Self Help

Fear of losing control rage

Fear Of Losing Control

Fear of Losing Control

The fear of losing control is a common fear that can be associated with many other anxiety-related conditions e.g., phobias, panic attacks, OCD, social anxiety and PTSD. You may not communicate this fear as an initial treatment goal, yet it can emerge as an important secondary issue that demands attention. Exploring your beliefs connected to “control” and what it means to “lose control” can be extremely beneficial to treating your main presenting condition and associated anxiety symptoms.

Fear of losing control rage
How do you define your loss of control?

What is a fear of losing control?

A fear of losing control can mean different things to different people. We all want to be in control of our lives, in the same way that we all want to pursue our model of happiness. However, there is a huge difference between wanting to be in control and living in fear of losing control, in whatever way that you define that negative reality coming into existence. As that negative reality threatens to materialise, you can anticipate your symptoms and you may become over-controlling with your emotions and behaviour to prevent it.

In more general terms, the prevention of this negative reality is characterised by an intense and irrational fear of losing control over:

  • Yourself – This can include your mind, emotions, memories, reactions, behaviour, bodily functions e.g., bladder or bowel,etc. You might fear losing control by making a fool of yourself, doing something irrational after drinking too much alcohol, being rash or aggressive (losing your temper), being emotional (crying), or saying something that you might regret. “Freaking-out” and “going crazy” are terms commonly used if you were to lose control or be “physically or mentally incapacitated” in some way. It often refers to having a panic attack and the struggle to breath associated with the panic attack. As a consequence of losing control, other secondary feelings of distress (blame, guilt, shame, embarrassment etc.) may also be related to the initial (primary) loss of control or panic attack.
  • A situation – This can include a work meeting, presentation, formal social occasion, or performance situation. You fear that the situation won’t go as planned, so you over-plan it, obsess and overthink it. You spend an excessive amount of time in your preparation and rehearsal. Your fear of something going wrong in the situation can overwhelm you and distract you from your ability to cope with the demands of the situation like listening and responding to questions.
  • Property – This can include items of financial and sentimental value. You fear that the item of value might be damaged or lost. For example, when you buy a new car, you then become possessive over it, fearing that it will be damaged or stolen if it is parked in a precarious place. To control this fear you then leave the car in your garage where it’s safe, rarely enjoying your “precious” new vehicle. Losing-control fear can also dominate how you maintain your property. It is prevalent with types of OCD including contamination behaviours, cleanliness, orderliness and hoarding compulsions.
  • Other people – This can relate to how you expect others to comply with your expectations to lower your anxiety because you worry about them. If others don’t comply, you fear that they might be harmed in some way. It can also include being controlling over others to prevent them from showing your potential incompetence.

The term “Control-Freak” is coined for those who obsess over things being done in a perfect way or be left with feelings of inadequacy or failure. As a phobia it is also known as atychiphobia or kakorrhaphiophobia.

Perfectionist controlling lawn
Perfectionists are more prone to losing-control fears

“Control-freaks” are often perfectionists who battle with intense self-criticism, hopelessness and stress. They struggle to delegate to others as they are intolerant of those who don’t share their same flawless standards.

Unhealthy (or neurotic) perfectionists are more prone to losing-control fears as general trait or in specific areas of life. They can be distinguished from the healthy form of perfectionism, in which pleasure is gained from one’s efforts and the outcomes do not compromise your self-esteem.

What situations can a fear of losing control affect?

Family relationships – Parental fears of their children being harmed is very common. The parent’s protective behaviour can reduce their own worries, but it can damage a child’s confidence particularly when the behaviour is controlling. For example, if a parent suffers with social anxiety, they can inadvertently instil socially anxious fears into their child by controlling who they should be friends with and when they can see them.

Parents can also be over-controlling of their children to prevent themselves being labelled as an incapable parents. Controlling the child’s homework to help the child’s success can be a sign of good parenting but controlling all their free time to make them study (just to calm the parent’s fears) can overwhelm them. Some children can become averse to studying because of parental pressure.

Workplace – The fear of losing control at work can present itself in many ways, usually as a fear of failure. For the individual who wants to achieve high standards, the extra time and energy to revise completed work just to “cross every T” can take its toll on your productivity-efficiency with potential burnout. When you can’t perfect something, you may become defensive of it, procrastinate over the task or avoid it altogether since an “adequate” outcome (rather than a perfect one) can be viewed as failure. Other perfectionist behaviour can include hiding your errors from others for fear of criticism, then finding it’s too late to correct these errors before the deadline. You may also be very critical of others who don’t have the same perfect standards as you.

In some cases, being managed by a perfectionist boss who fears losing control of their staff can amount to bullying. Bullying behaviour includes being humiliating, insulting, offensive and intimidating towards subordinate members of staff. Bullying behaviour is not always “downwards” in the chain of command, it can extend to colleagues at a similar level, and “upwards” towards superior staff. The latter can apply when a junior member of staff is envious of a superior’s position and will reject their “control” by failing to complete requested tasks, being disrespectful and spreading rumours about them to colleagues.

Relationships – losing-control fear in relationships can take many forms. Perhaps the most obvious is the fear of a relationship breakdown and the potential rejection, isolation, worthlessness, and abandonment that can accompany it. To suppress these fears, partners can display many dominating and controlling behaviours like anger, jealousy, guilt-tripping, shaming, possessiveness, being critical (to avoid blame), “gaslighting” and being excessively inquisitive (snooping on your partner’s phone/emails).

Education – Similar to the work situation, fear of losing control in your education can be related to perfectionism. To under-achieve and attain low grades would generate intense feelings of self-criticism worthlessness. Perfectionism due to high expectations can cause conditions like writer’s block, burnout, depression and anxiety. Some students may resort to cheating and plagiarism due to the pressure to achieve high standards when completing assignments and exams.

Physical activity (exercise) – You would expect a degree of perfectionism to become an elite performer, but as with other situations, the pressure to perform can generate a losing-control fear. The pressure at elite competitions can generate sports performance anxiety, self-doubt, anger and fear of failure. Self-criticism can encourage the performer to dwell on mistakes and get distracted during the competition when the competition-performance demands are relentless. For the amateur (and elite performer), cheating using performance-enhancing substances can be appealing to reach the next level of achievement. Even for the informal fitness enthusiast, you can be susceptible to training compulsively.

Other performance situations – Fear of losing control of the performance can impact on other performance situations including driving tests, interviews, musical and stage performances and presentations. It can also affect informal performance situations like dating, sexual performance (premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction), and other social situations. A lack of control may be experienced as a fear of embarrassment, humiliation, judgement, and failure.

Home cleanliness – Devoting time and attention to something that is your pride and joy can become progressively controlling, preventing you from actually relaxing in and enjoying your own home. As with other situations (and objects), perfectionism can influence the achievement of high standards. DIY and gardening projects, tidying and cleaning can become compulsive (as a common type of OCD), continuously finding yet another job to do in an already-busy daily schedule. Your loss-of-control fears can relate to who might see those flaws and criticise something that could be cleaner. The expectations you have about your home can influence you to take those imagined judgements personally (i.e. that you aren’t good enough to keep a perfect home).

Your body – the pursuit of high standards (ideals) and self-criticism directed towards your body can be displayed in many ways.  Body-perfect behaviours can include compulsive exercising (e.g. bodybuilding outside of competitions), body treatments (plastic surgery and implants, beauty treatments, having numerous tattoos and body piercings), excessive dieting (to lose weight or to prevent health conditions) and eating disorders (e.g. anorexia and bulimia etc.). Body dysmorphia is the mental health condition that can be associated with many of the above behaviours. Comorbid conditions like addiction, self-harm, drinking excessive alcohol, depression and binge behaviour etc. can accompany this condition.

There are some situations in which this losing-control fear can be beneficial to your overall health, particularly when connected to making poor lifestyle choices. If you define the fear of losing control as developing chronic health conditions (e.g. diabetes, coronary artery disease, stroke, some types of cancer, etc.), you may make better lifestyle choices to try and prevent these chronic conditions from developing. These self-care behaviours can include having a mild form of heath anxiety that can encourage you to stop smoking, eat a healthy diet, exercise, reduce alcohol intake, sleep better etc. Similarly, those who already have chronic physical and mental health conditions may maintain their habit of taking medication to control and prevent their symptoms becoming worse.

What causes a fear of losing control?

Fear of losing control can be caused by a variety of factors related to the causes of phobias, including:

1. Genetics: Some people may have a genetic predisposition to anxiety disorders, which can increase the likelihood of developing this fear.

2. Traumatic experiences: People who have experienced “survival anxiety” (e.g. abandonment or separation fears) or traumatic events such as abuse, accidents, or medical emergencies may develop this fear as a reaction to these traumas.

Mother controlling teenager’s behaviour
Controlling behaviour can be a reaction to retrospective feelings of control

3. Learned behaviours: This fear can be learned through observing others or through your personal experience. If a person has seen someone else lose control in a situation and had a negative outcome, they may develop a similar fear. Feeling like you have experienced being controlled in your life may generate a deep need to balance (or take back) that control in a direct or disconnected way. When the reaction is unable to be asserted, it can generate losing-control symptoms.

4. Personality traits: People who have a tendency towards perfectionism may be more susceptible to developing this fear.

5. Mental health conditions: This fear can be a symptom of other mental health conditions such as panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder or bipolar disorder.

In many cases, a combination of these factors may contribute to the development of a fear of losing control.

The locus of control

The concept of the locus of control is not a cause of how some people have more control in their lives compared to others; it is more of a way of understanding the beliefs about “where control exists” in some people and not in others.

The locus of control is a concept that refers to the degree to which a person believes that they are in control of their own life. People with an internal locus of control tend to believe that they have control over and are responsible for their own fate e.g. “the reason I am successful is because I have worked hard”. However, people with an external locus of control tend to believe that their fate is largely determined by outside forces e.g. “I am successful because I was lucky”.

In relation to the fear of losing control, it is likely that those with a strong internal locus of control are less likely to experience this fear, as they believe that they have more power over their own lives and can do more to influence their outcomes. Those with a high external locus of control are more likely to experience this out-of-control fear, believing that they are helpless to the stronger authority of the outside world.

Another term associated with the locus of control of one’s thoughts and actions is personal agency.

What are the common symptoms?

The symptoms of a fear of losing control, can vary from person to
person, but common symptoms include:

  1. Intense anxiety or panic, especially in situations that are perceived as threatening.
    2. Avoidance behaviours: avoiding situations or activities that you associate with the fear to limit the feelings of panic and anxiety.
    3. Physical symptoms such as rapid heart rate, sweating, shaking, and muscle tension. Periods of insomnia is also common.
    4. Mental symptoms including racing thoughts, confusion, dread, disorientation, and a sense of detachment from reality.
    5. Emotional symptoms of distress such as feelings of shame, embarrassment, anger and hopelessness.

How is a fear of losing control commonly treated?

This fear is commonly treated with a combination of psychotherapy and medication. Some common approaches to treatment include:
1. Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT): This type of therapy helps individuals
recognize and change negative thought patterns and behaviours associated with
their fear.
2. Exposure therapy: This involves gradually exposing individuals to the feared
situation or trigger. It is done in a controlled and safe environment, in order to help reduce anxiety and panic.
3. Medication: Anti-anxiety medications, such as benzodiazepines, and
antidepressant medications, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
(SSRIs), can be prescribed by your doctor to help manage symptoms of anxiety and panic.
4. Relaxation techniques: Practicing relaxation techniques, such as deep breathing techniques, self-hypnosis, mindfulness and progressive muscle relaxation, can help reduce anxiety symptoms and improve emotional regulation.
5. Lifestyle changes: Making lifestyle changes, such as reducing caffeine and
alcohol intake, having regular exercise, and practicing good sleep hygiene can
also help manage symptoms of anxiety and improve overall well-being.
The most effective treatment plan will depend on the individual's specific needs and circumstances, and it's important to work with a mental health professional to develop a plan that is tailored to your needs.

Treating your fear of losing control with hypnotherapy

There are many ways that hypnotherapy can help you to treat your fears and phobias. Hypnotic techniques include using hypnotic suggestions to reduce your anxiety and anticipatory anxiety symptoms, assisting controlled exposure, regression techniques to identify sensitising events and visualisation of your desired outcome.

As mentioned earlier, a fear of losing control is related to your beliefs associated with control and what it means for you to lose control. In the initial stages of the treatment, it is essential to engage in a discussion about your beliefs to individualise your treatment. These strategies are commonly used in cognitive behavioural therapy. The treatment can then help you to confront your losing-control fears that “sit underneath” your treatment goals, enabling you to think and act positively towards them. This can include overcoming a phobia, treating specific issues within your OCD or social anxiety.

Some of the losing-control fear discussion points are listed below:

  • Clarify your domain of fear. The domain of fear is discussed earlier in this article. You will already know the significant areas that your losing-control fear is affecting e.g., if it relates to a loss of control over your body, your emotions (e.g., anger) or your trust in other people’s behaviour. You will also be aware of the sphere of your life that it affects (work, relationships, diet etc.).
  • Discuss whether your losing control fear is a primary issue (from the
    Fear of losing control humiliation
    It can seem like there is no recovery after the losing-control event

    domains listed above) or a secondary issue. Many clients over-focus on the primary issue, as if there is “no life” or recovery after the losing-control event. You can neglect to value the secondary issues that drive you to the primary issue and leave you ruminating over it long after it has Secondary issues can include feeling embarrassed, humiliated, responsible, blame-worthy, guilty, regretful, ashamed, angry etc. Consider anxiety-related overactive bladder syndrome for example. Having an accident may be the primary issue for most people who have the condition. You feel humiliated and believe that you will never recover from this experience. You now double your urinary urge to prevent your primary loss of control but until you validate and confront the beliefs related to your humiliation, it will continue to dominate your fear. Validating the emotion and giving it the attention it deserves will help dissolve your primary issue.

For some clients, these secondary feelings are the primary issue, but you mistake these feelings as the secondary issue. Ignoring these emotions can deepen your fear of losing control, since you get stuck in a situation that is in the middle, rather than at the top of your fear hierarchy. Feeling over-responsible is considered to be a major contributor to a loss-of-control fear.

  • Describe specifically what would happen when you lose control. When closely examined, many clients acknowledge the low probability and irrationality of the fearful “bad event” transpiring. Your description is meta-analysed in the session. This can enable you to acknowledge its improbability and give you the opportunity to rationalise the pathway of losing-control events.
  • Help you appreciate the boundaries of your control. Following a bad experience, it can intensify the belief that you have to try harder to be in control next time. You overthink and over-prepare yourself, trying to control what is realistically outside of your power or ability (rather than what is inside your ability, like mental attitudes). Your perfectionist mind is reluctant “to give up” on the situation and those unspent fearful urges convince you that you can really do the impossible. For example, after a flying trauma, you want to be in control of the flight. You struggle to delegate (or trust) the pilot and think that you can do a better job if you were in charge. Or due to your claustrophobic tendencies, you convince yourself that you can force the plane door open and flee the plane when you are in mid-flight. Maybe in the movies!
  • Establish what you are really trying to perfect in such an over-controlling way. This is another way of approaching your boundaries of control and identify what you fear if the perfect situation was not achieved. Many OCD behaviours are significant here when perfecting the locking-up routine at night to secure the house before going to bed for example. The routine has now become over-ritualised and cumbersome, taking nearly an hour to lock up. Would you feel guilty because you have not done the routine in a set way? Would your anxiety then influence you to stay awake because you struggle to control the uncertainty of another break-in? Would you struggle with the feeling of responsibility if the house was burgled? Are you trying to perfect behaviours or perfect feelings connected to those behaviours?
  • Reconsider the alternative view that “all responses are controlled”. This discussion can help you to challenge the concept of “control” and “being-out-of-control”. From a functional perspective, there is the view that panic attacks for example, are “controlled reactions” to the perception of danger; you are never really “out-of-control”, so this fear does not need to be pursued. Only those people who believe that you can be “out of control” and assign too much significance to the concept of being “out of control” are likely to be affected by this fear in the first place. If you tried to lose control right now, could you make it happen?
  • Examine any safety behaviours connecting to your fear. Safety behaviours are also known as avoidance or coping behaviours. They are used to help you temporarily feel better (your emotional control) when you feel anxious or threatened. You might do something that is unrelated to the threat, but the diversion feels more pleasant than the alternative. If you have an assignment due to be completed but are dwelling in the fear of failure (your loss of control), watching television (your procrastination or safety behaviour) can momentarily distract you from this fear. When the panic of submitting nothing and failing the assignment “screams at you”, you kick into action and start working on the assignment. The delay keeps you anxious through the experience and anxiety is likely to accumulate into the next assignment.
  • Identify your retrospective loss of control. You may have forgotten the previous situation in which you lost or nearly lost control. The trauma of that situation is exaggerating your fear of it surfacing again. What happened in that situation? Did your panic attack convince you that you are going “crazy”, or you’re going to pass out, have a heart attack, stop breathing and suffocate? What did you know about panic attacks when you first had one? What was your belief system before and when you lost control? How did your interpretation of the event reinforce this fear that you could lose control again? When a discussion is unable to recall the event, regression can be used to uncover the experience and the beliefs you held from your past. Further analysis can then be made to reframe the meaning of the event, and its significance to your future fear of it happening again.
  • Reframe your perfectionism. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) strategies integrated with hypnosis can help restructure your perfectionist  perspective in numerous ways. They can include helping you to reassess the “black-and-white-thinking” of your unrealistic standards; examine the perfectionist principles from another broader perspective (what is the worst case situation that can happen?); reconsider your catastrophic thinking of the situation being imperfect; compare your standards to “the bigger picture” (i.e. whether “it really matters” now or 2 years from now or whether the consequences of it not being perfect are survivable); and retrain your ability to compromise or be flexible with your own high standards.
  • Reappraise your unrealistic demand for certainty and fear of the unknown. In a world that is dominated by uncertainty, it’s natural to want to believe that you can cope with the outcomes of future events. Some people constructively prepare towards those outcomes, like when planning a presentation. With confidence, you can moderate your planning as you trust your previous experiences to guide your handling of future public speaking situations. You can then “think on your feet” without needing to be overprepared. You can focus on reasoned probabilities of hope and the potential to learn from those displeasing situations. You keep what you can control within your power. However, those with a fear of losing control are convinced that if the preparation is not perfected, something bad will happen. It is this perfectionist, “must-do” approach to meticulously predict and command the future that maintains your state of worry and hypervigilance. When you can’t control this certainty with perfectionist preparation, you ruminate over it. Those with a fear of public speaking can get stuck in the powerlessness of not being able to control your audience’s responses. Since you demand that certainty, you over-prepare answers to every possible question, then worry about the other questions that you haven’t prepared answers for. Developing a tolerance for uncertainty can help you
    Fear of losing control uncertainty junction
    Tolerating uncertainty can help your fear of losing control

    reduce your fear and promote courage to face the unknown. It can enable you to develop habits to act on the evidence that what you are doing is good enough, rather than using your feeling of disappointment as the outcome. The latter only serves to keep you locked in perfectionism. Developing a tolerance for uncertainty can help you forgive your mistakes and liberate you from the need to be perfect.

