Boost Your Well-being and Reduce Negative Thoughts and Feelings
Anxiety: Being Aware And Acceptance of Anxiety
Anxiety: Being Aware And Acceptance of Anxiety
This past weekend we took a family trip to the zoo, our first visit there for quite some time. One thing I love about being around animals, whether in the zoo or in nature, is how watching them has a way of taking you mentally away from all the busyness that can otherwise occupy your mind. Away from screens, household chores, things to do for work and so forth, you can get some positive mental clearness and space.
Listening to the sounds of the animals, watching them move and interact, and noticing the vast array of colours and sounds is a really beneficial mindful experience. On top of that, spending quality time with the kids is always guaranteed to bring amusement and fun. There were flamingos, tigers, camels, penguins, sea lions and a vast array of other animal and birds on display and it was a really great day out.
Now, of course, it’s possible to find some ‘escape’ in many other situations and places, and I’ve written before about the many benefits of time in nature and natural settings for supporting your mental health. And, of course, you can practice mindfulness type approaches from the comfort of your own home too. Both mindfulness and hypnosis have been shown to be able to help you to reduce anxiety and stress, and combining the two together can also bring you fantastic results for anxiety reduction.
In many cases of anxiety reduction, you are learning how to interrupt, reduce and deal effectively with the anxious thoughts and feelings that had been causing you so much despair and discomfort. Learning how to regulate emotions effetively means that you aren’t overwhelmed by anxiety and worry. Finding effective ways to control your thinking means you can disengage from anxious thoughts, dispute them, block them or just find yourself thinking more along the kind of lines you would wish to. As you learn how to direct, control and calm your thoughts, feelings and behaviours, you will find yourself feeling better and staying that way.
All too often, because of the uncomfortable anxious thoughts and feelings, it can become a battle inside your own head and body. You don’t want the anxiety and so you engage in it and try and fight it and suppress it. That inner battle, fight, frustration and stress can inadvertently add to the anxiety and leave you feeling worse and feeling like you’ll never be able to find a way to feel better. You try to suppress your anxiety and you find yourself feeling even worse. This is where approaches, such as mindfulness hypnosis, can really help. By accepting the thoughts and feelings, you weaken them and they pass quicker. You learn how to notice them, observe them, and have the ability to calmly and confidently carry on with things. You become an expert at successful emotional regulation and being at peace inside of your own head.
Developing a Positive Mindset: Turning Negative Thoughts To Positive
Developing a Positive Mindset: Turning Negative Thoughts To Positive
Could you do with developing a more positive mindset? Thinking negatively can lead to you feeling low, down or anxious. The more those thoughts fill your mind, and the more time, energy and focus you give them, the worse you can end up feeling.
What’s more, the more low or anxious you feel, the more of those thoughts there tend to be, leading to a cycle of not feeling particularly great. You may also find yourself thinking about all the things that could go wrong and then talking yourself out of taking action on the things you want to do.
Your habitual thinking patterns develop over time and from experience. The more negatively you think, the more low, down, stressed and anxious you feel, and the more it colours and feeds into your attitude, expectations and how you typically think, feel, act and react.
That’s not to say that you should switch to always thinking positively and being uplifted into every moment. That could be equally exhausting and limiting. And there are times when it is reasonable and appropriate to feel a bit low or negative about some specific thing you are experiencing.
Yet the more you can undermine and replace habitual, unnecessary, casual negative thoughts, the more positive your mental attitude and mood will be, and you feel better in yourself. You can start to feel more positive about life, yourself and the future, and to feel self-assured enough to believe in yourself and your abilities, and to take action on your goals.
Reducing Running Anxiety To Help Your Running Performance
Reducing Running Anxiety To Help Your Running Performance
Running training and racing can be filled with a sense of excitement and positivity. If you’ve been training for a key race that you really want to take part in, then you can geel upbeat, enthused, excited and filled with motivation and positive anticipation for it.
Yet sometimes, anxiety can rear it’s head around your running. Maybe you find yourself feeling uncomfortably nervous, tense and edgy about certain parts of your running performance. It may be those long training runs that make you feel anxious, you might have negative thoughts about training with others, feel tense about the pressures of speedwork or find that your running anxiety impairs your performance when you run or race.
Certainly race day tends to bring at least some level of nervousness, excitement and anticipation as you get up and get ready and onto the start line. But too much anxiety about the race can mean you don’t feel at your best, that you feel tense and tired, and your mind can fill with negative thoughts and doubt about your running and your ability to perform as well as you know you can.
