Aspire Therapy

Crunch Time for Smokers

Crunch time is coming for many smokers in England with the summertime date for the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces rapidly approaching.

Some will leave it until the July 1 deadline before thinking about how they will address this issue and adapt to change.

Others, however, will be planning for the change and thinking through the implications of the ban in terms of the impact on their life-style.

National No Smoking Day on Wednesday, March 14 provides a good opportunity to focus minds. No Smoking Day is an annual health awareness campaign which aims to help smokers who want to put an end to their habit.

When Is A Trance Not A Trance?

It’s commonly pointed out by hypnotherapists that the state of mind we call hypnosis is something all of us experience in our everyday lives.

We enter this state during periods of concentrated attention when we shut out surrounding distractions to focus on a particular thing or sensation. This might be a television programme, a book or a piece of music.

It could also be a train of thought, which we get caught up in to the exclusion of all else, pursuing it to the point where we lose conscious awareness of our environment. I’m talking here about daydreaming of course.

When you think about it in these terms you begin to realise that we actually spend large chunks of our lives in trance states, states where our attention is very focused – often to the exclusion of all else.

The Miracle Question

Suppose tonight, while you slept, a miracle happened….

When you awoke the following morning – you found that all your problems were magically resolved.

What would your life look like? What would you be doing, thinking or feeling? How exactly would you know that a miracle had occurred?

These are some of the questions posed in The Miracle Question written by Linda Metcalf and published by Crown House Publishing, which advocates a ‘solution focused approach’ to our problems – but what does this actually mean and how can it help us?

Hypnosis for Everyday Living

People don’t always realise that hypnotherapy can be used to enhance the quality of everyday living in a wide variety of simple ways, and is not just effective in the treatment of deep-seated problems or unwanted habits.

All of us at certain times in our lives face situations which can bring us considerable stress and anxiety, even though we may not regard ourselves as having any kind of habitual or long-term problem.

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 Price of Being Perfect

If you’re not a perfectionist yourself, you’ll probably know someone who is.

You’ll also know that while perfectionism can have its benefits it can also cause problems for the person themselves and for those around them.

Because the perfectionist sets themselves very high standards, they can end up feeling anxious and depressed and can run into problems with relationships

Therapy can help with these problems. But by their very nature, perfectionists may be reluctant to seek out such help, seeing it as a sign of weakness and failure.

The January edition of Psychologies Magazine suggests some exercises which can be helpful to the perfectionist who is suffering from these tendencies - exercises which they can try on their own.