Fear of losing control: summary

If you are seeking treatment for a fear of losing control, then these discussion points will help identify your individual definition of fear. It will acknowledge specific or generalised perfectionist traits that are exacerbating your distress. Outside of this losing-control fear, these discussion points can help you identify invaluable secondary issues that are blocking your main treatment goal.

You can access treatment for your losing-control fear in person and remotely by completing the Contact Form. There is more information about hypnotherapy in the hypnosis test.

For more information about treating your fear of losing control, contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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Regression Hypnotherapy

Regression Hypnotherapy

Regression Hypnotherapy

Regression hypnotherapy: As with other types of therapy, hypnotherapy can offer a variety of approaches and techniques to treat a client’s presenting condition. Each technique can have an aim and through its application, respective benefits can be observed. Behind the technique is a strategy to create change. Some strategies are brief and focused on treating symptoms, whilst other strategies deal with deeper core issues.

Regression hypnotherapy treatment
Regression hypnotherapy can help you reinterpret memories

When addressing a presenting problem, understanding the theories underpinning a technique can help improve your skills as a hypnotherapist. From a client’s perspective, understanding these techniques can help you appreciate what to expect during your treatment and how you can benefit from the applied techniques.

The application of regression hypnotherapy is often surrounded by misconception and controversy. However, it can be a beneficial technique in therapy when used appropriately to recall and reinterpret your memories. This article will discuss the uses, benefits and limitations of regression hypnotherapy.

Regression hypnotherapy: what you do or don’t do with memories

Our minds have an extraordinary ability to interact with time lines. Within a short conversation with a close friend, you can “time-travel”, recalling the events of last week that brought back events from a few years ago. Before you know it, you are recalling experiences even further back into your childhood. The conversation then takes a sudden change of direction and you jump forward to today and then to anticipate the possibilities of next week and next year.

The benefits of living in the present are advocated by many of the proponents of self help. The practice is encompassed into the many aspects of meditation, mindfulness and self hypnosis. Outside of the practice of these disciplines, your mind is prone to wandering, making associations with events outside of the present.

At times, it can be fulfilling to reminisce and daydream, recalling meaningful pleasant moments from your past, but this ability to recall your past can vary from person to person. Even if you can remember the details of past events, it can be difficult to recall how these events have directly affected you. This is because your mind engages in a constant filtering process, giving attention to some memories more than others. Some painful memories can be filtered out of normal memory, as if to unconsciously forget: a process called repression.

The idea of repression of memories can be attributed to Freud. He theorised that memory repression served as a defence mechanism against traumatic events. These traumatic events are dumped into the mind’s “non-conscious” zone to minimise discomfort experienced at the time of the event. Nonetheless, they can continue to play a significant role in your everyday life, provoking negative symptoms that have no clear origin.

Sometimes the process of dealing with traumatic events is managed at a more conscious and voluntary level. Suppression is the deliberate intention to forget or block painful or traumatic events, even though you are aware of them. Suppression can help store the painful events in the “holding bay” of your mind. You can then return to them again when there’s more time, it’s more appropriate or you have more effective resources to deal with the event in a beneficial or less destructive way. Sometimes the associations of that suppressed event prompt a need to deal with what’s in the mind’s “holding bay” because there’s just too much material accumulating in there. You can no longer avoid it because the contents are spilling over, causing chaos in one or more areas of your life.

Regression hypnotherapy: working on these memories

Your memories and ability to imagine are some of the basic elements of your unique psyche. Some memories and projected imaginings can be negative and distressing, others positive and strengthening, but all of them determine who you are and how you experience the world around you.

When you have been previously betrayed by an intimate person and you develop trust issues or jealousy with someone that you want to get close to, you know that those vulnerable memories are the problem behind the formation of your new relationship. Sometimes you can consciously work on healing those memories yourself. Maybe your new partner is able to help you rebuild trust.

Bad memories affect your daily life
Past traumas can affect your day-to-day life

There are times, however, when some memories are not open to your consciousness. Maybe they have been simply filtered out or knowing the source of your trauma, they continue to have an overwhelming effect on you. Living “within” the traumas, you can struggle to understand how they affect you or how to objectively find a way through to resolve them. Healing those bad memories or traumas with a therapist can help you overcome that feeling of being stuck and overwhelmed by your past. By releasing the emotion of your past traumas, it can enable you to move forward. Regression hypnotherapy is an excellent way to reappraise the meaning of past events.

What is regression hypnotherapy?

In general terms, regression therapy is a type of therapy that explores past events with the belief that they continue to influence your thinking, beliefs, emotions and behaviour. You may enter the therapy very aware of past events that you want to re-analyse, knowing how they are causing your symptoms. Or you can be aware of presenting symptoms that you want to treat in a regressive style to understand why you have these symptoms, establish their “cause” or explore if you have “buried” memories of events that you want to uncover. In this context, the treatment is still solution-focused because it is acknowledging that you have a goal that you want treated in a certain way, but it aims to approach the problem from a past perspective. Having worked through those memories, you can feel more at peace with your past and liberated from your current symptoms.

Hypnosis is commonly used with regression therapy. Hypnosis can be an extremely powerful tool to regress your mind and access the most subtle details of events that have been mishandled, overlooked or buried in the deeper part of your imagination.

Hypnosis is a state of heightened suggestibility that encourages hyper-focused attention and concentration into what you imagine. A hypnotic induction is typically used to create this focused state. Suggestions are then employed to facilitate an imagined “time travelling”, going back in time to recall specific memories. You may travel back to events from a few weeks ago or any significant event further back in your lifetime.

Depending on the therapeutic context of your goal, different techniques can be used to access the memory, then observe and reframe the meaning or significance of the memory. You may want to reframe events that left you with pain or feelings of embarrassment, guilt, shame, distrust, worthlessness and fear. At that time, you may have been surrounded or compromised by conflicts, limited resources, biased values and other stresses. These blocks self-sabotaged your secure and confident handling of the past event.

Regression hypnotherapy applied by a skilled hypnotherapist can transform and reframe the meaning of the event. When applied carefully, it can add new understanding and insight into the beliefs that shaped your perceptions and your reactions to the event. The process can transform, heal and resolve the memory “wounds” without “planting” false memories or accusations of wrong-doing. In the session, counselling often follows the hypnosis to help evaluate the development of these insights and new states of awareness. They can be further embraced with hypnotic progression to apply the new learning into associated goals.

Is regression hypnotherapy the same as past life regression?

Regression hypnotherapy aims to explore past events from your “current” life experiences. The general form aims to access and observe memories within your “subconscious” mind.

Age regression is another type of hypnotherapy that explores past events from your “current life”. It aims to regress you back to a specific age and relive the state of mind from that age. Some clients may think, speak and act in ways appropriate to that age. The client can then reinterpret their present life with new insights. Clients who are highly suggestible and imaginative may respond favourably to “age-related” suggestions. Some people consider this type of regression controversial.

Past Life Regression is based on the (spiritual) belief and existence of past lives - long before your current life. Some hypnotherapists may believe in past lives and are prepared to treat you within your religious beliefs. Others do not share the same spiritual beliefs or recognise it as a valid therapeutic treatment. Instead, they view it as controversial or an indulgent imaginative experience.

As the client, you may already believe in past lives and want to access and benefit from past life regression therapy. Or maybe you are just curious about which “past lives” will come to the surface in a treatment session.

Some people want to access past life regression treatment because you cannot identify any valid reason for your current negative symptoms. This does not mean that there aren’t any valid reasons – you may not have engaged in an objective therapeutic process to establish any validity.

Different techniques are used in the treatment process for all of the above types of regression hypnotherapy, depending on the approach of the hypnotherapist. Some hypnotherapists are more client-centred and others therapist-led in their style.

Regression hypnotherapy reflect on past
Various techniques can be used to heal your past

The techniques used may also depend on the client and the presenting condition. For example, inner child therapy encompasses many of the general techniques used to re-evaluate the meaning of past events and address unmet childhood needs. Gestalt therapy can be integrated into regression by taking the adult empathic mind back to the childhood mind. The two perspectives can communicate in a “here and now” interaction to encourage understanding, healing and compassion. “Sensation” therapy focuses into the bodily sensation as the cue to connect you with the past event that is causing your current symptoms. This cue-accessing technique can be used with other cues e.g. an emotion or other sensory experiences.

What happens in a typical treatment session?

Hypnotherapy treatment sessions will follow a typical hypnotherapy practice session. The preparation stage can include a discussion of your goals, presenting symptoms and background. The right questions analysis and responses given by the hypnotherapist will draw your attention into the pathway of relevance, build rapport and expectation. In a client-centred approach, the hypnotherapist will be using many of your reactions and dialogue patterns to build relevant suggestions. In a therapist-led approach, the hypnotherapist will have a more authoritative style and use fewer questioning techniques.

A discussion of hypnosis will precede the hypnotic induction stage in which suggestions are used to focus your attention and imagination to the regressive process. It may use breathing techniques or other suggestions of relaxation. In the regression stage, the hypnotherapist will take your imagination back to a past event to analyse the details. A client-centred hypnotherapist will use open-ended questions to guide your recall and will be careful about leading your mind and “planting” memories.  You may (or may not) interact with the hypnotherapist verbally or by using ideo-motor responses (or you may just discuss the regressive experience after the hypnosis is complete).

The emotional expression stage enables the repressed (or suppressed) emotions to emerge and be identified. Depending on the past event and the techniques used, it may be re-experienced in a complete or detached way. In the relearning stage, the past event is re-interpreted and connecting negative emotions released. New positive emotions are identified and reintegrated into the past event. The conclusion stage may involve discussion and counselling to evaluate the process alongside the treatment goals or presenting condition.

The process may be complete or be just one stage in the treatment plan. With regression hypnotherapy, it isn’t necessary to painstakingly regress you back through every event in your life as is often criticised by advocators of solution-focused hypnotherapy. Often, the initial “causal” event, the most emotional event and the most recent event may be sufficient to influence therapeutic change.

What conditions can regression hypnotherapy treat?

The aim of regression hypnotherapy is to identify and treat how past events affect your day-to-day life. For some people, establishing a past cause, where the behaviour comes from or the reason “why” you have your current symptoms can release internal conflicts about your history. When you know why, you can feel more at peace with your underlying motives for current feelings and actions. In your treatment, you can then establish a more coherent way forward.

Numerous benefits have been cited including removal or improvements in symptoms, reductions in fear, increased purpose and ability to cope with life, etc.

Regression hypnotherapy can be used to treat many conditions including:

Concerns and limitations of regression hypnotherapy

Regression hypnotherapy is surrounded in controversy for various reasons, over and above what can come from general misconceptions of hypnotherapy from the media and films with similar titles (e.g. Regression, 2015):

The risk of creating false memories: Memories are malleable and are prone to suggestion, especially when the treatment is therapist-led. Not all claims of sexual abuse are false, but jumping to conclusions on the basis of a hypnotherapy regression treatment can harm relationships, lead to damaging legal action and cause distress for all people concerned. A client-centred hypnotherapist is more likely to ask open-styled questions without contaminating the client’s memory.

A therapist may have preconceived notions about a client’s past:  Therapist bias can enter the therapy room from generalisations made from past treatments. Whilst therapists continuously work on their “blind spots”, it can be a reason for leading a client into creating memories that aren’t real and wrongly diagnosing a client’s cause of symptoms.

Not all “hypnotists” are trained hypnotherapists: Untrained and novice therapists may use scripted approaches and are unable to treat emotional reactions to a client’s past traumas.

Regression hypnotherapy daydream
Healing can take place within your beliefs

There’s limited scientific research: There’s limited research in the efficiency of regression as a treatment approach and some people question the need to “dig up the past” when there are other treatment approaches are available. There is also limited evidence in the existence of past lives and it is considered controversial to force these religious (or any other) beliefs onto a client who is not seeking this type of therapy. However, treating a client who does believe in past lives with past life regression is more likely to create a favourable outcome for the client. Past life regression therapists argue that past life stories don’t have to be factual as healing takes place within the metaphor of the past life story.

Some clients may not benefit from regression treatment: Treatment obstacles can include a client's receptiveness to hypnosis, those who struggle to visualise or who may fear being regressed to a major trauma, especially those with serious mental health problems. Furthermore, a client having secondary gains can be a reason to maintain their negative symptoms and resist the emotional relearning from the regression treatment process. A skilled hypnotherapist will adapt their approach to the client’s needs and will use regression selectively.

Despite concerns about regression, many people say that they benefit from this type of treatment. However, its effectiveness is very much in the eye of the beholder and some may consider regression to be a “helpful” placebo. Trying to prove whether something did or did not happen can be a pointless exercise without evidence. However, when a client “thinks” that something has happened in their past before hypnotherapy treatment has begun or when a past event is uncovered during the hypnotherapy treatment, it’s more beneficial to establish how to deal with this memory and its connected emotions when going forwards.

Regression hypnotherapy: a client-centred approach

Some people question the need to “go back to the past when it is already over”. Dwelling on the past and rereading the same chapter in your life can seem like you are reopening wounds and encouraging self sabotage. It can be argued that technically, you don’t go anywhere. You are always in the present, only going back to the preserved past that your carry now. You recollect the events from your past that continue to impact on your emotions, behaviour and formation of new beliefs.

Regression hypnotherapy turn back clock
Liberating your past traumas can help you move forward

Undoubtedly, going back to the past with a fixed mind-state would keep you stuck in a loop of regret, anger, guilt and shame. Regression hypnotherapy can help remind you that you are the author of your past. You can rewrite the meaning of that past chapter or continue the book of your life with new chapters that demonstrate your growing acceptance, trust, gratitude, forgiveness and self appreciation. Regression hypnotherapy can be enlighten and liberate you from your past and open the way forward into your future.

If you have exhausted all of your conscious efforts to resolve your psychological problems and are prepared to dig deeper into resolving your condition, regression hypnotherapy can offer you a potential solution. Regression hypnotherapy is just one tool in a hypnotherapist’s toolbox to influence therapeutic change. For an experienced and skilled hypnotherapist who uses a client-centred approach, it can be combined with other methods to form an individualised and beneficial approach to your condition.

For more information on regression hypnotherapy, contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

Revenge bedtime procrastination: Does this sound familiar to you? You’ve just finished your day’s work, whether it’s a homework assignment, a work-related project, parental responsibilities or a combination of all. It’s time to go to bed and go to sleep. When you check the clock you know that it’s late and your much-needed sleep quota will suffer if you delay. But instead of calling it a night, you decide to open your laptop, browse through social media, watch another episode of your favourite show or play a few games on your phone. Before you know it, you’re into the early hours of the morning.

Revenge bedtime procrastination tiredness
Is it time to go to sleep? Just one more episode...