Any over-arousal before your train or race is going to burn up your energy, tense up your muscles, and mean you may not achieve your running goals or perform how you want to. Some runners I’ve worked with find themselves even feeling anxious (about something they chose to do and want to do!) a few days before. It can affect sleep and fuelling. It can lead to countless trips to the toilet, it can make you irritable and uncertain, and it can lead to that queasy, sick feeling in your stomach. On top of that, anxiety can leave you wondering if you are able to run well, whether things are likely to go wrong, how you’ll cope if you don’t achieve your goal and countless other worst case scenarios and self doubts inside your mind.
The Hypnotic Mindset and Hypnosis
The Hypnotic Mindset and Hypnosis
The other day, during a hypnotherapy consultation at my office here in Ely, a client asked about hypnosis and mentioned how they had read online about the subconscious mind and so on. Sadly, the way that hypnosis is talked about and portrayed in many quarters (including by some hypnotherapists) with a sense of mind control, mysticism, magic and mystery, means that it is no wonder that people are uncertain about what hypnosis is and what it entails.
Whilst we often joke about it, many people do expect me to pull out a swinging watch or to zap them somehow, in a way that leads to magical improvement (and where they will have no idea how it happened). There are many hypnotherapists and others who continue to advocate that hypnosis is a passive process for a client and that some form of unseen, unknown change occurs at the unconscious level. Even more sadly, these myths and misconceptions (and downright inaccuracies) put many people off seeking a form of therapy that could really help them (and that has scientific research and evidence to support its application).
Far from being a therapy where you are controlled by a hypnotist and unaware of what is going on, hypnosis allows you to take control over the kind of things going on inside your mind. Rather than being passive, you get to be active and engaged in your own progress and improvement, which stands you in good stead for the future because you know how to orchestrate your thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions. Hypnosis is a process that you actively participate in rather than being a passive that you respond mechanically to resulting in hypnosis.
Whilst we do things non-conconsciously and sometimes habitually and seemingly automatically, our minds work on pattern and repetition. In most cases, you will find yourselves thinking, feeling and doing things in a way that you did in a previous, similar situation or experience. By working out how your mind is doing this pattern, and how it continues to do it, you can interrupt that pattern and create a new way of thinking, feeling and doing things that serves you better in that situation. You get to take control and choose what goes on inside your own mind (how awesome is that!).
Successful hypnosis involves you participating in the process of your own improvement. You adopt a positive mindset, build upon your motivation to change, grow your confidence in their ability to make changes, and create optimistic about the process, expecting to experience the things you are seeking from the hypnotherapy. Whatever your issue or starting point, you become better and better at orchestrating your mindset, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions.
Running Psychology: Increase Running Performance By Picking The Pink
Running Psychology: Increase Running Performance By Picking The Pink
As my own running training ramps up a bit, I’ve been writing much more about running psychology and how you can improve your running performance. Drawing upon successful races and training runs can help you to increase confidence and belief in your own running ability so that you can overcome past poor performances and achieve your future running goals.
If you want to run to the best of your ability and potential, then applying elements of running psychology will certainly help you. You can take control over your self-talk, confidence, self-belief, imagination, motivation and many other aspects of your thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions. You can harness and direct your mindset towards running how you want to.
Today I’m talking about some research that goes to demonstrate just how important your psychology is towards your performance when running.
It’s incredible how much what goes on in your head can impact upon your running performance. That little voice in your head can help you push on and improve, or can niggle away and undermine you. What you imagine before and during a run can influence your motivation, confidence and arousal levels. Your confidence and belief in your running ability has a huge bearing on how well you run. And then there are all the other factors that can get in your head, from tiredness, hills, other people and more. I’ve known runners who smash it in training, only to be overwhelmed with anxiety and self-doubt at the starting line of a race. I’ve known runners who find that the negative thoughts sabotage what they are doing. And there are runners who are able to consistently perform, run well and stay up beat due to what goes on inside their heads, and who may even perform above expectations as a result.
And your mind is even more amazing than that. If you perceive something to be beneficial then it can improve your running performance, simply due to your expectation of a positive outcome (which is perhaps why so many runners and sports people have certain consistent rituals or habits that they carry out because they perceive them to be beneficial).
Here is more evidence of how your mind impacts upon your running performance…
Reducing Anxiety and Take Control Over Your Thoughts and Feelings
Reducing Anxiety and Take Control Over Your Thoughts and Feelings
There’s no doubt that the pandemic has had a massive impact upon many people’s mental health and well-being. There has been stress, worry and anxiety through the many stages of restrictions, lockdowns and opening up that have taken place over the months.
