Hypnotherapy is becoming more and more well-known and is utilised to assist with many different concerns in everyday life, and rightly so. From quitting smoking, weight loss, anxiety, habits or even pain management. Hypnotherapy is a very effective tool in changing thoughts, habits and beliefs.

Hypnotherapy is when a hypnotherapist guides a client into a deep state of relaxation, a state between waking consciousness and sleep, similar to when we are daydreaming. Once in this state, your subconscious mind becomes very suggestible to change and the hypnotherapist can work with you to make changes to your thoughts, habits and behaviors. All hypnosis is self hypnosis, where the hypnotherapist will guide you to make the changes that you need. Therefore you cannot be made to do something you do not want to do, you cannot be made to cluck like a chicken, unless you would like to!

 If we look at the mind (in regards to hypnotherapy), in an easy to understand manner, we can define the mind as the 'Conscious Mind' and the 'Subconscious Mind'.

The conscious mind is where we make all of our logical and analytical decisions, the thoughts we consciously make. The conscious mind is very cognitive and is always thinking and analysing information, and will discard any information it does not want to keep. This information is then stored in the subconscious mind. Interestingly, the conscious mind is only around 10% of our mind, and the remaining 90% of our mind is our subconscious mind.  

The subconscious mind is our storage system and simply accepts information as facts from the conscious mind, without trying to analyse or interpret this information. This is how we can store incorrect, or unhelpful information. The subconscious mind does not decipher between what is real, and what is not. This information creates our beliefs, and forms all of our habits. 

As humans, we are all programmable. Everything we do, everything we know we have learnt. We learn to talk, walk, interact with others, to read, maths, drive a car, the list goes on. Over time, these are stored as a program, and we then automatically run these programs from our subconscious. Have you ever driven somewhere and not remembered the drive? Once you have learnt to drive a car, you do not need to consciously think to take your foot off the accelerator and on to the brake, your subconscious just knows what you are doing.

The problem is, if we learn a program, that is no longer working for us, our subconscious continues with this automatically. Examples:

• You have a bad day, you feel overwhelmed or emotional. You eat something, it takes your mind off that feeling, giving you something to focus on that you enjoy. This continues the next time you need comfort, again and again. Your subconscious stores this as your default. Every time you need comfort, you turn to food, often before you even realise.  Even when you promise yourself you won’t next time, the subconscious just runs this program automatically.
• Portion Control- you grow up in a time when your parents are constantly telling you to eat everything on your plate. Their background was food scarcity, so they are coming from a good place when they enforce this rule. It is also worth noting, they were likely asking you to eat your balanced meals and to eat all of your vegetables.

 Fast forward, you move out of home. You have access to takeaway food (which is developed to make you want more) and portion sizes have significantly increased. You are conditioned to eat everything on your plate- so even though the food isn’t making you feel good, and the portions are far too big, you ‘have’ to eat everything on your plate. You will notice that you will do this without even realising, as if you are on autopilot. 

• Incorrect nutrition knowledge and dieting- your Aunty tells you the only way to lose weight is to cut out carbs. You try this diet, lose weight fast (which is water weight FYI) so this enforces your belief! Amazing! 

You then cannot stick to the diet, fall off the bandwagon and gain the weight back and more. The diet has in fact failed, however your belief is that this is the only way to lose weight, which leaves you in this yoyo cycle.