This might start as a harmless habit, but it can soon become a destructive cycle that can affect your mental and physical health. It can be frustrating enough battling with sleep problems when you’re suffering with anxiety you try, “you just can’t sleep”.

When you are actively postponing settling down to sleep, some might consider the delay more akin to a stubborn “you just won’t sleep”. But maybe there’s a much deeper issue behind this delay. Is it such a conscious act of delaying bedtime? It can be agreed that in both situations, you end up with insufficient sleep that ruins your day ahead. The “can’t sleeper” deserves empathy but maybe the “won’t sleeper” is struggling with their emotions too?

A psychological phenomenon called revenge bedtime procrastination has been used to describe this failure to go to bed at the intended time. So what causes this postponement and what is it a revenge on?

 

What is revenge bedtime procrastination?

In its basic form, revenge bedtime procrastination is the habit of delaying going to bed (and going to sleep) for no apparent reason even though you are aware it will have negative consequences on your day ahead.

Distinctions can be made about bedtime procrastination (delaying getting into bed) and whilst in-bed procrastination (delaying going to sleep), but both ultimately result in the deprivation of your sleep.

Bedtime procrastination is considered a form of revenge on your sleeping hours due to not having had enough pleasure, fun time or “me” time (in whatever form that might take) in your daylight hours. The perceived control that you lose from one or several areas in your life (e.g. the day’s working obligations) is balanced by removing it from (or in this case inflicting harm on) another area of your life (your sleep).

Although procrastination is not a new concept, with the rise in electronic gadgets and social media, they have become one of the most common modern methods of procrastination including activities such as binge-watching your favourite series, playing games, online shopping and keeping up with your peer group on social media apps. These electronic-based activities (also known as cyber leisure) can be enjoyed during your free time. It’s when they replace time doing something more important like sleeping that it becomes a destructive activity.

Is it necessarily an online problem? Not always. Some people find an escape in reading fiction until early morning, whilst others take up their creative knitting hobby or watch TV for endless hours.

The term bedtime procrastination was proposed by Dr. Floor Kroese et al. They investigated how procrastination can transfer into other important life domains such as health behaviours (e.g. sleeping, healthy eating, exercise, relaxation time, etc.) and consequently damage your well-being.

Whilst other studies gave emphasis to sleep deprivation being connected to sleep disorders, the psychological phenomenon of bedtime procrastination aimed to highlight that sleep deprivation could “simply” be caused by the act of going to be late. The study reinforced that bedtime procrastination is a problem of emotional self-control (or self-regulation) in common with the general form of procrastination.

By 2020, the term developed the additional revenge theme in East Asia by Daphne K Lee. Revenge bedtime procrastination was given prominence possibly due to the harsh “996 working routine” in China, in which some organisations enforce a 72 hour working week, consisting of 12 hour days (from 9 am to 9 pm), 6 days a week. By vengefully suffering through the night, employees were refusing to sleep early to recover a sense of freedom during their late night hours.

Revenge bedtime procrastination tiredness
Sleeping can seem like wasting time when there’s work to do

Without having “control” of the working day and recreational time in the evening, going to sleep can seem like “wasting” time. Of course, the act of delaying bedtime offers no obvious long terms benefits to one’s health. If anything, it deepens the feelings of powerlessness and disappointment of one’s lifestyle. Some may see it as a type of compensation, a defence mechanism or an act of resistance to redirect one’s frustrations, inadequacies and possible loneliness from one area of your life into another.

Another feature of revenge bedtime procrastination can be connected to an increasing cultural emphasis on “active leisure”. For those who want to impress others that “life is interesting” and having something to talk about in work the day after, working and sleeping with nothing in-between may be viewed by others as dull and likely to disappoint them.

With little time to engage in something “active” late in the evening, filling it with what’s easily available like online activity may be the only way to impress others and talk about what’s vogue. Sleep can seem like an inconvenience to what’s “hot” or yet another obligation to fulfil on your priority schedule.

 

The Signs of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

Bedtime procrastination is a common feature of modern living. In the study by Floor Kroese et al, 74% of those surveyed indicated that they delayed going to bed later than they planned at least one or more days per week without having a good reason.

Just because you are staying up late to complete a work deadline or taking care of your child, does it mean that you are participating in the phenomenon of revenge bedtime procrastination? No, this concept should not be confused with sleeping late when you have good reasons to do so, but the psychology behind it can be subtle.

Revenge bedtime procrastination has distinct behaviours. They include:

You delay – Bedtime procrastinators consistently go to bed later than originally intended. Non-bedtime procrastinators have the intention to delay bedtime to catch up with some work, are planning to sleep in the day after or by chronotype are typical “night owls”.

You lack valid motives – Bedtime procrastinators don’t have a credible reason for staying up late. You find something “trivial” to do that could easily have been done at an earlier time. Non-bedtime procrastinators stay up late for important reasons like caring for someone who is ill or waiting for an urgent call from a family member who has forgotten their front door key.

Is there a difference between a valid reason and an excuse? Yes, the bedtime procrastinator will kid themselves that staying up late was justified to watch the important “hot” series that everyone is talking about or to shop for that urgent sale item.

Awareness - Bedtime procrastinators recognise that actions will have negative consequences in the morning accompanied by feelings of guilt, but yield to the delay nevertheless. Non-bedtime procrastinators are aware of the need to sleep and will be confident of the decision the following morning.

Although a lack of self control is common with general procrastination, there are other notable features of bedtime procrastination that could make it distinct from general procrastination e.g. perfectionism, fear of judgement and task aversion. Some might argue that the issue of perfectionism (common with the general form) doesn’t apply at bedtime. However, the bedtime procrastinator could be trying to perfect the mood of “readiness” to then surrender the control of the delay. Similarly, fear of negative feedback may not apply to the bedtime procrastinator. But the bedtime procrastinator may keep the delay a secret due to the embarrassment of what seems a simple solution and judgement to just “just go to bed earlier!” Furthermore, task aversion (common with the general form) may not apply to the bedtime procrastinator. However, anticipating that you will struggle to have self control and discipline to switch off in the night ahead can convert the night time routine into a dreaded “task” that you “hate” doing.

 

What causes revenge bedtime procrastination?

People engage in this psychological phenomenon for a variety of pressing causes rather than for radical vice. The primary cause of general procrastination is a lack of self-regulation or self-control.

procrastinating bedtime using phone
Procrastination is caused by a lack of self-regulation

What makes revenge bedtime procrastination prevalent is the lack of self regulation in your daily routine. The daily actions and activities that you undertake can generate long-term or short-term benefits to your well-being. But, if you lack self-regulation, your intentions and plans won’t match what you end up doing throughout your day.

Instead, you succumb to pleasures, forget or displace your tasks, or delay the important things for later. This results in a disorganised routine and accommodates your pleasures after midnight as a reward. Furthermore, these pleasures may seem even more exciting and rebellious in the moment because you are “stealing” or reclaiming time back from what has been “taken away from you” in another area in your life.

There is some evidence that the self-control mechanisms that procrastinators struggle with are exacerbated at a time when you lack the mental energy to apply the willpower needed to switch off electronic devices. Additionally, whilst tiredness or exhaustion in the evening is a common motivator to go to bed, bedtime procrastinators who are sat in the living room watching TV might be too tired and apathetic to overcome the inertia to leave the sofa and prepare to go to bed.

An alternative view to the lack of self-control explanation of revenge bedtime procrastination is one related to inter-individual difference in biology. One study emphasises that bedtime procrastination can be attributed to those who have the evening “night owl” chronotype as opposed to the early bird or “lark” chronotype.

“Night owls” are forced to accommodate lifestyles or biological clocks that suit “larks”. This creates circadian misalignment stress for the “night owl” who will then attempt to recover time by delaying bedtime to balance this stress. This process can become habit-forming.

Lastly, with revenge being a cultural buzzword for defence strategies, can anxiety also be a cause of bedtime procrastination and a reason for which you also seek self-revenge?

Revenge bedtime procrastination anxiety
Are you taking revenge on anxiety when you can’t sleep?

Anxiety and the potential to ruminate on your problems is often worse at night when you are trying to settle down to sleep. Unless you are exhausted, many people find this night time phase typifies when those anxieties demand attention. This ultimately contributes to sleep problems and insomnia. When you “can’t sleep”, it’s easy to lie there mulling over your worries. It can be frustrating and wasteful of those precious hours.

When you form these insomnia habits, you begin to anticipate an anxious night ahead and rather than waste time being anxious, it can seem more fruitful to be doing something rather than nothing. Cyber leisure can be the momentary “distracted” alternative to laying there worrying. So instead, you fill the “anxiety window” with activity until over-tiredness and sleep eventually replaces the ability to focus on the next cyber task.

Is this revenge? When you “can’t sleep”, it may not start with the intention to delay bedtime, but it soon develops as a coping strategy to take revenge on anxiety when you persistently struggle to sleep.

Why it develops can be related to “distraction” strategies being the (very limited) solution to anxiety. During the day, you are habitually task-focused. This can serve as a distraction from your anxiety and the belief that you are managing your anxiety effectively. But this “distraction” solution is temporary. When you are doing routine activities or have nothing but your mind to work with at night, anxiety can win and disrupt your sleep.

 

Who is most affected by this psychological phenomenon?

Anyone can experience revenge bedtime procrastination. The more you dislike the activities in your daytime, the more likely you will struggle to detach from work and attempt to attempt to reclaim the night time with pleasurable activities. Your negative daytime activities can include the type of work that you do, the control you have over that work, the number of hours you work, the additional obligations that you have in your free time etc.

These factors contribute to or take away from the balance of (perceived) “me” time. For example, working in a caring role can be a passionate vocation for some and would lower your need for revenge in the night because you go home feeling fulfilled. For others, it’s a vocational “trap” and increases the need for revenge.

Stress can also create intermittent periods when you seek revenge. Being a student, having a high-pressure job and working shifts can have revengeful periods when demands are high. One study suggests that woman and students are particularly prone to bedtime revenge when under stress.

As previously mentioned, general procrastinators and “night owls” can be prone to this phenomenon. Additionally, those with sleep disorders and generalised anxiety can also divert the frustration of not sleeping into cyber leisure.

Use of blue light emitted from electronic devices when you have not been able to access natural daylight in your day may add an additional factor into sleep deprivation. According to this study, “blue light” activities can further disturb the quality of asleep rather than help it. So even though you believe you are achieving your delay strategy, it is having a deeper negative effect on the quality of your sleep (when are able to fall asleep).

More recently the effect of the Covid global pandemic has further blurred the work-home life distinction and increased revenge bedtime procrastination. It has had a notable effect of reducing women’s leisure time hours and the ability to balance “me” time. It has been noted in another study that nearly 40% of the research sample had sleep problems during the Covid work-from-home mandate increasing the prevalence of this psychological phenomenon.

This suggests that those affected by revenge bedtime procrastination cannot be explained by one factor alone. Who is affected by this psychological phenomenon involves a number of interlinking factors.

 

How revenge can revenge bedtime procrastination affect your health?

Staying up late once in a while may not have drastic consequences to your health but it can be problematic in the long term. Regardless of your method of distraction (i.e. cyber or non-cyber activities), sleep deprivation will lead to fatigue. It can then affect your work concentration and your work performance in your day ahead. In the long term, sleep deprivation can also cause an increase in stress responsivity, mood disorders and memory loss.

Revenge bedtime procrastination couple on phones
These late-night acts of indulgence can seem like normal behaviour, even for couples

With continuity, these late-night acts of deserved indulgence can seem like normal behaviour in which you lose the motivation for maintaining a sleep pattern. People want to believe that they can cope with minimal sleep, but it inevitably impacts on your irritability, decision-making ability and physical health. Taken to the extreme, the compensation to delay bedtime can become an overcompensation in which you enter a deeper cycle of self hatred.

 

How can you prevent revenge bedtime procrastination?

If revenge bedtime procrastination has become a bad habit that is affecting you your day-to-day life both mentally and physically, the following tips can help you reconnect with good sleeping habits.

Reappraise how you spend your daytime obligations – How much control do you have over your working life? Are you in the right career? Changing your work situation won’t happen overnight, but finding your passionate vocation in the long term can balance the scales of leading a satisfactory life on one side of the equation and the need to compensate it on the other side when going to bed. Practising gratitude can shift some of the emotional negativity in your work.

Identify some new relaxing activities - If you cannot control your hours of work, review how you spend your leisure time. Do you feel like you have achieved anything when you have spent a few hours on social media? Does reading a good book or having a brisk walk offer a better solution to social media? Schedule some down-time associated with something that you do each evening to anchor the habit and help to separate your work and sleep boundaries. Even better, learn breathing techniques with affirmations or other mindfulness activities to guide or direct your mind into relaxation.

Re-evaluate how you perceive sleep – When an activity has become something to avert, rehearsing a positive meaning can change the experience. Learn self hypnosis to validate sleep as a healthy and beneficial part of your life rather than a chore.

Rehearse a new bedtime routine – Waiting until the moment to change the routine can be too late to be effective as you are swayed by the expectations of habit i.e. repeating what you did last night. Visualising your sleep routine can help you plan your new sleep hygiene rituals. A wind-down routine helps you to trigger your natural sleep cues. Practising breathing techniques can help you to relax in bed.

Give electronic devices their bedtime too – Powering down your devices and turning off auto-play at least half an hour before going to bed will initially feel discomforting. Persist with your new habits and it will empower you to open your mind-space to the new sleep rituals that will revitalise you.

 

 

How can hypnotherapy help your revenge bedtime procrastination?

Some ingrained night time habits can be challenging to change when you are dominated by your internal beliefs to fulfil these rituals. When your health is suffering professional help can assist your changes.

Hypnotherapy to break bad habits can help explore and treat your underlying motives, goal-formation strategies, background causes, stress triggers etc. It can help you develop self hypnosis (https://www.clinicalhypnotherapy-cardiff.co.uk/practise-self-hypnosis/) to disconnect your bedtime procrastination and your revenge strategies.

 

For more information treating revenge bedtime procrastination contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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Participating in exercise to relieve stress

Participating in exercise to relieve stress

Exercise to relieve stress: Managing stress is an ongoing process. Even when there is an absence of demands, boredom can be a trigger for negative behaviours like comfort eating. There are many ways to relieve stress. This article aims to identify how exercise in particular can relieve the effects of stress.

Exercise to relieve stress
Dancing is an excellent way to relieve stress

The content draws from my previous experience in the health and fitness industry as a fitness instructor and sports coach. It also combines my experience in stress management as a hypnotherapist.

These recommendations can help your overall management of stress. If you want to exercise to relieve stress, your individual preferences to exercise will determine how much you can alleviate the effects of stress.

Whilst all exercise is physical activity, the extent that your physical activity is structured, planned, intentional and repetitive may be open to interpretation. Gardening and vigorous cleaning can be a “workout” for some people with similar health benefits as “exercise” depending on how it’s done and on what frequency.

Exercise to relieve stress: What is stress?

Stress can be defined as the body’s reaction to perceived threats, challenges or emotional pressure. Initially, the body’s reactions can include autonomic nervous and endocrine system changes caused by the production of stress hormones. These stress hormones have physiological effects that “flood” the various systems of the body to prepare you to deal with your “stressor”. Changes include the common “fight or flight” responses such as increases in breathing rate, heart function, perspiration, blood pressure and muscle tension. Each person can usually identify a personal “template” of responses that affect you when you are feeling stressed.

Your personality type and approach to problems will affect your level of stress. How you perceive the situational factors of the “stressor” will also affect the relative “control” you have to manage it. “Stressors” can be positive (eustress) and negative (distress).

Exercise to relieve stress: Leading a healthy lifestyle to relieve stress

The connections between leading a healthy lifestyle and the benefits to your mental health are well documented. There is a growing understanding of the common lifestyle areas that are recommended to help you manage the effects of stress. These include quitting smoking; eating healthily to reduce obesity; moderating your alcohol consumption, sugar and caffeine intake; being social; participating in mentally challenging, cultural, enjoyable, and creative activities; practising relaxation techniques that can include meditation, mindfulness or self hypnosis; sleeping well; participating in some form of physical activity or exercise.

When you can “tick the boxes” related to these lifestyle areas (without being compulsive with any particular lifestyle activity), you are likely to be undoing the effect that stress has on your emotional and physical wellbeing.

Pre-exercise considerations

Before participating in any planned physical activity or exercise to relieve stress, it’s important to check with your doctor that you have no contraindications to exercise. Where appropriate, employing an activity professional such as a gym instructor or coach to supervise your performance in the early stages will help you to build confidence and set goals in your activity. The professional will teach you how to warm up and cool down, emphasise best technique and progressions, identify safety issues, take into account your prior learning and health limitations, teach you how to incorporate breathing into the activity, overcome any exercise bad habits etc. When you have gained confidence in your activity, you may prefer to continue independently.

If you have no medical issues that prevent you from exercising, identifying a physical activity that you enjoy and find challenging is likely to have a positive impact on your stress. You are also more likely to continue participating in this activity in the long term.

