What exactly is hypnosis?

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My name is David Faratian. I am a consultant hypnotherapist practising at the Cumbria Hypnosis Mindfulness Clinic and in this article, I would like to explore the fascinating psychology of hypnosis and hypnotherapy and attempt to unravel some of the more common myths. Hypnosis has become well-known thanks to popular acts where people are prompted to perform unusual or ridiculous actions, but, it has also been clinically proven to provide medical and therapeutic benefits, most notably in the reduction of pain and anxiety. It has even been suggested that hypnosis can reduce the symptoms of dementia. When you hear the word hypnotist, what comes to mind?

If you’re like many people, the word may conjure up images of a sinister stage-villain who brings about a hypnotic state by swinging a pocket watch back and forth. While hypnosis is often described as a sleep-like trance state, it is better expressed as a state characterised by focused attention, heightened suggestibility, and vivid fantasies. People in a hypnotic state often seem sleepy and zoned out, but in reality, they are in a state of hyper-awareness. In psychology, hypnosis is sometimes referred to as hypnotherapy and has been used for a number of purposes including the reduction and treatment of pain. Hypnosis is usually performed by a trained therapist who utilises visualisation and verbal repetition to induce a hypnotic state.

  So what can hypnotherapy help with? Often hypnotherapy is seen as the magic bullet for dealing with smoking cessation and weight loss. While this is partially true, what people may not always realise is that hypnosis has applications far more far-reaching and effective for a wide range of limiting beliefs, behaviours and emotions, including generalised anxiety disorders, OCD, ADHD, IBS, PTSD, Panic attacks, and even some forms of chronic pain. Often hypnotherapy can be a powerful ally for conventional medical treatments as it empowers self-belief and the ability for the client to heal themselves. Essentially the hypnotherapist acts as a bridge between the issue being dealt with and the part within capable of learning and making changes, namely the subconscious mind. If this brief introduction has piqued your interest and you would like to learn more about how this approach may offer a solution to a long-standing issue which has not been effectively dealt with yet, then find out more by reading the rest of the information on this website.




Mind Over Weight

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Recently one of my clients, Claire from Ulverston in Cumbria came to see me for her years of struggle with her attempts to lose weight. She had literally tried everything she could think of and like so many people had spent hundreds of pounds searching for her holy grail. She had attempted numerous diets, traditional and a few unconventional ones which she had found on Facebook and the internet but each and every attempt had resulted in the same outcome which was short term weight loss and a sense of optimism followed very quickly by an abject sense of feeling dismayed and disheartened: “I felt like a complete failure and just went straight back to eating again, putting all the weight back on again” Claire is not alone, however. Her story, like 90% of people worldwide is one of failure to lose weight with diets long term. Why is it so hard? The answer is pretty simple really. The body was not designed to be starved. When you put your body into a famine all you end up doing is stressing the system and the body kicks in to recovery mode. What this means is that once you starve yourself the body makes you feel more hungry, more irritable and more focused on the foods you shouldn’t be thinking about rather than anything else, which then compels you to grab the first opportunity to eat as much as possible thereby undoing all of the work you may have already put in. The body will keep this up until the balance is restored and the ‘emergency’ of no food is over.

And yet the dieting industry which is worth billions of dollars happily pedals the false dream of the perfect body as long as you keep trying again and again. The perfect business model for the big name weight loss companies, which I don’t even have to mention, but not necessarily the perfect solution for those they sell to. Diets are artificial, they are boring and they are unsustainable long term. This is our starting point in this discussion. So is it a lost cause? Is the idea of controlling your weight the impossible dream? Well, yes and no. You see if you are always comparing yourself to the airbrushed models in Vogue or Cosmopolitan then you are setting yourself an unrealistic challenge to become something which doesn’t even really exist. If however you can condition yourself to be happy with a balanced and healthy body, where you are simply comfortable and happy in your own skin then very quickly your resistance around what you think you should and shouldn’t eat can become less important. If you can accept and understand that food is merely a function of your life and NOT the be all and end all then you can relax more and live with less stress about your body.

So if you don’t achieve weight loss through dieting then how do you do it? The clients I work with learn to control three key areas of their lives, which once dealt with help reshape their entire philosophy around food so that they cannot only control the weight but more importantly can learn to lose weight naturally without sacrificing anything in their lives. Claire told me “ This was like nothing I had ever done in the past, because at no point did I feel like I was having to give up anything or having to use will power”. What Claire had identified was the one main difference between experiences with diets and the gastric band hypnosis process which I teach. In diets you have to choose what you can and cannot eat. With gastric band hypnotherapy, using a variety of cutting edge mental strategies you do not need any effort or willpower because our starting point is that food will always be around you therefore why fight it? You can try denying yourself but you will always want the thing you are trying to avoid so just stop resisting and realise your environment will not change BUT you can! Once food doesn’t tempt you in quite the same way, your behaviour based on your emotions will start changing. The autopilot of the body also known as the subconscious can readily train your ability to know when you are full and can be trained to feel full quicker. Claire’s experience illustrates this: “ I had always known that gastric band operations existed, but I didn’t want to put my body through dangerous surgery and I certainly wasn’t willing to spend £8000. Once I was shown how to achieve similar results using hypnosis, I was amazed at how quickly I was feeling full and how much more food was left on my plate” Once you can have more subconscious awareness of feeling full quicker with less food then through sustained automatic balanced eating, the body begins to more efficiently process burning off existing fat and preserving less new fat. The metabolism can, in effect, return to normal and function more efficiently, doing its job properly after having maybe spent years speeding up and slowing down according to any yo-yo dieting attempts.


“I would recommend this service (Cumbria Hypnosis Habit Change Clinic) to anyone who is struggling with diets. It Takes all the effort out of losing weight, gives you confidence and enables you to live your life to fullest without sacrificing anything.” Louise (Barrow-in-Furness)

The mind and body working in balance can result in dramatic and long lasting weight loss, once you have been able to engage with the creative part of brain. The reason why this approach works, is simply because it does not rely on resisting your environment and yourself, instead it is about reframing your perceptions of food and how much you actually need to eat to have the energy you need to get from one mealtime to the next without running back to the fridge an hour later. If you want to find out more then visit our dedicated page HERE

Cumbria Hypnosis serves Cumbria, South Lakes including Ulverston, Kendal and Lancaster with flexible daytime and evening clinics to suit you. If you would like to have a no obligation 20 minute consultation where I will share exactly how this process can help you then you can contact me by clicking this link

Wishing you well

David Faratian











A shocking fact about smoking cessation


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In this month’s blog I want to discuss the three issues that trigger your cravings and urges to smoke, and the secret hypnotic techniques that can turn them into triggers that make you automatically lose the cravings and urges and reject the cigarettes.

In the next few minutes you are going to completely understand why it is so difficult to quit smoking, and the way hypnosis and NLP techniques can be highly effective psychological tool for neutralising the cravings and urges without having to resort to struggle or to willpower. 

Here's the first issue that triggers oral cravings and urges.

All smokers get cravings and urges to smoke because putting cigarettes into the mouth provides temporary relaxation and pleasure 

If you smoke, it all started when you were an infant. When you got upset, your mother stuck a bottle full of baby milk in your mouth or maybe a dummy.You got distracted by the bottle, relaxed and soon thereafter you fell asleep.Your inner computer, your unconscious mind got programmed so that now, when something is placed into your mouth, you get relaxation and pleasure from it. 

Now as an adult when you feel tense or nervous, you put cigarettes (or chewing tobacco) into your mouth for relaxation and pleasure.

Here's the second issue that triggers oral cravings. Smoking is a conditioned response 

Do you remember learning about the scientist named Pavlov in school? Pavlov rang a bell every time that he fed his dogs. After a few repetitions, all he had to do was just ring the bell, and the dogs would salivate.

If a person smokes and simultaneously drinks coffee, the mind takes a picture of the cigarette in the hand, and connect it to the image of the cup of coffee. Thereafter, every time the person looks at a cup of coffee, the minefields in the missing part of the picture. It flashes an image of the cigarette in the hand, and the person feels and urge to smoke

The mental picture of the cigarette is usually only at the unconscious level. In other words, the person may not be consciously aware of the picture. But the image is there, creating cravings and a compulsion to smoke. 


The same thing happens if you smoke and drive, or smoke and watch other people smoke, smoke and watch TV, or smoking do anything else. Soon almost everything causes you to unconsciously see a cigarette, and it is those unconscious images which make you feel cravings and a compulsion to smoke.

But what about the physical addiction? Isn't there a strong physical addiction? Isn't that what makes quitting so difficult question?
Here is an interesting fact. Relaxation and pleasure make up as much as 45% of the addiction. The conditioned responses make up 45% of the addiction BUT the physical addiction surprisingly only makes up 10% of the addiction

Of course the physical addiction is to nicotine among other psychoactive elements. Scientists tell us however, that the body metabolises all of the nicotine within 72 hours! So effectively after the 72 hours we are only left with the urges and compulsions caused by the mental emotional aspects of the smoking habit

So now I'm going to share with you how you can quickly get rid of your cravings, urges, and compulsions, because this will provide a solution to quitting without with drawl, stress substitution of food or having to rely on willpower. As already discussed the craving and compulsion part of the smoking addiction accounts for 90% of the addiction, so it is the mental aspects of smoking which cause the majority of the cravings and compulsions and not the physical addiction to nicotine. In other words your mind is mostly responsible for causing the cravings and compulsions.