You can find many articles about the mental health impact of the pandemic on this website, and I’ve written about anxiety, fear, sleep problems and alcohol consumption, among other things. Covid 19 related anxiety, stress and worry has become a serious psychological issue.
If your mental health has been impacted upon by the pandemic then you may well be experiencing elevated levels of anxiety, stress or health anxiety. And I’ve certainly been helping people who are finding the removal of restrictions and the opening up of more aspects of our ‘normal’ lives to be causing problematic anxiety. Covid 19 anxiety syndrome can lead to avoidance, checking and heightened levels of worry and distress.
Covid 19 anxiety syndrome can involve issues such as avoiding public places (such a shops) due to the fear of contracting coronavirus, checking yourself (and others) for symptoms of Covid-19, becoming absorbed in news about the virus at the cost of getting on with other things, and imagining what could happen to family members if they contracted coronavirus (Nikčević and Spada, 2020). In essence, this anxiety syndrome, whilst pertaining specifically to Covid-19, involves the usual elements of anxiety, with avoidance, excessive worry, a heightened awareness of potential threat and all the accompanying unwanted thoughts and feelings.
Many of these anxiety issues may well continue to affect you even after the pandemic has passed, as anxiety certainly has a tendency to filter and generalise onto other aspects of what you think, feel and do. The good news, however, is that it is definitely possible to reduce your anxiety, interrupt unwanted thought processes and feelings, and to take back control over your thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions in ways that mean that you feel calm, confident and in control.
Runners Therapy in Ely And Newmarket: Using Your Mind To Boost Your Confidence and Self-Esteem
Runners’ Therapy in Ely And Newmarket: Using Your Mind To Boost Your Confidence and Self-Esteem
It’s been twenty or so years since I took up running properly. Before that I’d done a bit of jogging and running but in a much more haphazard and inconsistent way. Over the last two decade, except for time out with injuries, I’ve pretty much kept on donning my trainers and heading out of the door.
To my mind, running reflects so many aspects of life. There are the good times, and the not so good: the smooth times when you feel on top of the world, and those where you have to draw upon every ounce of persistence and determination to overcome challenges. Both inside and outside of running, you can have all sorts of inner dialogue, thoughts, feelings, expectations and beliefs.
When I suffered with anxiety, low confidence and low self-esteem, running was my crutch for everything. I would run after a good day and also to try and cope and deal with the less good days. I would run to try and feel better in myself, often succeeding for a while, yet the anxiety and mental health challenges in the rest of my life remained.
If I missed a run I would feel irritable, tense, frustrated and down. I could even go so far to say that in those days when my mental health struggles were the strongest, I felt like I absolutely needed to run and I had to run just to keep afloat in my life. Unless you’ve struggled with your mental health and experienced the highs that running can bring, you may struggle to understand the intensity of feeling and the need and desperation that comes from finding a way to demonstrate your own worth to yourself (and others), to find relief from the suffering and the need to run in order to cope.
There are many, many mental health benefits that come from exercise, yet running doesn’t always allow for full mental health recovery and relief, and those same old unwanted thoughts and feelings can continue to hold you back in other aspects of your life.
Mental Health Awareness Week – Mental Health and Nature
Mental Health Awareness Week – Mental Health and Nature
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week and the focus is all about noticing nature and making a habit of connecting to nature every day. Of course, every day of every year should be about helping and supporting everyone to promote their good mental health and well-being (along with their good physical health too), yet an awareness week helps to remind us all of the importance of self-care and looking after ourselves better.
Spending time in nature has a lot of research to support its benefits for your mental health. It can help you to reduce your anxiety and stress levels, and can help boost your mental health and well-being. I certainly find that running and walking in nature helps me to feel calmer, more positive and boosts my own sense of well-being (and exercise, such as walking or running, helps with mental health too).
In my opinion, few things beat finding a nice quiet place to enjoy and explore nature on a nice day. Getting away from the usual daily load at home and work, and switching off from screens, means you can just focus on the sights, smells and sounds of what is going on around you.
Hypnosis Downloads – New Audios Now Available!
Hypnosis Downloads – New Audios Now Available!
After quite some wait, due to the pandemic, I was really pleased to finally be able to get back into the recording studio and create some brand new hypnosis downloads for you.
There are several new titles now available that cover help to reduce anxiety, increasing your confidence, gaining a more positive mindset and outlook, and reducing unwanted thoughts and feelings. I’m really happy to be able to share them and I can’t wait to hear your feedback too!