Persevere with any new activity through the (usually stressful) “break-in” period of about 5-6 sessions to develop a reasonable level of competence and feel integrated into the activity, situation or membership.

Exercise to relieve stress: Types of exercise

There are many components of fitness that emphasise how the body can move including the components of power, speed, muscular endurance, agility, coordination and accuracy.

For general fitness, there are 4 broad categories of exercise. They include endurance, strength, balance and flexibility.

Current NHS advice suggests exercising for at least 150 minutes per week of cardiovascular physical activity or up to 75 minutes per week of vigorous physical activity ideally spread over 3-4 days. In addition to this, 2 sessions of strength training physical activities per week is also needed for optimal health benefits. Any (safe) physical activity is better than being sedentary; start with small goals and gradually build up your momentum.

Exercises that develop your endurance

Jogging exercise to relieve stress
Jogging is a popular endurance activity

These exercises are also known as aerobic or cardiovascular exercises since they increase your heart rate and breathing rate. They improve the health of your heart, lungs and circulatory system. Endurance physical activities include brisk walking or running, repetitive gardening activities, cycling, swimming, dancing, court sports like tennis and using cardio gym equipment.

Exercises that develop your strength

These exercises (also known as anaerobic or resistance exercise) keep your muscles strong. They help you to retain a level of independence with routine movements like getting in and out of chairs, climbing stairs, maintaining good posture when sitting, carrying shopping etc. Strong muscles (particularly core and lower body muscles) will help balance and help prevent fall-related injuries.

Strength training physical activities include using weights, resistance gym equipment and resistance bands doing exercises like weighted squats, bench press, lat pull downs etc. Exercises can also be performed with your own body weight or using non gym-related equipment depending on your current level of strength. By overloading your muscles progressively, start using lighter resistance in the form of repetitions and sets. Your strength can be developed gradually and with less likelihood of injury. This progression is particularly important for beginners and older adults.

A schedule of strength training exercises will benefit you more when working antagonistic pairs of muscle groups and working specific muscle groups on non-consecutive days to allow sufficient recovery time.

Exercises that develop your balance

General physical activity will help to maintain balance. However some physical activities will help to prevent falls when they focus on specific muscle groups of the lower body and the way that these muscles contract. Static (also known as isometric) contraction of “fixator” muscles can stabilise your posture and develop your balance. For example prolonged standing on one leg will encourage leg and hip muscles of the rooted leg to stabilise your body. Certain types of physical activity like Tai Chi and yoga combine static contraction of muscles with slow and precise movement of the limbs that can help stabilise of the body when you are active.

Exercises that develop your flexibility

When you lack flexibility, common activities like tying shoe laces or looking behind you when reversing the car can be difficult. General physical activity will help your flexibility, including walking. However, some physical activities and exercises will increase your specific joint range of movement throughout the body thereby allowing you to move more freely.

There are passive and dynamic stretching exercises that increase your flexibility, depending on how you perform the exercise. Examples include hamstring stretches and seated trunk rotations, but some activities like yoga is also renowned for developing flexibility throughout the body.

Muscles respond to stretching when you have warmed up. They are also responsive to stretching following strength exercises and cardiovascular exercises.

Activities that combine all components of fitness

Some physical activities will develop a particular type of fitness e.g. long distance running will develop your cardiovascular fitness and muscular endurance in the legs. However, some physical activities and sports can combine more than one type of fitness such as dancing, circuit training and open field sports such as football, rugby, netball and hockey, depending on how you move during the activity.

If you are deficient in certain areas of fitness (e.g. balance, flexibility and coordination, muscular endurance) and it is impacting on fundamental lifestyle functions such as climbing stairs or standing from a seated position, then a broad approach to exercising will benefit your lifestyle.

Exercise to relieve stress: How do you benefit?

Exercise releases your feel-good brain chemicals

Low mood is a common feature of negative emotional states like stress, depression and anxiety. Exercise (particularly aerobic) can boost the way that the body deals with stress by releasing the brains neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. The effect of these hormones is to boost your mood and sense of well-being, acting as an antidepressant. These hormones can also have a positive effect on attention, memory, problem-solving, low appetite and sleep cycles, which are common symptoms of low mood.

In addition to this, exercise can have an effect on the release of opioids from the brain. Opioids are responsible for regulating pain, the response to stress and control of the autonomic nervous system.

Long term exercise can help you deal with different bodily stress challenges and improve your energy levels.  If you want to exercise to relieve stress, staying with an exercise programme past the initial stages is important to reap the benefits of stress reduction. When you first participate in exercise (particularly high intensity exercise), your body releases one of the body’s stress hormones: cortisol. For the sedentary individual, exercise in the short term can increase stress levels (distress). However, with persistence to exercise into the long term, exercise can transfer into positive stress (eustress) as the body learns to accommodate and adapt to the effects of cortisol.

Exercise stimulates diaphragmatic breathing

Exercise diaphragmatic breathing
Exercise stimulates diaphragmatic breathing

Diaphragmatic tension is a common symptom of stress. Sometime referred to as “butterflies” or that knot you feel at the top of your abdomen. Breathing techniques can be used to release your diaphragmatic tension when doing more passive activities like meditation. Breathing techniques are usually emphasised in activities like yoga and Tai Chi.

The reason that you may feel relaxed after exercise is that the oxygen demands during exercise stimulate deeper breathing; you have to access diaphragmatic breathing to balance your circulation. So if you don’t know how to breathe to relax, have anxiety when thinking about breathing or the activity of meditation is not dynamic enough for you, you can use the oxygen breathing demands in any “overloading” physical activity or exercise to relieve stress.

Exercise can release muscular tension

In addition to diaphragmatic tension, stress can also cause muscle tension and pain (migraines, headaches etc.) throughout the body. Other common areas of tension include the pelvic floor and jaw joint due to teeth grinding. Neck, shoulders, hips and muscles of the back can accumulate tension due to recurrent static postures like sitting at a desk for hours. Muscle tension can then exacerbate previous injuries or muscular-skeletal deformities.

Some physical activities and exercises like yoga and Tai Chi and weight training can target specific muscle groups by mobilising the joints and stretching the muscles in which you feel tension or lack muscle tone. Other physical activity movement like dancing can be generalised but is still beneficial to your tense muscles.

Most people can accept how poor mental health from acute stress can affect your physical wellbeing and create acute physical stress symptoms. This relationship is reciprocal however. When you have negative physical symptoms, it can influence a negative mood into catastrophic thinking, over generalisation etc. Thus, by taking care of your physical health symptoms with physical activity and exercise, your mental health can also benefit.

Exercise can be competitive (goal-oriented) or non-competitive

Competition can be both good and bad for stress depending on your beliefs, your strategy and the level of importance that you place on the competition. Developing an approach to lower your performance anxiety can help you access a performance zone in which you can get the best out of your physical and mental ability. This ability to cope with competition stress can be beneficial for both the elite performer and amateur performer when in competition.

When you have performed well in physical activities like sports that have competitive goals, it can enhance your sense of achievement and convert the negative stress into (positive) eustress. In the long term, competitive physical activities can help you adapt to the effects of negative competition stress. For the amateur performer, physical activity can help you build resilience to other life stressors by using the sporting situation as a model for coping with “real” life stressful situations.

For those who want to avoid the stress in competitions, but want to use exercise as a way of adapting to stress, your competitiveness can be internal. Setting internal goals can help you maintain a level of motivation without being overwhelmed by a competition. You can set and achieve your own internal goals relating to your repetitions, sets, weight (load), speed, distance, duration, frequency etc. depending on the type of activity and what you personally want to achieve.

Or for those who prefer non-competitive situations that are low on the stress scale, you can “go with the flow” and consider brisk walking in scenic areas. In your picturesque surrounds, you may hardly notice that you are exercising.

Exercise can be meditative

Meditation has been shown to lower stress. Some exercises like yoga and Tai Chi can be considered as meditative in which you breathe, “still” your mind as you focus into your thoughts and movement. This is in contrast to those competitive situations in which you need to focus into what you and your competitor are doing to overcome them.

Other repetitive individual endurance physical activities like running, cycling, swimming and rowing can also be an “exercise” in meditation (or mindfulness) in which you also breathe, disconnect from the world around you and get absorbed into your thoughts. Routine activity gives you the opportunity to “zone out” and deal with peripheral issues. Some athletes report how you can solve problems in a self hypnotic state whilst you exercise. At the end of the activity, you feel released from the stresses of the day.

But even weight training can be meditative with some athletes claiming that the ability to use focused thinking can improve your performance. Again, as with endurance activities, before and during weight training lift, you can breathe, use affirmations and practise mental rehearsal (visualisation) or self hypnosis to access your peak lifting performance zone. After the weight training exercises, the mental and physical rituals have helped you to lower your stress.

Exercise can be social or solitary

Social exercise to relieve stress
Exercise can be an excellent social activity

Engaging in social interaction with your network of family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances can encourage social support from others. Social support is considered to be an important strategy to help alleviate stress. It’s particularly beneficial for the socially gregarious and extrovert participants who feel more secure in the presence of others (and in larger groups).

When you are engaged in conversation with good listeners it can give you an opportunity to off-load and verbalise your problems. You can welcome the opinions of others to alter the perception of your own problems. Listening to others can help you consider your level of stress in a wider context. It can also develop confidence in your stress management strategies when you make suggestions for others to consider.

Group physical activity and exercise can encourage the opportunity for social interaction and the development of friendships helping you to alleviate stress. This might happen during the activity or with social opportunities after the event. Group participation can also be a motivator to participate if your friends have invited you to join them.

For those of you who have a degree of social anxiety and are more introverted, you can choose to participate in physical activities with smaller groups. For example, by playing badminton doubles or singles, you can limit your social interaction with your opponent(s) and doubles partner.

Alternatively, physical activity and exercise can be solitary, participating when you have the opportunity and at your level of competence without the interference from others, thereby lowering the stress of social anxiety.

Alternatively, if you are particularly self-conscious when exercising, you can exercise in the home. Or you can incorporate physical activity into other activities without drawing attention to the exercise e.g. by walking to work.

Exercise can build self confidence and self esteem

Situations are more stressful when they damage your self confidence and self esteem. If your work situation has caused you emotional setbacks, exercising (exorcising?) your negativity during physical activity can help you to balance your emotions in the many ways already described in this article e.g. stimulating the release of endorphins, improving cognitive function, releasing tension, achieving goals etc.

If your self confidence and self esteem are connected to your body perception, physical activity can be used to build your self esteem. Exercise can tone your body and strengthen muscles, improving your perception (and maybe other people’s perception) of your physical appearance. If you suffer with low self esteem connected to obesity, exercise can also help you to burn calories and reduce body fat, assisting in your weight reduction programme and boosting your self-esteem.

Exercise is an activity and can be so much more

Using activities to manage stress won’t help you access the cause of your stress; neither will they help you to finish an imminent project deadline. However, activities can help you to manage the effects of stress by engaging your attention into something else.

Doing nothing, or using negative coping strategies like smoking cigarettes, or even dwelling on stress can keep you replaying and exacerbating the issues, without taking control of the situation. This can be a common pattern for those suffering with anxiety and OCD. By identifying a physical activity that you enjoy, you can use exercise to relieve stress. It can serve as an effective break or time out from stress or from the recurrent negative thinking that can accompany it.

Lifestyle (physical) activities that can fulfil a variety of your needs are likely to give you higher levels of engagement, satisfaction, confidence and self worth, enabling you to escape from the stresses of your day. Physical activities like sport and exercise can offer a number of opportunities for those who have specific needs. For example, physical activity can:

Children exercise to relieve stress
Exercise develops psychomotor skills
  • Help you learn and develop psychomotor skills that can transfer into many life situations in the home and at work.
  • Be educational with progressions of attainment with or without exams.
  • Develop problem-solving abilities when competing against others.
  • Enhance your creative skills when participating in a variety sports.
  • Encourage social interaction particularly in team sports.
  • In the broader context of secular or folk religion, it can be a “religious” activity embracing aspects of ritual, emotion, devotion and community.
  • Be an enjoyable activity for many people particularly when it involves dance, music and social interaction. It can be fun when it gives you an opportunity to be playful and when you can laugh at yourself! Or it can be serious depending on what you want to develop in your physical activity.
  • Offer vocational opportunities for those who are passionate about human movement and its benefits. Careers include working as a participant (elite athlete), coach, instructor or teacher. Being employed in something you are passionate about and in which you have a personal interest can contribute to lower stress levels.

Exercise to relieve stress: Summary

There are many ways to manage stress. Physical activity and exercise is an effective way to integrate these benefits and relieve how your body and mind handles the symptoms of stress. It can also offer you physical and psychological health benefits when compared to some of the other stress management techniques. You can use exercise to relieve stress whilst lowering the risk of cancer, stroke, heart disease and diabetes type 2.

 Exercise to relieve stress: for more information on stress management contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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Coping with OCD

Coping with OCD

Coping with OCD: Obsessive Compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts and repetitive compulsions. Whilst many sufferers take refuge in medication and therapy to treat OCD, the work is often incomplete and requires self-care and coping strategies to manage it. Coping with OCD takes practice and a lot of dedication to be well-implemented. With focused strategies, the benefits can change the way you lead your life. In the following article, ten of the best coping with OCD tips are listed that can help you become an expert of your own condition.

Coping with OCD word cloud
OCD coping strategies can complement your treatment

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #1: Use Relaxation Techniques

OCD, like many mental health disorders, manifests with physical and psychological states of stress and tension. It throws your mind and body into anguish as you battle with nagging obsessions and intrusive thoughts. A good coping mechanism that many sufferers use to manage these effects is to practise relaxation techniques such as deep breathing techniques to centre your mind. Relaxation techniques can take many forms, including self-hypnosis, meditation and mindfulness. Relaxation techniques can involve the use of imagery, visualisation and affirmations to focus your awareness in an engaging way.

There is growing evidence that relaxation techniques can play a significant part in your overall treatment. They have the advantage of being mobile; you can practise them anywhere, whether at home, at work or just relaxed breathing when you are on the go.

If you have tried relaxation techniques and found them to have limited benefit when coping with OCD, sampling a live hypnotherapy treatment will intensify the effect. Whilst relaxation is not the overall aim of hypnotherapy, hypnotherapists who specialise in teaching breathing techniques will transform your relaxed breathing ability to another level.

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #2: Challenge Your Thoughts:

Obsessive thoughts make up half of the struggle when coping with OCD. If you are exposed to triggers, they tend to rush in almost immediately and can set off your anxiety for hours afterwards. Some OCD patients with different types of OCD for example, describe that they have intrusive thoughts about harming someone; others worry about whether they have locked their doors securely, turned off the oven, or even have paranoid scenarios about the safety of their loved ones if they are away from them.

When these thoughts perpetuate, you can feel like you are a victim of these thoughts. Managing these distressing thoughts or reducing their power, will alleviate many of the compulsions that stem from them. But, unfortunately, trying to resist these thoughts by fighting them might achieve the opposite result, as it is the lack of flexibility with these thoughts that give them their power over you. In a sense, you can end up repressing them and giving them too much importance.

Coping with OCD effectively requires techniques like exposure to these thoughts or the expression of these thoughts to deprive them of their power. For example, you can benefit by using a journal and writing your thoughts down, or typing them on your smart phone or laptop. The method is to simply write these thoughts as many times as you want or express your feelings or worry regarding them. Alternatively, you could use a daily writing period of 15 minutes specifically made for worry. To your mind, this will be a time where it can vent all that disturbs it in a “safe zone” but it’s important to stay limited by a timeframe so that constructive worrying doesn’t take over your day.

Question thoughts to cope with OCD
Questioning your thoughts can help deprive them of their power

If free expression of your thoughts isn’t always effective, it is also useful to “question your thoughts”, again on paper or your “tech” device. Ask hard questions about the truth and credibility of these thoughts. Do you have evidence for their truth? Is it strong evidence? How do you know you are not wrong? And what would be a realistic understanding of the situation if you are certain?

As an additional or alternative activity, make an audio recording of your written content. Then listen to your recording, interacting with your content to vent or challenge your obsessive thoughts.

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #3: Identify Your Triggers

Your OCD compulsions and thoughts do not arise in a vacuum. They are the result of triggering cues, situations or beliefs that make the distressing compulsions necessary to please. They create doubt and worry or generate irrational fears over which you have very little control. However, whilst such triggers play this important role, many OCD patients who haven’t studied their situation well can remain oblivious to how and why certain triggers set off their symptoms.

When you are coping with OCD effectively, you are able to identify your triggers and pay attention to how they create your fears and anxiety. General examples of such triggers can be using a public toilet seat that you believe is contaminated, attending a job interview or a social meeting where you obsess about what you did wrong, or the lack of symmetry and order in certain places that you visit.