But here's the good news what the mind can create what the mind can learn, The mind can also unlearn

Hypnosis works extremely well at eliminating the smoking addiction because it reaches deep into the part of the brain where the unwanted habits take route, the unconscious. When implemented by an expert hypnotist and NLP specialist you can quickly eliminate any compulsion

Without a compulsion to smoke you quit without feeling tension or anxiety, or suffering from cravings or with drawl. And since you're actually feel more relaxed, you won't have any desire to substitute food in place of the cigarettes!

Through the hypnosis and NLP programs available on this site you can conquer your battle with smoking and cigarettes without the struggle. You might be wondering why hypnosis and NLP (neurolinguistic programming), works so well. The reason is simple when you change the mental association, you also change the emotion which links you to the behaviour which in turn breaks down the habit. 

If you would like to find out more about this approach for dealing with your habit of smoking or any other compulsion or addiction then simply click on the CONTACT ME link at the bottom of this page or CLICK HERE for more information.
 



How Medical Hypnosis Is Giving Hope

By David Faratian

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For many people hypnosis and hypnotherapy belong in the realm of voodoo and hocus-pocus. As more studies are conducted on brainwaves and how altered states can be induced through guided suggestions, there is more and more agreement within the scientific community that positive physiological benefits can be experienced through carefully structured hypnotherapy sessions. More interestingly, studies have found that children and animals who naturally exhibit the brainwave frequencies typically associated with Hypnosis are more prone to Hypnotherapy treatment and are more likely to deal with problems experienced during childhood such as bedwetting and nightmares and lack of self confidence through bullying etc the most exciting area, yet to be explored in depth, is the area of learning and the brains ability to accelerate memory. It is now generally agreed that Hypnosis and self-diagnosis induce the natural states of learning associated with alpha and theta brainwave frequencies. Once these states can be conditioned and triggered at will the ability to retain information long term is dramatically increased.

But studies have gone further and proven that through carefully guided imagery people suffering from pain and in particular burn victims have greatly increased their speed of recovery by visualising cooling images around any affected areas. This would indicate that Hypnosis has a neuro psychoneuroimmunological effect on the individual and is a very versatile alternative therapy which has a scope far beyond simple habit management like losing weight and stopping smoking. This has very exciting implications indeed. As there is a greater understanding of consciousness and in particular the innate intelligence we all understand as the subconscious, Hypnosis opens the gateway to self-healing on a much larger scale than we may at first have appreciated.



The power of the human mind


Please picture an iceberg and now imagine that the iceberg is submerged and all that you can see is the very top of it. The rest of that huge bulk lies deep below the water. Well, if you were now to imagine that the bit that you can see above the water approximately 10% represents the part of your mind that you use during an entire lifetime, while the bit below that huge roughly 90% is the part of your brain that never gets used, then you’ll understand how we are not only underutilising our very own ‘supercomputer’ but just consider the potential of the mind which many people miss out on. In the words of author James Allen “ You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you”

So what if you could harness that potential no matter how old or young and literally master your mind to achieve some quite amazing things, which may at first seem impossible and certainly untreatable from a conventional medical point of view. Would that be of interest?

In the blog that now follows, over coming weeks and months, I hope to be able to share with you just how powerful the mind really is and what you can personally achieve once you are open to the possibilities for change. My intention is not to baffle you with science nor do I wish to make any extreme claims about the subject matter to follow. What I do hope is to de-mystify the myth about all things to do with the mind, mind control and hypnosis. The media has understandably stirred a subconscious interest in mind power, from psychological illusionists like Derren Brown to hypnotherapists like Paul McKenna and even more recently from magicians like Dynamo, that enigmatic blend of science and the paranormal is intuitively appealing to even the most skeptical. It is far more interesting to be challenged by the unexplainable than to simply have that experience handed to your understanding on a silver platter; it’s just how we are built.


I hope that the reader finds the information interesting, educational and certainly helpful in what it may open up in terms of opportunities for personal development. I will begin as from next week exploring how the mind can be used for faster and more effective learning by discussing the fascinating subject of accelerated learning and memory, so whether you are an emerging student or a more mature learner looking to maximize your brain’s potential you may just wish to ‘tune in’ next time. Let the journey into mastering your mind begin.