – the amygdala responding to stimuli and putting you on constant alert. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help. 

Smoking or vaping, gambling, shopping, over-eating or eating too little - just a fraction of the things that will once have given you solace from something, but which then become the problem, requiring your total attention, and often compromising your lifestyle and finances. I can work with you to help reduce the urges you feel by finding alternative sources of dopamine and determining a route to the life you WANT to lead. 

With smoking / vaping, a two-hour, one-off Solution Focused Hypnotherapy session will suffice provided you commit to the process. 

Hypnotherapy uses the most well-researched and evidence-based therapies, and this includes Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. If you suffer poor confidence or self-esteem, your thinking will be negative (whether conscious or not), resulting in negative feelings. I will help you bring this distorted thinking into focus by tapping into your rational thinking mind and challenging these assumptions, so that with practice, you can create more positive automatic associations. CBT research has shown that the brain can re-pattern its neural pathways over a period of 45 days. 

Fears are our bodies’ acceptable response to something but can still be grinding you down. Phobias are extreme responses, over which you have no control, and are out of proportion to the actual threat posed. I work with you to reframe the fear, and to determine alternative ways of responding to events. Provided the phobia isn’t complex (lots of things rather than just one) then Solutions Focused Hypnotherapy can be effective in just four sessions.

The gut is sometimes referred to as the second brain. Any worries you churn over in your head can often cause a physical response in the body. By firstly easing the matters you’re spinning with worry over, and controlling your responses, you can vastly reduce the impact of bouts of irritable bowel syndrome and ultimately be free of this pernicious disease. 

OCD is an anxiety disorder which causes the sufferer to carry out compulsions to try and rid themselves of obsessive worry (health, safety, cleanliness). I will help you get your anxiety well under control before confronting your fear response, beginning with the easiest strategies, as identified by you, and then progressing through to the difficult areas.

A ‘good night’s sleep’ will vary from person to person. But if you’ve ever been sleep deprived, you’ll know how hard it is to function. We need two types of sleep: ‘slow-wave sleep’ so the body can repair itself, and REM sleep to help with ‘housekeeping’ or processing events and emotions of our day. This is where we ditch what we don’t need and ‘solve’ problems or challenges. If we don’t have enough REM sleep, this leads to residual anxiety. I will help you regulate your sleep patterns so that you can function better. 

Stress limits our capacity to live more fully and effectively causing us to think in black and white terms. I will help you see things from different perspectives and to practice reframing situations which have traditionally caused you stress. Small changes lead to bigger changes. 

Stress is a big factor in weight gain. And the need for control is a major factor in anyone suffering from disordered eating. Interrupting our impulses and questioning what they’re really saying can be liberating in helping to change behaviour.