Without a good understanding of how and what affects you, you can be a constant victim of OCD. One good technique to use is to keep a notebook and record your triggers, and then rate their emotional intensity out of 10. Since the most intense are likely to give you sustained distress and severe OCD symptoms, focus on managing the lower levels to build confidence. Then gradually approach the higher levels. For example, you could focus all of your attention whilst wiping the public toilet seat so that you can be assured that it’s cleaned well enough and won’t contaminate you. If it’s a job interview that you obsess over, set moderate standards about how it can progress. This will enable you to deal with it more effectively at the interview and in your review of your performance to pre-empt your OCD symptoms from emerging.

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #4: Confront Your Fears

The next step that can give you power over your triggers is your ability to confront your fears. Of course, all OCD fears can be very distressing to you, but they are, in fact, quite illusory. You can confront your fears with graduated exposure, paced at a level that suits you. For example, a source of panic can be a dirty floor, disturbing asymmetry in objects, or a job assignment that fills you with debilitating perfectionism. Sometimes, your worst fear can be to lose control and feel contaminated, feel guilty or fear failure.

Use a grading notebook to rate your fears out of 10 and then make a plan to expose yourself to the least fearful thing in the list. When you withdraw from the fearful situation, use the relaxation techniques (from tip #1) to visualise remaining in the “fear zone”. Immerse your mind in that low level of fear, gradually allowing it to disperse without the need to physically do anything. The achievement is to keep it as a mind process, gradually noticing that the fearful emotion at these lower levels can be diminished without force.

Like many sufferers who are coping with OCD effectively, this is a highly useful practice to be able to tolerate your anxiety over time, even for your worst fears.

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #5: Do some physical activity (exercise)

Coping with OCD exercise
Exercise can have a positive effect on irrational thinking

The benefits of exercising are vast, and they certainly include the efficient coping with OCD symptoms. Regular exercise (with integrated rest days) can have a lasting positive effect on your susceptibility to stress and tendency to adopt negative and irrational thinking.

Following a medical health check to investigate if you have any contraindications to exercise, regular enjoyable exercise has the ability to rewire your body and mind. With enough commitment you can escape the dark pit of constant reactivity to triggers and repetitive OCD behaviours.

If you want to keep your OCD under control, take up an easy exercise plan that suits your schedule and stay committed to it. Coupled with other coping techniques, exercise will have a major role in changing your OCD symptoms for the long-term.

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #6: Talking to others about your OCD

This tip is one of the most dismissed and underrated ways to cope with OCD. While many other techniques have a direct effect on your behavioural and psychological symptoms, the act of talking about your OCD and sharing your experiences can completely reframe your attitudes to the condition.

OCD is not just a simple compulsive reaction to disturbing triggers; rather it’s a complex mental health condition where your symptoms can also thrive in the feelings of shame, lack of self-knowledge, and psychological vulnerability. In times of anxiety and obsessive thinking, for instance, you can lack realism and the psychological fortitude that talking about your condition can bring about.

Sharing your struggle and outlook on your situation with other people builds acceptance and openness to your inner world. It also fosters social belonging and the realisation that you are not alone. You may know some isolated sufferers with OCD. You will find they are more likely to engage in distorted thinking and feelings of worthlessness. These negative moods can aggravate your symptoms.

So, to step away from an isolated perspective, it is important to find friends or close individuals who make you feel safe and are interested in listening to your struggles. Some those people are probably good listeners and with an understanding of your OCD condition can follow helpful listening guidelines.

 

  

Coping with OCD tip #7: Seek effective Therapy

Research shows that Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is most effective form of treatment for treating OCD. It represents a treatment of the two forms in which OCD presents itself; recurring obsessions and connected behavioural compulsions. Research has also shown that ERP can be incorporated into other treatment modalities like hypnotherapy.

Making use of ERP therapy will address your issues at a more fundamental level, especially with the help of a therapist. ERP will challenge your believed fears using questioning techniques, exploring your over-generalisations, catastrophic thinking and other cognitive distortions. It will then focus on exposing you to your fears and developing your self-control to resist doing your compulsions. For example, if you fear contaminated toilet seats, you are helped to use a toilet seat and then to proceed without any de-contamination behaviour such as “excessive” hand or body washing. You are supported as your contamination-fears diminish. Breaking that thought/emotion-behaviour pathway is the essence of ERP.

All obsessions remain fearful and disturbing when they are not tolerated at first. For that reason ERP tries to reveal to your mind and body how the fear of the trigger is harmless and recoverable without behaviour. Initially it’s very discomforting, but the longer you stay in the presence of those situations and triggers, the more you develop the strength and flexibility to cope with them.

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #8: Explore help from your community

Other than help from your therapist, seeking out extended forms of help will complement the work that you are already doing to assist your condition. There is a huge amount of resources and mental tools to be gained from other people and communities. Ignoring that resource will slow down your progress and make your strategies limited.

Anything from joining OCD associations, finding online communities, and making friends with other OCD sufferers can boost your skills and mood to cope with OCD. Reach out and ask questions or request help from your peers and friends. Many of these individuals can share with you their practical strategies that they use to handle their own OCD, strategies that you may not have thought about before. They might also help with recommending therapists, books, or local groups to join.

You may believe that you have all of the information that you need but even the exchange of sharing your learning with others will help you reflect on aspects that are specific to your condition. Discussions can also help you analyse the process and build confidence into what makes your learning so useful.

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #9: Maintain a healthy lifestyle

Attending to other lifestyle issues will help to stabilise your anxiety and impact on your OCD. If you are constantly lacking sleep and eating unhealthily, you will be an easy prey to fatigue. Poor sleep and diet can create a cycle that thwarts the efficiency of other coping techniques.

Coping with OCD sleep
Restful sleep can help stabilise your OCD

Start first by regulating your sleep habits and making sure to “hit the bed” on time. Your 7 or 8 hours of sleep needs to be a non-negotiable part of your day, preferably starting early at night to wake up early for a fresh and clear-minded day. As for diet, have your full meals well-spread throughout the day and make sure they consist of healthy foods. With commitment, sufficient sleep and healthy eating and will give you a firm baseline which can improve your energy levels and positive moods.

Other lifestyle issues than can impact on your physical health include limiting caffeine intake, quitting smoking and moderating your alcohol consumption.

 

 

Coping with OCD tip #10: Celebrate your wins and guard against relapse

In common with understanding your addiction triggers, it is often said that full recovery is only 50% of the solution and that maintaining your recovery is the other 50%. Many OCD patients fall for the mistake of thinking that once their recovery is achieved in the short term, their OCD is gone forever. However, this is a grave error as OCD is a chronic condition and can resurface if you don’t keep an eye on your routine, stress levels, and lifestyle habits.

A relapse is possible if, for example, you stop taking medication without informing your clinician. A relapse can also be common when, having partially confronted your fears and not performed any compulsions recently, your over-confidence lowers your guard and the OCD rituals gradually worm their way back into your life.

Being clear and honest about your progress helps you to pay attention to possible scenarios that can give room for OCD to reappear. In addition to this, it’s highly useful to celebrate your victories and keep progress of small achievements. Feeling proud of your consecutive wins against OCD will motivate you for your next challenges and, more importantly, remind you of the serious work that is still needed.

 

More information on professional treatment for OCD.

 

For more information on coping with OCD, contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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Social Smoking When Drinking Alcohol

Social Smoking When Drinking Alcohol

Do you give in to social smoking when drinking alcohol?

For the aspiring non-smoker, it can be a recurrent problem setting up your non-smoking goals and then relapsing when you next socialise and drink alcohol. Not only do you wake up feeling guilty that you have crossed your own non-smoking boundaries, but you feel disgusted because your chest feels tight and you reek of cigarette smoke. Then you spend the morning coughing up the contents of what you’ve inhaled and feel hung-over from the heavy night’s drinking session. Does this sound like a night out that you wanted to avoid?

Social smoking when drinking alcohol
Is drinking alcohol connected to your social smoking lapse?

If your goal is to ultimately stop smoking, it’s important to appreciate the impact that your social smoking rituals and the affect that drinking alcohol has on your behaviour and brain chemistry. Combine the two and it can transform many people’s healthy smoke-free intentions into a “Jekyll and Hyde” night out.

Where does it all go wrong?

Social smoking when drinking alcohol: Adolescent social smoking

Nearly 80% of adults who smoke said that they started smoking before the age of 20. The reasons that people start smoking are very similar to the reasons that people start drinking alcohol.

Psychosocial factors play an important role in encouraging young people to smoke and to form habits that will keep them smoking. During this transition from adolescence into adulthood, the appeal is particularly strong to take risks associated with imitating adult behaviour. It can also be just as attractive to develop reactions that defy controlling behaviour from adult authority figures.

The desire to act like adults however is not matched with an adolescent’s level of brain development. Adolescents tend to be impulsive, ignoring the long-term consequences of short-term behaviour, and tend to lack the analytical decision-making skills that can come from experience. More notably, adolescent decision-making values are filtered though peer group influences.  Being praised or criticised by one’s peers motivates adolescents to act or avoid participating in situations.

It’s during these extreme shifts in one’s values that adolescents are particularly vulnerable to starting and persisting with smoking. Smoking cigarettes can seem normal, functional, and deceptively rewarding. It’s not surprising that smoker’s attach beliefs that when smoking, you are: relaxing, having fun, being daring, taking back control, being sociable, being admired and being “grown up”.

What continues the integration of these psychosocial values at a deeper level is repetition with a highly addictive substance. Habits can become consolidated and the “positive” beliefs can then form attachments to other situations. During times of stress or anxiety, the associations of relaxation, having fun etc. create the urge to smoke a cigarette to relieve this stress or anxiety. In addition to other intrapersonal factors, it’s during these habit-consolidation stages that a smoker will convert from being an intermittent social user to a higher personal dependency on nicotine. In other words, you become the “regular smoker” building your dependency on nicotine into addiction.

Contrary to this development, some people are able to place tight boundaries around their smoking rituals, ensuring that it stays within the domain of social situations. They may have already crossed-over into personal nicotine dependency for a many years before reverting back to occasional use. Or it was never their intention to become a “real” smoker, perceiving it as a socially-defined ritual from the start.

Social smoking when drinking alcohol: The social smoker

The social smoker is also known as the occasional smoker, the light smoker or the casual smoker. You may never buy a pack of cigarettes, but instead prefer to scrounge cigarettes off your mates. Without buying a cigarette, it may maintain a state of denial, helping to convince you that you don’t really smoke and could quit at any time. You may also believe that the intermittent nature of your smoking carries no health risks, but this is a myth as even second-hand smoke can harm your health.

Social smoking when drinking alcohol
Social smokers are convinced smoking it helps you to socialise

As a social smoker, you may view your smoking as a legitimised “dirty habit”, but continue because you are convinced that it helps you to socialise. Unlike some defiant smokers, you are respectful of and are sympathetic towards other non-smoker’s wellbeing. You will suppress your smoking habit in a situation if it is likely to set a bad example e.g. if smoking in front of young children. You will resist your urge to smoke if it might offend someone or be considered harmful to their health.

Your occasional social smoking ritual may involve binge smoking, as your patterns involve conforming to the social rituals of others. You lose track of the number of cigarettes that you smoke since you are unable to register having an empty packet. Over the course of a social weekend, the number of cigarettes that you smoke might exceed the level of a genuine “regular” smoker who smokes constantly throughout the week.

Social smokers may use nicotine for its psychoactive effects, such as for stimulation and pleasure. You are not addicted to nicotine, since you suffer none of the cravings, irritability or withdrawal symptoms in common with regular smokers. You are probably addicted to the ritual of smoking in social situations however, defined by some as a compulsion. Compulsions are prone to growing uncontrollably. With the potential for social-smoking being part of whole days spent during social weekends with your peers, your social smoking habits can place you on a slippery slope towards addiction.

Challenging peer group values and personal values

If your goal is to quit social smoking, it will mean confronting the identity and group culture of your peer group. Can it change or is your peer group defined by conformity? In some social group situations, many individuals want to change something negative about the group but fear being judged or evicted from the group.

Alternatively, quitting social smoking can involve strengthening your personal non-smoking values and believing that they are good enough for your peer group to accommodate. You can be proud to stand out as being different. Ultimately, if all that matters to the peer group is your conformity to do what they do, you may decide to join a different group that accepts you and the life that you want to lead – and not the life that others expect you to lead.

Social smoking when drinking alcohol: Adolescent drinking

Adolescent reasons for drinking alcohol are very similar to the reasons for starting smoking listed above. The reasons include peer pressure, self medication, defiance, sensation seeking, desire to take risks, and imitation of adult behaviour. As with smoking cigarettes, associating a potentially addictive substance with these values is likely to consolidate the “rewards” when combined with the repetition of drinking alcohol.

Another feature of drinking regularly is one of an increased tolerance to alcohol, whereby you need to consume more of it to have the same beneficial effect. Often, this means bypassing the initial “high” that you previously gained from it whilst in pursuit of your sought-after reward. At the physiological level, as your tolerance increases, you are changing your brain’s wiring system.

During the adolescent period, there is still a significant level of brain development. The short term effects of alcohol on the still-developing brain include lower cognitive attention, reaction, functioning and memory. Possible long term effects can include increased alcohol dependency.

There are many different reasons that someone can end up being dependent on alcohol to some degree, even if it means struggling to get through the weekend without at least one binge-drinking session. Having sustained periods to consolidate your “rewards” during adolescence when there is a significant amount of brain plasticity may form a deep association and possible dependency into adulthood that the only way to access these “rewards” is by drinking alcohol.

Combining alcohol into the social smoking mix

Not all adolescents smoke and drink alcohol, but these “gateway drugs” are often amongst the first experimental substances to be used concurrently. In one research study of smoking and drinking amongst youth over 98% of the sample of smokers also drank alcohol, suggesting that smoking is a reliable indicator of alcohol use.

The reasons that adolescents both smoke and drink relate to the same reasons listed above for drinking and smoking e.g. peer-pressure, looking cool, looking grown up etc.

Binge drinking and binge smoking
A cocktail effect of alcohol and cigarettes

Believing that both substances give you these rewards will compound these associations, integrating the links that smokers often make that drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes “go hand in hand”. When these rewards have been integrated, these combined substances can change your brain chemistry and deceive your brain into thinking that the respective behaviours of smoking or drinking will actualise these beliefs from one another. So when you are participating in one activity e.g. having a great time when drinking socially, the activity can act as a cue for the rewarding memory that powers your craving or urge to then smoke a cigarette.

Social smoking when drinking alcohol: The desire to quit smoking

As adolescents move into adulthood, values can change. What was previously considered a good habit can become a bad habit. The previous adolescent beliefs that activated your smoking or drinking habits may not be important to you, or may not justify your reasons to continue those habits as the young adult. Obviously, you don’t have to “look grown-up” by smoking cigarettes when you are a “grown up” adult for example.

The young adult will also create new beliefs and want to form new habits that complement that stage of your life. Attention to your health and the cost implications to maintain these habits can be reasons to change your habits.

In a survey, about a quarter of the adult sample that drank alcohol just wanted to cut down their alcohol consumption into “controlled drinking”, but not quit drinking completely.

In another survey, it was found that 70% of adult smokers wanted to quit smoking completely.

How does drinking alcohol socially affect a smoker’s ability to kick the smoking habit?

Social smoking when drinking alcohol: potential relapses

From my experience of helping clients quit smoking, one of the main reasons that people have previously lapsed and relapsed back into smoking is due to attending a major social drinking occasion in which several of the peer group smoked cigarettes.

When I’ve treated clients for smoking cessation, one of the biggest fears when stopping is to put in all of the hard work to not smoke for a few days, to then think that you have nailed it, only to lapse on a social drinking night out.

Many smokers quit using NRT, medication from the GP, with therapy or even with self help quit smoking methods. Some smokers may vape as a progressive shift away from smoking cigarettes. Adopting an effective quitting process can involve identifying your potential relapse triggers to prepare you for situations that will trigger your urge. Your stop smoking goals can run smoothly until you hit that situation that helplessly eliminates your good intentions.

When you have background experiences of social smoking when drinking alcohol, the force of habit can make this situation particularly difficult to change what you do when you are in that situation again. Deeply entrenched values from adolescence can form the learned associations that intensify the urge to lapse or relapse back into social smoking when drinking alcohol.

But it’s not just the background experiences that are causing these urges though. Once you have created the “cocktail” of chemical pathways by using both substances concurrently, there are research-based explanations that will then drive your urges to continue that behaviour. It will also explain why so many aspiring non-smokers lapse and relapse when they drink alcohol socially. The urge to smoke and drink together is not just a coincidence.

Why people are prone to social smoking when drinking alcohol

The research-based explanations for why people lapse (and relapse) into social smoking when drinking alcohol includes:

Rational decision-making processes are diminished when drinking alcohol

You can probably relate to the scenario when you have kept off cigarettes for a few days, are dealing really well with the cravings and think that you have cracked it! Then to you decide to enjoy a night out, drinking with your friends to celebrate. In the pub, they venture over to the outdoor smoking area and you join them without giving it a second thought.

