Do you spend too much time criticising yourself and putting yourself down?
If you struggle with low self esteem and low confidence it may feel all too natural to accept criticism from yourself and others and to focus on perceived flaws in what you are capable of.
So now is the time to dilute this flow and start to focus on your strengths.
With the New Year approaching, are you now planning to quit smoking? Maybe stopping smoking will be your New Year Resolution or maybe you’ve just decided that you no longer want to be a slave to the cigarettes and the toil they reap on your health.
If you want to successfully stop smoking for good then you can start to stack the odds in your favour even before you quit smoking. Your smoking feeds off your current habitual behaviours and associations around smoking as well as the impact of the nicotine and all the rest of the chemicals on your body.
Just trying to sort out your smoking habit alone can lead to increased stress and irritability and so you eat more or go back to smoking to cope. And just swapping cigarettes for another nicotine form doesn’t address the habitual relationship you have with smoking. As one stop smoking client told me yesterday: even with nicotine patches he still felt the need to hold a cigarette and smoke and he ended up feeling dizzy and sick from increasing his nicotine intake.
Christmas can be one of the most enjoyable times of the year….and also one of the most stressful.
Against the ticking clock as the day approaches there are presents to find, buy and wrap. There’s the food to organise and prepare and at the same time you may be busy clearing that workload, managing the kids or just keeping on top of the other day to day things to get done. Alongside this you may have social activities and many other friends and relatives visiting and making demands upon your time and energy. So much to do! So much stress!
It’s no wonder that with all these pressures sometimes we can all feel the stress, worry and strain of Christmas.
So here are 5 ways to make sure you have a truly enjoyable and relaxing Christmas this year.
I’m very pleased to be able to reveal that I’ve won an award!
Dan Regan Hypnotherapy has won the award for Hypnotherapy Business Of The Year 2014.
The award was presented by the Hypnotherapy Business School and I’m very honoured to receive this in recognition of my work during 2014 striving to deliver an excellent service to my clients.
People will try all sorts of things to try and get to, and stay, asleep. I’ve met people who drink, smoke, eat, watch TV, listen to the radio, look on their phone and those who just lie there getting more and more frustrated about still being awake.
And without a good night’s sleep, everything gets much harder – we have less energy and feel less confident, our stress levels go up and we may eat to try and get hold of that missing energy and vitality.
So if you struggle to sleep then these 5 simple steps will set you up for starting to sleep better and better:
When we feel anxious, we go ‘inside our heads’ – we become more and more aware of what we are thinking, feeling and experiencing, and less engaged in everything else.
Everything else becomes less noticeable and relevant as those anxious thoughts and feelings become stronger and take more control. You may be thinking about what you are saying, how you are coming across, how you look, what others are thinking and whether anyone else is noticing all your anxiety. You may feel your heart pounding, your body shaking and your mind racing.
To take back control you need to shift your attention and start to take notice of those things going on outside yourself.
Anxiety makes you focus on all the things you don’t want to happen – your mind runs away with all those worries about the ‘what ifs’. You then feel more anxiety and think even more about all those things that could go wrong for you:
What if I make an idiot of myself?
What if they don’t like me?
What if I make a mistake?
What if I have a panic attack, etc?
To beat the anxiety you need to start focusing on what you do want – how do you want to feel in that situation? Your brain is like a sat-nav – you need to tell it where you want to go.
Over the last year I have been working with an increasing number of adults who struggle with food phobia or selective eating problems.
Whilst they do eat certain familiar foods, people with a food phobia tend to struggle with any new foods – they just physically cannot take a mouthful and swallow it. Depending on how long it has been going on, and the range of foods they can eat, this can impact on health – as well as causing social problems about eating around others.
If you struggle with something similar then it may well have been going on so long that it’s just become what you do around food. You’ll have a mental list of foods that are ok for you to calmly eat, and you will have developed practices to avoid getting into embarassing and anxious situations around food (e.g. making up excuses to avoid social eating, cooking your own meals).
Are you worrying about things that may never happen? All those scenarios in your over-active mind can leave you in a heap of anxiety, worry and exhaustion.
So is it time to give your mind a break and let all that worry drift away?
Here’s how you can let all that worry and anxiety float away to leave you feeling calmer and more in control:
Is your mind always on the go? Do you find it impossible to switch off and just unwind?
It’s very common for people to tell me they can’t switch off their minds – they may distract themselves and stay busy but as soon as they pause (e.g. in the car or when trying to sleep at night), their mind goes into overdrive.
Of course, we are always thinking, so it’s about learning to feel calmer and take control over those thoughts that gives us that freedom.
So here is a quick way to start getting freedom from thoughts:
Subscribe to Dan’s Digest filled with tips, strategies and techniques and get instant access to your free rapid relaxation hypnosis audio track.
Enjoy feeling and being more mentally calm and physically relaxed right now:
