Become a Time Traveller

Our understanding of time has an important bearing upon our feelings of mental and emotional well-being.

Clinical Psychologist, Michael D Yapko, well known for his work on the application of hypnosis in therapy, believes that the person who is in good mental and emotional health thinks flexibly about time.

These people are able to move freely between the past, the present and the future. This means that in dealing with everyday living they can draw equally well upon past experiences, future possibilities and perceptions of the present.

Some individuals however get locked into one way of experiencing time and this can be associated with particular forms of behaviour.

The anxious person tends to be obsessed by the future, worrying about what might happen, and unable to temper those perceptions by reference to past experience. Rather than learning through past experience that things will turn out okay in the end, they shut out the past, overwhelmed by their worries about future possibilities.

The depressed person, on the other hand, is caught up in the past, allowing former disappointments, injustices and old traumas to dominate their thinking and determine their view of the present.

The person who gives no thought to either the past or the future and lives entirely in the present gives no importance to past experience or to future consequences. This sort of person is susceptible to impulse disorders, and due to their exclusive preoccupation with the here-and-now may suffer from addictions.

Think about whether your own bias is in favour of the past, the present or the future? Perhaps with a bit of thought and readjustment you can begin to change your mind-set.

NLP makes use of timelines and these can provide a useful supplement to approaches offered by hypnotherapists. Timelines allow people to move into the future and the past and to look at themselves from new temporal perspectives.