Now, if you were driving and staying sober for example, your self-discipline would see this situation as a threat to your quit-smoking goals and would stop you in your tracks. Having shared a few rounds of drinks with your friends however, the implications of your smoking behaviour are rapidly brushed aside.

Social smoking when drinking alcohol
Moderate drinking raises your impulsivity

Even moderate drinking raises your impulsivity. It does this by increasing the amount of nor-adrenaline in the brain, elevating your levels of arousal and excitement. When drinking alcohol, it means that you are prone to seeking immediate rewards rather than the risks associated with those rewards.

Alcohol also removes your rational decision-making abilities by dampening activity in the pre-frontal cortex part of your brain. This means that you will find it hard to resist the offer of a cigarette because your inhibitions are reduced and you are not thinking about the consequences of your long term quit-smoking goals.

Nicotine counteracts the drowsy effects of alcohol

You may already be aware of the sluggish, depressant effects that a heavy drinking session can have on your mood as the night continues. Researchers have identified that the stimulating effect of nicotine can counteract the sleepiness caused by alcohol. This can explain why smokers crave a cigarette when they have drunk excessively and rather than “call it quits” for the night (knowing that you have had more than enough), you will use the stimulants in nicotine to prolong the evening. According to the research, nicotine thus increases your mental alertness, neutralising the sluggish effects of alcohol.

Alcohol and nicotine reinforces/eliminates the effects of one another

When you have had a few drinks and crossed the barrier of smoking one cigarette, the alcohol and the nicotine will be boosting the rewarding properties of the other substance. Nicotine and alcohol act on the same brain pathways, particularly on the mesolimbic dopamine system.

This process would substantiate why so many people say that smoking and drinking goes “hand in hand”; the feelings of pleasure are increased when you combine alcohol and nicotine, flooding your brain with high levels of dopamine and increasing the cravings of one another.

However, other researchers have argued that the combined effects of both substances aren’t all pleasurable. When smoking and drinking simultaneously, stress hormones effectively interact to cancel out the release of dopamine.

This research is suggesting that you feel happy when you smoke and drink separately, but when you smoke and drink together, drinking alcohol is first bringing up the happy memories of smoking. You then smoke a cigarette with your alcoholic drink and your dopamine levels drop. So you drink alcohol more to recover your dopamine and this reminds you of the pleasures of smoking...and so the reaction-cycle continues. Thos who smoke and drink together may find this process particularly tough to eliminate in that moment when a mix of different chemicals are flooding the brain.

Social smoking when drinking alcohol: Quitting smoking

With drinking alcohol increasing the urge to smoke cigarettes and smoking cigarettes increasing the urge to drink more alcohol, the risk of binge behaviour and addiction are high.

Refusing alcohol and cigarettes
Quitting smoking can lower your alcohol consumption

By quitting smoking cigarettes however (which the majority of adult smokers want to do), it can lower your alcohol consumption and potential for alcohol-related health problems.

Your may seek help from a hypnotherapist to assist your journey. Or work on some self-help strategies:

First things first...

In your smoking cessation journey, first ensure that nicotine is out of your system for at least three days. Use relaxation techniques to counter the cravings and to deal with stress. Continue to replace any smoking habits with new non-smoking habits and repeatedly integrate them with a feeling of achievement. The social smoker won’t have too many problems with this stage.

Temporarily avoiding social smoking when drinking alcohol

For the social smoker who socialises heavily on the weekend, achieve three days without smoking by recovering from the previous weekend’s activities and waiting until midweek to focus on your smoking cessation goals for the following weekend. Try to curb your midweek socials for a while.

In the short term, change your routine as this will help you to confront your smoking and drinking habits and it will help you to be aware of your smoking lapse triggers.

Some situations target drinking and smoking behaviour. Pubs often welcome smokers as their main audience by creating bigger outdoor spaces to accommodate smokers.

New activities and locations

Can you organise a non-social drinking situation by changing the activity? Do you feel the pressure to smoke because of the location e.g. by going to a specific pub, or because of the people you socialise with e.g. do all of your friends smoke? Can you temporarily socialise with your non-smoking friends?

What would happen if you asked trustful friends to give you a reminder of your non-smoking intentions when you are out? Can you avoid leaving the non-smoking area and venturing over into the smoking area? Can you plan to leave early if you feel the growing pressure to drink in “rounds”?

Lowering your alcohol consumption will help you smoke less. What non-alcohol drink can you drink instead? If you don’t smoke whilst socialising, it may help you reduce your total alcohol consumption.

Reappraise what drives your binge behaviour

Then consider if your socialising is a binge activity. What aren’t you dealing with through your week (or in your life) that is being channelled into the binge drinking and smoking habit on the weekend?

What other more effective ways can replace how you cope with stress throughout the week that will take the pressure off the weekend?

Hypnotherapy to help social smoking when drinking alcohol

If you are a social smoker and your goal is to become a non-smoker, confronting your social habits is an essential part of achieving your goal. With persistence, changing those old negative habits will lead to you forming new positive socialising habits. Initially it will seem like something is missing, but keep focused on your goal and it will become a natural part of how you socialise.

You can contact me for more help if you are struggling with any part of your quit smoking programme.

For more information on social smoking when drinking alcohol, contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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Erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy

Can you erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy?

I am frequently asked if you can erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy. The question often stems from misconceptions of the power of hypnosis from the media. Films like “Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” further reinforce the fantasy of these possibilities that you can undergo some brainwashing process to erase the bad memories of someone.
Erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy
Is memory erasure with hypnotherapy a fantasy?
Or maybe the enquiry originated from being a member of the audience in a stage hypnosis show in which the memory of a subject was temporarily “erased”. Witnessing the subject being placed in a “trance” and then forgetting their own name can sow seeds of belief into the audience that memory erasure is possible. Then you are faced with a personal trauma. You find out that your partner has been cheating on you...more than once! You’ve managed to break out of the relationship but the trauma doesn’t end there. You are desperate to get your (ex) partner “out of your head”. But there’s another problem: the more you try and forget them, the more the memories of them just rebound back into your consciousness. It’s in those moments of helplessness that what you have “learned” from the movies or stage hypnosis shows can seem plausible. You’re desperate to find a memory erasing process that can rescue your torment in a “flick of a switch”. But is it really possible to erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy? Or is it just something that exists in fantasy movies and stage hypnosis shows?  

Erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy: fact or fiction?

In order to distinguish what happens in the fictional portrayal of hypnosis against what typically happens in a hypnotherapy treatment, it can be useful to redefine what hypnotherapy is and how hypnotherapy works in practice. Hypnotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses hypnosis to create therapeutic change. Various hypnotic techniques are used to enable you to achieve a “heightened state of consciousness” in which you can concentrate your attention into the achievement of your hypnotherapy goals. Depending on hypnotherapist’s approach, relaxation techniques may also be incorporated into the hypnotic induction without diminishing your focus of attention. The word hypnosis is derived from the Greek word “to sleep”, but the state of hypnosis is not a state of unconsciousness. Ask someone to “role-play” being asleep and they would instinctively close their eyes. When watching hypnosis in films (and in hypnotherapy treatments), eye closure is often promoted to focus the attention inwardly, but the hypnotherapist is not encouraging sleep in that treatment session. The state of mind in hypnosis is often compared to states in meditation and mindfulness. In these different practices you are refocusing your own awareness into (or away from) different situations for calmness or re-clarification. Assisted externally by the hypnotherapist, it can be argued that hypnosis is a state of guided “meditation”. Similar to these other practices, it can enable you to perceive your situations with different thoughts, emotions and beliefs. When defining hypnosis, hypnotherapists refer to being able to access the subconscious mind that holds many of the automated “patterns” of thoughts, emotions, beliefs and behaviours that can remain hidden from the conscious mind. Some of these patterns are negative and self limiting. Whilst in hypnosis, you are more receptive to the hypnotherapist’s suggestions to access these self-limiting and negative automated “patterns”. You are then encouraged to re-imagine them in alignment with your positive therapeutic goals. Many conditions like smoking cessation, phobias, weight control, anxiety, stress, panic attacks and depression can be treated with hypnotherapy. The treatment process requires your active participation in which you can recall some of the therapeutic suggestions used during hypnosis. Contrary to popular belief, you cannot be made to do anything against your will with hypnosis. Having distinguished some aspects of fact or faction, is it still possible to erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy?  

Erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy: reality check

Erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy
Memories might be weighing you down but they can’t be erased
As much as you may wish to forget the existence of a person or a painful memory, there is no modern therapy that will enable you to do so. Memory erasing or brainwashing techniques do not exist; nor would it be an ethical practise if it did exist. So when asking whether you can erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy, it stems from the fictional depiction of what people want to believe about hypnosis at a desperate time of need.    

The irony of trying harder to forget a recent painful memory

A memory of someone or of something is not a tangible object; memories are complex and contain far more than just the subject-matter. One memory may lead to countless other memories and associations such as other people, places, thoughts and feelings. If you were able to simply erase a memory from your mind, your mind would be missing lots of gaps and connected pockets of information. Furthermore, whilst studies have shown that you can forget an isolated “emotionally-weak” object that has recently been shown to you in a test; you cannot forget a recent emotionally-charged memory connected to lots of experiences that are typical say, in a long term relationship. Bad emotionally-charged memories, in particular, are pushed into your subconscious mind to protect you from re-experiencing pain and trauma. This is termed as repression. Whilst you may not be dwelling on those issues, the emotions from those memories can resurface with an appropriate connected trigger causing you to feel distressed. Often, when someone wants to forget a person it’s because you associate negative feelings and behaviour towards them. These negative associations make it almost impossible to forget this person, as they are marked as “significant” in your subconscious (or unconscious) mind. When you forcefully try to forget (suppress) a recent painful memory, the memory is recalled. You are then adding more importance to the memory as you re-trigger the painful emotions. By also adding additional emotions like frustration into this effort, you are effectively keeping the bad memory active. To summarise then, vigorously trying to forget recent (or distant) bad memories backfires, keeping the memory active and causing you more upset. But dealing with bad memories can be managed in different, more productive way.    

Remoulding the context of memories with hypnotherapy

Memories are not static constant structures that are fixed in your mind. Memories (and their associated thoughts and emotions) are adaptable and flexible. They are open to suggestion and can accept small deletions or “add-ons” to change some of their original meaning. Each time that your mind replays memories, minor details of those memories are being remoulded, sometimes without even realising it. By creating new associations and narratives to that memory, you can effectively change what that memory means to you and how you feel and respond towards it. What will surprise some people is that when you apply these changes, these changes don’t need to have happened in reality, but they still need to be “reasonably acceptable”.
Hypnotherapy change bad memories memory stick
Change the meaning of your bad memories with hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy is an effective tool to help you “re-edit” the negative emotional associations of a memory. These associations can be reinterpreted into ones that are aligned towards your therapeutic goals. And as you then change the way you feel about the memory, it alters your “template” of mental discomfort and the negative physical reactions. So whilst you can’t erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy, hypnotherapy can help you change the specific thought, emotion, and behavioural associations that are connected to the memory. In other words, hypnotherapy can change “how you remember” the memory, not the “raw” memory itself. But some people may be worried about the ethics of such a process that “meddles” with someone’s personal painful memories. Is it right to change something in your negative past that could help you develop a higher sense of morality? It’s a valid concern, but you can take into account the following:
  • As mentioned earlier, nothing is done against your will and nothing can be changed without your cooperation.
  • The decision to seek therapy is a tentative and personal step. It’s important to seek a therapist that you can trust and whom you believe will guide you towards emotional positivity. The change is for your emotional benefit.
  • You will have assessed the need for this change, weighing up the quality of your life that you currently have by maintaining the status quo and the benefits of being free of these painful memories.
  • The re-evaluation of one’s past is happening naturally and informally without even trying to change it. When you look at photographs, engage in conversations, watch the television, read newspapers etc. memories are being altered in some way. If your self-help methods are not helping you break free of these painful memories, professional therapy becomes a viable option.
  • All therapies, not just hypnotherapy, seek to remould your memories in some way. The approach may actively look back at those memories or deal with them incidentally when looking ahead at what you want to achieve.
When you actively want treatment for a bad memory, hypnotherapy regression techniques and/or rewind techniques may be used in this process. They can be combined with or without solution focused hypnotherapy, which tends to “leave the past behind”. Even the most basic hypnotherapy relaxation inductions that involve a “glance” at a bad memory can help you reduce the intensity of your distress connected to the bad memory. The hypnotherapist who uses numerous hypnotherapeutic strategies will use regression to treat your bad memory, but will still ask confirmatory questions about the achievement of your (future) goals e.g. “when you have “forgotten” this memory how will you lead your life? How will you then react or feel when you think about this memory or see this person again?”    

Which conditions can benefit from a reinterpretation of your memories?

Having discussed whether it’s possible to erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy, there are certain treatment-areas that particularly benefit from a reinterpretation of your bad memories. Your specific issue does not have to fall into the categories below to be treatable. With some treatment areas, you may not actively dwell on those bad memories, but the beliefs connected to those memories are inhibiting you from moving forwards and accessing positive change. Fears and Phobias There are various causes of phobias. Most phobias are learnt during childhood when these traumatic experiences shape your beliefs about your phobic object or situation. Combined with progressive desensitisation, the reinterpretation of the “causal” traumatising event can help you to release the emotions connected your phobia. Relationships Traumas from your parent’s relationship and from your own previous relationships can compound unresolved emotions. They continue to contaminate your current and future relationships. The effect of past abuse, infidelity and parental divorce can cause deep insecurities and jealousy towards to your partner. Lack of self confidence Avoiding new challenges because you fear failure can be connected to events in your past. These past “failings” now shape your belief that things will go wrong again in the future, but without taking risks your confidence suffers. Releasing the emotion from these past memories can change the pathway of this negative self-fulfilling prophecy. Low self esteem Past criticism, abuse, bullying and neglect can be internalised as a definitions of your worth. Without realising that you are holding onto these memories, you can continue to believe that there is something wrong with you. Reappraising those bad memories can help you challenge your beliefs and rebuild your self esteem. PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) With post traumatic stress disorder, the traumatic experience is considered to be fragmented and “misfiled” when your mind originally presented it for memory storage. The traumatic memories of the experience are now being reactivated by triggers causing symptoms like distressing flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks and sudden fits of rage. Hypnotherapy can enable the traumatic memory to be safely reprocessed reducing your distressing PTSD symptoms.    

Summary: the “memory erasing” potential of hypnotherapy

Erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy can help you change how you feel about the memory
When a memory continues to haunt you, accessing a “silver bullet” that will remove the struggle remains a fantasy. But that doesn’t mean that the memory should continue to haunt you. With the right expectations, what surrounds the memory can be altered. And it’s important to have the right expectations when starting a therapeutic process of change. This hypnosis test and the article that follows it can help demystify many of the common misconceptions about hypnosis. Ultimately, you cannot erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy, but you can change what you associate with that memory.  Hypnotherapy is a useful tool to facilitate this change with a variety of conditions. When actively focusing on the memory and its associations, you can then remould what that memory means to you.  

For more information on whether you can erase bad memories or forget someone with hypnotherapy, contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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Reasons for drinking alcohol

17 Common Reasons For Drinking Alcohol

People have various reasons for drinking alcohol without their drinking patterns being a cause for concern. An alcoholic drink or two can be part of an occasional celebration or to complement a special meal. Other people may avoid alcohol altogether if they don’t like to taste, fear being out of control, or associate alcohol with past distress.

: Social reasons for drinking alcohol
Peer pressure is a common reason to drink alcohol

In the early stages of drinking, you may not enjoy the taste. However, the situation surrounding your drinking behaviour e.g. feeling intimidated by peer pressure, will motivate you to push through your negative taste reaction until you accept it.

After some persistence, you find out that alcohol produces many gratifying effects on your mind and body. If you perceive this effect as rewarding, then your habits will draw you in to establish a level of alcohol dependence, however small. The associations you make with your drinking experiences will shape your values and expectations to continue drinking. But the effects of alcohol on the mind and body are so deceiving that people persevere with drinking alcohol compulsively even after it becomes a problem.

The reasons for drinking alcohol listed here include a further analysis of that reason. When you want to reduce your alcohol consumption, examining your underlying motivation or reason for drinking can help you re-evaluate your perceived reward. This can start a process of change in which you can then find better emotional and behavioural alternatives that are aligned with your new drinking goals.

 

 

Reasons for drinking alcohol: two broad categories

There are generally two broad categories that define the common reasons for drinking alcohol. One category uses alcohol as a coping mechanism to ease discomfort (or for negative reinforcement). The other category involves using alcohol to be cheerful and lively at social situations (for positive reinforcement). Both categories are vulnerable to habitual and binge drinking behaviour depending on the situation and individual beliefs. Situations can involve a mix of both categories e.g. when someone’s mood is jovial with moderate alcohol consumption, but after heavy drinking their mood becomes hostile causing them to release repressed anger from childhood experiences.

 

 

What are some common reasons for drinking alcohol?

You drink alcohol to relieve stress – Alcohol has anxiety reducing (or anxiolytic properties) and diminishes the feelings of stress. This is often acknowledged in the early stages of drinking, but as the dependency grips you, drinking continues even when the stress-relieving benefits have faded. The memory of the past benefit pushes the misconception that the feeling of relief will arrive after another drink. Ironically, for those with a high alcohol dependency, the increased alcohol consumption intensifies the feeling of stress that you were hoping to escape in the first place.

 

You are influenced by peer pressure (social norms) – The UK has an established drinking culture and following these social drinking norms and rituals is one of the main reasons for drinking alcohol, regardless of age. Drinking influences can come from your peers, your family, the media, the occasion etc.

In a social situation, you may not want to drink, but the fear of offending someone or standing out from the crowd if you don’t “keep up” can trigger feelings of isolation, a fear of being criticised or fear of being rejected from the social group (or activity). These fears can pressurise people into drinking because it’s socially expected particularly when it is connected to occasions like weddings and large parties.

For some people and social groups, drinking is the activity and the term “drinking buddy” can be used to form a relationship in which heavy drinking is normalised. Ironically, those with a high alcohol dependency will frequently drink alone with minimal social interaction in a social setting. Peer pressure can then be used as the hidden excuse for yet another occasion to believe you are drinking and having fun with friends.

Teenage reasons for drinking alcohol
Young people can feel grown up when they drink alcohol

You drink alcohol to feel grown up – Teenagers are highly curious and suggestible when they see adults doing something that they don’t do. With adulthood approaching fast, their impatience can encourage them to imitate adult behaviour. Tell your teenage children not to do something when you are doing it yourself and it’s likely to fire their curiosity when you are not around and see what all of the fuss is about. For teenagers, acting like an adult is one of the most common reasons for drinking alcohol. Ironically, when drinking excessively, it’s an excuse for many adults to act like young children!

 

You drink as an act of rebellion – If you are a teenager who is surrounded by rules and is constantly being told not to do things, being defiant about breaking the rules can be exciting. And when the members of your peer group haven’t “found” alcohol yet, it can seem very cool to do something excessively that they don’t do. The need to stand out as a non-conformist can continue into adulthood however, justifying the drinking behaviour as the definition of your individuality. Being the adult rebel with a high alcohol dependency, others will probably pity your behaviour rather than admire it, thinking that you have somehow lost your direction and now hide behind the “glamour” of your rebellious drinking.

 

You drink alcohol to take back control – If you have experienced control, manipulation or abuse from a parent or partner, you may use alcohol to “take back control” or even take revenge on your oppressor, particularly if they don’t like you drinking alcohol. Or maybe you are struggling to control a part of your life e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder, and having something that gives your mind moments of “release” can feel like you have momentarily escaped your torture and can “control” something. Drinking alcohol to cope with the despair of abuse and to take back control and is one of the most common reasons for drinking alcohol heavily. Even when you have battled your way out of your situation, the subtle reminders of your previous loss of control can be a strong trigger to drink again. It’s a long path back to heal the damage of your situation, but alcohol never really gave you the emotional resources to conquer it.

 

You drink alcohol to lower your inhibitions – Social phobia or (social anxiety) is a common phobia in which the individual fears embarrassment and attention. Alcohol is often used as “liquid courage” to take the edge off shyness particularly when coping with situations like a first date or a large party filled with strangers. You can feel anxious and drink alcohol to cope in anticipation of the actual event.

As your intolerance increases with a hectic social life, those spontaneous moments of awkwardness can trigger the need for another drink. Ironically, when you then become a binge drinker, your lack of inhibition can create situations that are often embarrassing, aggressive or attention-seeking. This is something that you can obviously blame on alcohol and “shrug off” the next day to hide your blushes, rather than developing skills like using affirmations, breathing techniques to control your anxiety, self hypnosis and meditation.

 

You drink alcohol to improve your sleep quality – When you are going through major lifestyle changes or work-related stress, your sleep quality can be affected. Introducing alcohol as a sedative to break the sleep-worry cycle can have a short term benefit, but when the effects of alcohol wear off, you are likely to wake up in the middle of the night. As your intolerance to alcohol increases, it means that you will need more alcohol to have the same sedating effect though the night. If the stressful conditions continue, those benefits can fool you into believing that alcohol is helping your long term sleeping habits. Since alcohol is a depressant, it reduces the amount of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) necessary for quality sleep. So when you have drunk alcohol, you tend to wake up feeling fatigued with poor concentration levels. Learning how to regain your natural sleep quality will help you break the sleep-worry cycle.

 

You drink alcohol to manage pain – It’s common to manage chronic pain with alcohol, but in order to be effective, you will need to binge drink over long periods to achieve some level of benefit. As you build up a tolerance for the quantity of alcohol, you will need more to achieve the same pain-relieving effect. There are further dangers of causing harm to other organs when mixing alcohol with painkillers.

 

Drinking alcohol helps you to feel better – Another term for using a substance like alcohol to feel better is called self medication. This is a broad category within the reasons for drinking alcohol that includes gaining any perceived benefit whether it’s shared by others or just personal to you.

Self medication with alcohol
Self medication is a major reason to drink alcohol

Common reasons to self medicate (other than reasons already listed in this article) include feeling angry, lonely, depressed, bereft, worthless, frustrated, guilty, ashamed, bored etc. Using alcohol becomes the crutch to help you avoid, escape, divert, deny, suppress, repress, relieve, replace, numb, punish, block, hide, erase, stall, mask, forget etc. actively confronting or dealing with the discomfort associated with another situation.

In so many of those situations, the underlying problem doesn’t go away after you have finished drinking. Drinking alcohol just gives you a momentary release that is more bearable until you have accessed (if ever) a better way of coping with the alternative. If, for example, you drink to block feelings of guilt about something that you did wrong, your attention can be temporarily diverted from that guilty feeling that connects to the situation.

Some problems become more complex with time and latch onto additional situations causing the sufferer to feel more guilt and increase your dependency on alcohol. You don’t find an active solution to their problems; instead, drinking alcohol becomes the solution. Forming new good habits without alcohol takes time; prepare for a long road ahead.

 

You enjoy the taste of alcohol – Tasting ethanol for the first time as a child is rarely a pleasant experience. Evolution has hard-wired humans to dislike bitterness. But the taste can be “acquired” when it is suggested to you to “give it time” or you attach other reasons to persist with the bitter taste until you accept it e.g. because you want to fit in with your peer group.

Adding sugar to disguise the bitterness will help that acquired “liking” for you alcoholic drink and this addition also takes care of the other half of what evolution has programmed us to do (like sweetness). Flavour it with a whole range of mixers in enjoyable surrounds and your perceptions quickly convert it to the acquired taste that you enjoy.

And despite many people having drunk excessively to the point of vomiting to indicate that your body doesn’t like this, it only serves as a temporary aversion when your peers boost your drinking and vomiting achievement as “cool”.

 

You really want a drink – When you already perceive pleasure from something, the neurotransmitter that controls the reward centre in the brain called dopamine is playing a major part in motivating your behaviour. Drinking alcohol has an effect of increasing the release of the dopamine giving some people this temporary euphoria of enjoyment. Then add to that physiological process numerous pleasurable experiences like parties and celebrations to set up habits and your “want” and expectation to want more will be amplified.

Unfortunately, with continued alcohol use, the brain adapts to the dopamine overload by producing less of the neurotransmitter and lowering your mood. To regain your euphoria, the brain is tricked into thinking that you have to keep drinking to stay happy, meaning that you may need more alcohol to have the same effect. At this stage of alcohol dependency, your want is bordering on a “need” to feel good again. If you maintain a high level of alcohol consumption, you are on the early pathway to alcohol dependency.

 

You drink alcohol to warm you up – Drinking alcohol can temporarily feel warming by the receptor nerves in your skin detecting a rise in skin temperature caused by vasodilation. But this effect actually lowers the body’s core temperature as the thermoregulatory system would normally perform this function to cool your core temperature down.  Natural ways to warm up include moving around and putting on warmer clothes and wrapping your hands around a hot cup of tea if your hands are cold.

 

You drink alcohol to quench your thirst – Drinking alcohol has a diuretic effect, helping you to eliminate water from your body by increasing the production of urine, hence you tend to feel thirsty in the night or morning after a drinking session. It’s likely that when you are thirsty and you consume one alcoholic drink, you believe that the next drink will taste better because of the false belief that it is thirst quenching. If you are thirsty, there are many non-alcoholic drinks that will quench your thirst.

 

You drink alcohol to improve the taste of your food – Pairing your food with alcohol can seem like a sophisticated ritual that is built into fine dining culture.  Excessive alcohol consumption however can damage your sense of taste.

Moderate drinking activates the taste and smell receptors connected to the brain to generate a chemo-sensory perceptive experience along the lines of “ah, plenty of berry fruits...etc.” This response makes it an ingenious marketing opportunity to mark up the cost of a bottle of wine in a restaurant. When you then buy your “deliciously” described steak from the menu (another way to build expectation about having something better than it is), you are fully buying into the illusory benefits of wine pairing.

 

You drink alcohol to feel powerful – Power can mean several things to different people. It can mean feeling confident, self-assured, authentic, courageous, being assertive, funny, sexy, beautiful, sociable, impulsive, flirtatious, important or liberated as an ideal version of your “self”. For some people, it can mean an excessive “high” feeling of arrogance or aggression that can be admired by one’s peers (social confidence) and would not come to the surface without using an elixir to immortalise you in some way. The reason that you might feel powerful is again connected to the brain’s flooding of dopamine (pleasure neurotransmitter) that can have the effect of lowering one’s inhibitions. Then there’s the placebo effect – believe that that an amount of alcohol “caused” you to have a good outcome last time and you will drink alcohol again to “create” the same effect.

If you have low self belief and low self confidence, and fear being exposed as dull, unintelligent, ugly etc., you are probably using alcohol to fill your void of insecurities. You remain convinced that alcohol will give you “power” or another emotional boost and guess what, it will probably will!

Reasons to drink alcohol to improve sexual performance
Heavy drinking can leave your partner feeling frustrated

You drink alcohol to improve sexual performance – Drinking alcohol to improve the quality of your sex can have variable benefits. Depending on your gender, people may drink alcohol to increase your desire to be intimate, be less “fussy” with your choice of partner, lower the level of performance anxiety, increase or decrease arousal levels depending on your underlying negative issue (e.g. premature ejaculation), sustain an erection and delay orgasm. But there is an optimal amount of alcohol to achieve the desired result. Excessive alcohol can have a detrimental effect on the quality of your sex, decreasing sensitivity (common with erectile dysfunction), reducing arousal and your ability to achieve orgasm. As with using any substance excessively, achieving natural sexual satisfaction can become more difficult to achieve as you drink heavily. Many people who binge drink often regret their sexual experiences whilst being drunk.

 

You drink to get drunk – Drinking with the intention of getting drunk can be motivated by a number of underlying reasons. People usually get drunk to cope with negative experiences, to be more sociable, to conform to ritualised behaviour and to feel more excitable. The physical effects of alcohol include reducing stress by acting like a common tranquilliser in parts of the brain, dimming your judgement abilities so that you “don’t care”, releasing dopamine to increase pleasure and releasing endorphins (opiates) to help you “feel good”. With alcohol being legal, it’s not surprising that people want to get drunk in the short term with all of these physiological effects. Continue to binge drink over an extensive period of time and the changes in your brain chemistry steer you towards high alcohol dependency.

 

 

Common reasons for drinking alcohol: Summary

The reasons for drinking alcohol are numerous and personal but can be generalised into drinking for positive and negative reinforcement. Any behaviour associated with a substance can become habit-forming. A behaviour that is part of cultural norms and values can quickly accumulate positive beliefs as you multiply those experiences.

If you are seeking to reduce your alcohol consumption, interacting with your underlying needs will help you to focus on positive changes.

  • Relying on any substance like alcohol to cope deceives you that you are really dealing with it.
  • The perceived rewards can become a habitual.
  • Your initial rewards can be redundant, but you continue to believe that you are still benefitting even though your lifestyle has changed.
  • You can be convinced that things would be worse if you didn’t drink.
  • As your tolerance to alcohol increases, you need more alcohol to have the same effect.
  • When you drink heavily, the rewiring of your brain chemistry makes it harder to cope with those situations naturally.
  • Heavy drinking patterns can creep up on you.
  • You increase the number of health risks as your drink heavily, including risking alcoholism.

 

Reasons for drinking alcohol: for more information on hypnotherapy to lower your alcohol consumption contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

 

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Accepting Health Anxiety

Accepting Health Anxiety

Accepting health anxiety: You often hear that you should “trust your gut instincts”. It’s probably true for most of the time. But what if those instincts are rooted in fear? Does it then mean that those fearful instincts are distorted and will cause havoc if you follow those gut instincts?
Accepting health anxiety fear
How fear is affecting your reactions?
You can appreciate that sending for the emergency fire services each time that someone lights a match because of what might happen to that small isolated fire would be a blatant over-reaction. But when suffer you have excessive fear, your reality is dominated by your emotion; the situation will be catastrophic. With excessive fear, this reaction feels right and the fearful person is unable to “normalise” how less fearful people might dismiss it. Health anxiety (also known as hypochondriasis) is a condition in which you are preoccupied with the fearful belief that you have or will contract a serious illness. You struggle to enjoy life because you are convinced that all of those bodily “noises” (sensations, feelings and discomforts etc.) that normal healthy people learn to live with is something far more serious. With health anxiety, you are convinced that this small match fire is attached to something highly flammable and needs the fire service to extinguish it. In addition to this, when it has been extinguished, you’re convinced that it will keep relighting and cause another major fire.  

Accepting health anxiety: Feared illness or actual illness

The internal systems of the body are constantly making normal “noises” that can affect heart rate, breathing patterns, changes muscle tone etc. Many of those sensations that you feel can alter according to your emotional state. Heart rate slows when relaxed, but increases when you are anxious. Your digestion rate can change with emotions and create many noises along the way! Some of the bodily sensation changes can be uncomfortable, startling and even undesirable, but they are not dangerous.  When you are convinced that they are symptoms of a serious illness, your anxiety can exaggerate those sensations, and trigger more of them. When you feel these changes, they are not fabricated. The sensations you feel are real but the fearful beliefs and emotions that underpin them are false. The sensations deceive you because you or people close to you usually have suffered a retrospective medical trauma. Confronting this internal deception is an important part of your return to health. It means acknowledging that the medical illness you fear is not the medical illness that you have; instead, the fear is the illness.    

Accepting health anxiety: From denial to acceptance

Accepting that you have a mental health disorder can be a difficult path. Denial, embarrassment, guilt, shame, frustration, anger and self blame are likely to be just some of your emotional obstacles en route. As you continue your journey, you can then understand what your health anxiety means for you and the options available to cope with it. Your survival mechanisms can include rituals of exercise, dieting, self care programmes all of which are generally good for your long term health. Some of those rituals can become compulsive and indicate that you are avoiding or struggling to deal with the core issue. This is not your fault as you are driven by your emotions, trying your best to minimise that moment of discomfort. Your journey of change may initially involve looking back on how it originated. Did you make the retrospective link to childhood values that “taught” you to be fearful of your health? This is not about blaming others, more about understanding your foundation layers of belief. Understanding how you “did it” can relieve some of your mind’s confusion. Some of those learning situations were traumatic and in the same way certain phobias are formed, you were hyper-reactive to the “object” of your fear. Typically, with health anxiety, it involves a close member of your family suddenly falling ill. A massive heart attack can give no warning for you to prepare your grief.
Accepting health anxiety palpitations
You are convinced that your symptoms are a serious illness
When you are a young child it’s difficult to understand what has happened and how your emotions are affecting you. The mark it leaves on your emotional development won’t show itself for some years to come. It’s likely that authority figures who were coping with their own grief may have shielded you from this trauma without involving you in discussions of your grief. What they may not have realised is that you had already made your own (misplaced and often illogical) associations of health anxiety-learning and this is now taking its hold on you. So the heart attack trauma and all that you then learn about heart functioning becomes a focus of your attention. Before you understand what stress and anxiety is, you are already convinced that this rapid heartbeat (caused by a panic attack) is a major cause for alarm. Will you also have a heart attack like your close relation? If something does happen to you, will it be your fault if your family go through yet more suffering? What about other types of family traumas that can exacerbate health anxiety? It is well known that when parents go through acrimonious separations, this creates deep insecurity in children who may struggle with anxiety in the future. This can reinforce the health anxiety “seeds” from a family bereavement or be the start a deep feeling of helplessness when symptoms of anxiety (like a racing heart beat) present themselves. If the excessive attention given to a sick child diverts the family rows, the “emotion gain” can be a trigger for health-related attention-seeking behaviour when the child feels unwell in the future (Munchausen Syndrome). When you bring health anxiety symptoms into teenage hood, the shift towards a socially-oriented value system brings additional pressure to appear “normal” to one’s peers. Feelings of embarrassment when you get attention are likely to heighten your struggle with excessive anxiety symptoms. You want to remain invisible but the tightness in your chest will surely be noticed and be judged by your peers. You fear looking as if you are having a heart attack and the irreversible damage this will have on your frail social esteem. So you avoid presentations, you suffer panic attacks with exams and your school attendance may suffer as a consequence of your anxiety. You are still convinced that your palpitations are more than just anxiety. Then there’s the dilemma about admitting these issues to your peers. Will they mock you? Will it make the symptoms worse if they know about it? Afraid to speak out about it, you go through a period of silence, stifling your social confidence and avoiding situations that might trigger your anxiety. When you are tired of running away from it, you finally speak to your family and they offer their reassurance that it will probably just disappear with time. But how do they know? They aren’t doctors so maybe they’re just trying to distract you. You pluck up the courage to see your doctor who wants to refer you to a cardiologist just to make sure that there is no underlying medical issue. This is helpful that someone has heard you but the appointment is months away. During that period of anticipation, it seems like an eternity. You are convinced that it must be serious to have to see a consultant. Your imagination creates any number of catastrophic scenarios of needing major heart surgery, or that you are untreatable or even worse.
Hypochondria health anxiety
Is it a betrayal when the diagnosis is not what you expected?
When you finally have your medical consultation, you are told by the consultant that all is clear and it’s probably anxiety. Momentarily, you feel reassured; then you feel betrayed. What if they have missed something? The symptoms are still there and you are not ready to fully accept the diagnosis. “What I am feeling can’t just be anxiety!” The symptoms are too real. Determined to prove the reality of your chest sensations, you research your symptoms with Dr Google. This is a bit risky because during your research, you are likely to only accept what you already believe. You feel tense during your research and it causes your symptoms to become active just reading about the traumas of heart conditions. Feeling desperate, you let down your guard and go back to your GP who prescribes some medication for your anxiety. You are not elated about taking medication; you have never had to take medication before. Is it safe to introduce something unnatural into your body? Will it have any side effects? When you research the possible side effects, you read that it could actually cause palpitations. Why was this medication prescribed if it can cause the very problem that you want to resolve? Feeling betrayed by your doctor, you take matters back into your own hands. The next line of attack is trying untested natural remedies by people who seem to be going through the same situation as you. If it works for them, it could help you too! And when you read the reviews, they are fantastic! You haven’t considered the placebo effect just yet. Sometimes by coincidence, those natural health remedies help, but the racing heart beat still has its moments. Then, a friend opens up and tells you about their anxiety symptoms. They mention that they have had a similar traumatic background with a relation dying suddenly of a medical condition. You are ready to confide in them and the conversation moves to the topic of health anxiety. In that moment, everything adds up. It takes a while to sink in but when you research “accepting health anxiety”, more of it makes sense. Now you can get the help that you need. You are not seeking treatment for a medically-based condition; you are seeking treatment for a mental health condition. Click here for more information on health anxiety treatment.    

Accepting health anxiety: For more information on treatment for health anxiety contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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OCD Treatment Cardiff

OCD Treatment Cardiff

OCD Treatment Cardiff: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a mental health condition that is characterised by having uncontrollable obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are unwanted, persistent and sometimes intrusive thoughts, images or impulses that cause emotional distress. Obsessions can cause the individual to act out certain repetitive behaviours or additional mental acts (called compulsions) in order to immediately reduce the distress of the obsession.
OCD treatment Cardiff stressed man
OCD is characterised by uncontrollable obsessions and compulsions
It is estimated that about three quarters of a million people in UK suffer with obsessive compulsive disorder, with about half of those being affected severely. It tends to interfere with the majority of people’s lives around early adulthood, but can be problematic at any age.    

OCD Treatment Cardiff: OCD in everyday language and OCD in reality

There are many medical terms that cross-over into everyday language. Being “addicted”, “paranoid” or “agoraphobic” are common labels that can be used respectively to describe how a person can exaggerate the enjoyment of something, fear that something terrible is going to happen or have a lack of enthusiasm for social events. But the real conditions are far more distressing than those applied in everyday language. Similarly, being “obsessed” or “obsessing” are common terms used to give casual reference to say, being preoccupied with a person, a new hobby or with a specific goal. Used in this context, your “obsession” will absorb your time and attention in some momentary way, particularly if the event is recent. You may listen to a new song repetitively and keep singing it when you are doing something routine. Or you may persistently think about a new love interest so intensely that it can distract some moments of your concentration, but it will be placed in the context of your other responsibilities that will help your day to function. Undoubtedly, the nature of the “obsession” can be related to negative situations like illness or death, but the preoccupation lessens when the situation has ended or when it gradually fades with the passing of time. Generally, you will still get to work at the time required, eat meals regularly, attend social events and ensure that you have a reasonable night’s sleep. With OCD, the obsessions and compulsions have more permanence. The time spent (usually more than one hour per day) replaying thoughts or perfecting rituals will interfere with the other important parts of your life such as your health, your relationships and your occupation.  There is extensive loss of control over your repetitive thoughts or behaviours. Additionally, there is little or no satisfaction when carrying out your compulsions; any relief from the anxiety is usually brief.    

OCD Treatment Cardiff: Types of OCD

Your obsessive compulsive disorder can attach onto any specific issue depending on your belief system, history of traumas and reactions to those traumas. There are some common categories of obsessions and compulsions however. Categories of obsessions can include contamination fears, orderliness and symmetry, fear of danger (and harm), and taboo thoughts. Categories of compulsions can include rituals of decontamination, rearranging, checking, and reassurance-seeking. You can access more information here on the common types of obsessive compulsive disorder.    

OCD Treatment Cardiff: What causes OCD?

word cloud OCD treatment Cardiff
There are various possible causes of OCD
Despite extensive research into the causes of obsessive compulsive disorder, no definitive cause of OCD has been identified. Instead there are various theories that relate to possible causes: Biological factors – Varied blood flow in parts of the brain and chemical deficiencies of serotonin (and other neurotransmitters) are indicated with OCD brain chemistry. These differences do not confirm whether this is a cause or an effect of having OCD however. Genetic factors – Those with close relatives who have OCD can increase the likelihood that you will also develop OCD. There have been attempts to identify a specific gene with OCD, but no research has been conclusive. Where OCD is limited to only some members of the family, it may still suggest that the condition could be a learned behaviour from authority figures, rather than a genetically-linked condition. Environmental factors – The effect of past abuse, traumas and stressful events play a significant role in the development of OCD. They are likely to accelerate its development where there are biological or genetic connections. OCD can also develop in children following streptococcal infection.    

OCD Treatment Cardiff: Signs and symptoms of OCD

The severity of your mental or behavioural rituals is the major factor in determining whether you have OCD. In the early stages, you may live inside the condition and not realise its development. For some people, it may take a partner or close relative to point out that your rituals are excessive. When OCD is suspected, it’s important to have the condition formally diagnosed by your doctor. What are some of the common signs and symptoms? Checking – Checking rituals are used to prevent harm, danger and avoid feelings of irresponsibility. It becomes more troublesome when the checking rituals cause you to miss deadlines (e.g. being late for work) and when the rituals have a fixed numerical routine that cannot be compromised e.g. you must check it five times or you have to start the ritual over again. Hand-washing – Hand-washing becomes an OCD problem when you are in possession of elaborate hand-washing routines that focus more on the comfort of the ritual than the cleanliness of your hands. Hand-washing can also be problematic when you still feel anxious about contamination even after you have thoroughly washed your hands. Cleaning – Cleaning rituals can become an OCD problem when you experience no relief from your contamination fears, despite you having spent an extensive amount of time on cleaning. Ruminating on relationships – It’s common to obsess when a relationship has broken down; it’s part of the grieving process. With non-intimate partners, obsessing over the intricacies of what was meant by someone or whether your comment was likely to offend someone can mean more than just issues of social anxiety. It could be a sign of OCD when those conversations keep replaying in your mind and you struggle to turn them off. Counting – Counting becomes problematic when the ritual of repetitive counting distracts you from being able to function in important situations. Or it could be a sign of OCD when you assign excessive superstitious value on to your behaviour e.g. will only take action with “lucky” numbers, and will avoid participation with “unlucky” numbers. Despising your looks – Disliking some physical features of your appearance is common. Extensively avoiding social situations or spending hours in front of the mirror fixating on a body part that you perceive as abnormal can be linked to body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). OCD is indicated when you place too much importance to your physical features.
OCD symmetry aligning rearranging
Meticulous aligning and rearranging is a sign of OCD
Reassurance seeking – It’s ok to have moments of doubt and seek reassurance from people that you trust. Continually asking for reassurance on the same issues and being told you are doing this by someone close to you could be a warning sign for OCD. Symmetry – Organisation issues are troublesome when they exceed perfectionism. Tidying the sock draw is occasionally helpful, but OCD can be indicated when you may not really want to do the task in the first place, but need to “order it and re-arrange it” to relieve anxiety. Fear of violence – It’s common to have fleeting thoughts about harming yourself, harming others or being harmed by others. But it could be a sign of OCD when these (sometimes intrusive) thoughts are persistent, you continually seek reassurance about these negative thoughts, or you avoid the situations that could cause this harm. Hoarding – Most people are guilty of collecting things for that “just in case I need it in the future” moment. When those collections pile up and prevent you from routine functions because they are taking over your sleeping space or the ability to use the bathroom, then it’s time to accept that you have an OCD (related) condition. Forbidden thoughts – Most people have fleeting taboo thoughts that you can dismiss easily. Struggling to reject forbidden thoughts, believing that they are part of your identity and avoiding those people who are connected with your forbidden thoughts can be a sign of OCD. You can access many more of the common signs and symptoms of OCD in this article detailing the various types of obsessive compulsive disorder.    

OCD Treatment Cardiff: Common Treatment Methods

Accepting that you have OCD is an early common obstacle because most sufferers can feel embarrassed and ashamed of the condition. This denial can cause more avoidance and negative, suppressive coping strategies. Like with so many mental health conditions, you will have done your best to prevent the development of your condition. But once the condition is in full swing, it can be very challenging to treat it without external help. Depending on the severity of your condition, your GP will offer some of the following methods to treat OCD: Medication – You may be prescribed SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressant medication from your doctor. CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a talking therapy that explores how your thoughts, beliefs and emotions are influencing your behaviour. ERP – Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is similar to systematic desensitisation where you are gradually exposed to situations whilst changing how you react to them. With ERP, you are assisted by your therapist to confront the situations that cause you anxiety. Instead of carrying out the compulsion, you are encouraged to tolerate the anxiety and resist your compulsive urge.    

OCD Treatment Cardiff: How Can Hypnotherapy Treat Your OCD?

The research for treating OCD with hypnotherapy may not be as comprehensive as treating it with CBT and medication, but there are smaller isolated studies that demonstrate its effectiveness. For example, hypnotherapy has been used when treating two OCD patients with contamination fears, with another OCD patient who had an AIDS-related contamination fear and again as an OCD dissociative tool. How can you benefit from hypnotherapy? Hypnotic states of awareness are similar to OCD states of awareness Hypnosis can be an effective tool for treating OCD because the two states of awareness are so alike. In both hypnosis and OCD, your attention is highly concentrated; your mind will “zone out” and become inwardly absorbed into the intense “reality” of what you are imagining.
Hypnotherapy OCD Treatment Cardiff
OCD and hypnosis are similar states of awareness
There is also a similarity with temporal distortion. When you are in hypnosis, it’s common to lose track of time whilst in deep visualisation. In the same way, during the performance of your OCD rituals, hours can pass you by without noticing how much time you have spent inside your ritual or what is happening in the outside world. With these common features, it’s logical to treat what can be considered as a “hypnotic” condition using a treatment mode that is so similar. You won’t be surprised to know that previous OCD clients that I have treated have been highly responsive to hypnosis. You can test your level of suggestibility here with this hypnosis test. Hypnotherapy can help with anxiety reduction Reducing your level of your anxiety is an important part of coping with OCD. Hypnotherapy has an advantage over other therapies because anxiety reduction is incorporated into the hypnotic induction. But anxiety reduction by itself is not the complete treatment for OCD; being able to confront the emotions that dominate your obsessions so that you can resist the urge of your compulsions is also a necessary part of your treatment. When you are in a relaxed hypnotic state, you will be more receptive to suggestions that will target this treatment goal. Hypnotherapy can help you interrupt the patterns from past traumas Using regression techniques selectively, hypnosis can be used to change the negative emotional learning from past traumas. Interrupting the past patterns of thoughts, emotions and behaviour that have consolidated your OCD rituals will help you to break recurrent ritualistic habits that now define your OCD. But this doesn’t mean ploughing through every year of your life as is commonly considered with age regression techniques. Only the most pertinent traumas are selected and reframed for you to benefit from this treatment technique. Hypnosis can treat the problem part of your OCD mind Obsessions and compulsions can be intensified when you have recurrent traumas. Your feared reactions then serve to reinforce the impact of these past traumas. Over time, this habitual functioning becomes automated and gets pushed down into your subconscious mind. This process can create (what can be considered as) OCD “parts” of your mind (or ego states) that replay your OCD “programme”. Traditional counselling methods attempt to work on these issues at the conscious level, but this can be a challenging process when this OCD “programme” now resides in your subconscious mind. In hypnosis, your subconscious mind is accessed. The subconscious OCD “programme” can be treated, adding insight into the sensitising emotional causes of your OCD “programme”. By treating the emotional parts of your OCD mind, you can relearn to cope with these negative emotions, to resist the urge to perform the compulsions and relearn that nothing bad happens when you don’t give in to your compulsions. Hypnotherapy can be integrated with ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) Techniques It’s a common misconception that hypnosis will be the magic wand and will simply turn off your OCD in one session. Is a hypnotherapist actively promoting this belief? If you see any hypnosis being advertised in this way, you will know not to bother giving it a second thought as quite simply, it will fail. When you enter your treatment with this expectation, not surprisingly, you will leave saying “hypnosis didn’t work for me”. ERP techniques are the effective way to treat OCD, but these techniques are not a quick fix either. ERP takes commitment and persistence to go through what can be a short-term increase in anxiety, before your condition gradually improves.
OCD Exposure and response prevention confront fears
ERP: Confront the emotions that drive your obsessions
What happens in a typical ERP treatment? Under the guidance of your ERP therapist, you learn to confront the anxiety of the obsessions whilst resisting the urge to perform your compulsions. Over time, as you resist your compulsions, the anxiety fades. You progressively learn to challenge the fear that drives your compulsion and accept that nothing catastrophic follows. In other words, rather than taking the short-term “compulsion fix” that has dominated your OCD ritual, you learn to ride out the anxiety as the structure of your OCD “programme” changes. Another misconception by the other therapies considers that hypnosis is not suitable for ERP techniques because when you are “put under”, you will not be exposed to the anxiety sufficiently to change what drives the urge to perform the compulsion. This depends on how hypnosis is being used. There is some previous research with a war veteran that demonstrates how hypnosis can be integrated with ERP techniques successfully. Hypnotherapy offers a multitude of therapeutic interventions to treat OCD. It is only limited by the skill of the hypnotherapist employing these techniques. Other therapists may not be able to appreciate this enough if they don’t have the experience of using hypnosis. Hypnotherapy can thus be mistakenly classified as a single-approach modality in which you are “made” to change in one session or it doesn’t work. There are many reasons why other therapies outside of hypnotherapy would fail to treat OCD too, particularly if you only had one treatment session. Hypnotherapy can treat the emotions that are manipulating your feared reality Contained within your deceptive OCD programme of “fictional outcomes” is a mix of unwanted (and sometimes intrusive) thoughts, images, sensations, urges, emotions and behaviour. The biggest driver that formulates your OCD “programme” and convinces you that your OCD story is real are the emotions and feelings of guilt, shame, disgust, blame, fear, responsibility etc. Without these strong emotions and feelings underpinning your condition, you would be able to dismiss the thoughts and triggers as nonsense. Instead, you fear them, avoid them, seek reassurance from them and have the strong urge to immediately perform the compulsions as safety behaviour. Hypnotherapy can help you access, welcome and embrace the emotions and feelings that overwhelm your OCD programme. As part of your integrated ERP hypnotherapy treatment, you can learn to tolerate these negative emotions and feelings that are out of control. This process of emotional desensitisation will give you the confidence to believe that the intrusive thoughts are irrational, overestimated and undeserving of those needless and time-consuming compulsive rituals. Hypnotherapy can convince you that you are strong enough to deal with the deceit behind the OCD programme, to confront the painful emotions and feelings until they pass. With hypnotherapy, what awaits you is emotional freedom from your OCD programme.    

OCD Treatment Cardiff: For more information on how hypnotherapy can treat your OCD contact Richard J D’Souza Hypnotherapy Cardiff

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