Diary of a Hypnotherapist, Episode 25 | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist

Hi there, and welcome to the latest edition of Diary of a Hypnotherapist, and I think this is number 23, 24, something like that. It's a habit I've been building to focus on what went wrong and what went well last week, to allow better or different decisions to be made next week. It's a practice that I recommend to a lot of my clients to do, and as a therapist, It's really important to me that I practice what I preach. So, in this week gone by, I've had quite a few new clients starting with me, and some really interesting ones as well. One of them was a lady who had experienced heartbreak. Her partner had disappeared and very quickly established a relationship with someone else. And what was really difficult is she still had access to seeing this person on a regular basis. So it was almost like that wound couldn't heal because it kept getting picked off. And whilst this doesn't always have a direct relationship to anxiety, the element where anxiety does creep in is when you're established in a relationship, you start to think about the future. So when the relationship ends, all of those future plans just go poof, and that just leaves And a state of anxiety is about what is my future now, the unknown, and the unknown is where anxiety absolutely thrives. So we started doing some work on that, both to help plan for the future that is now going to be different, and whilst also dealing with the emotional heartbreak and grief of the loss. Also had another client, a gentleman this time, who was looking to change his relationship with food. Yes, he wanted to lose a couple of stone, but the actual figure on the scales wasn't the primary thing, it was recognizing that food, sweet food especially, was his go-to when the stress was high, and he worked in a very stressful environment. And there was also someone who came to me that had a particular habit that he'd developed of chewing his tongue and swallowing regularly, following a cancer operation that had removed part of his tongue. There clearly was a physical element, but there was also a very big emotional element attached to it as well. So again, not directly related to anxiety, but the power of hypnotherapy is so incredible, and so when I can help these people, it's my absolute privilege to be able to do so. And now, as I record this on a Friday, I'm actually buzzing because I've just finished doing a session where I used one of my favourite techniques with someone, which is called compartmentalization. Again, another gentleman, very, very successful in his business career, but like many of us who run our own businesses and otherwise, we tend to take our work home, which then starts to jeopardize the home environment, can influence the quality of relationships, and many things beyond. And he was very aware that he'd taken his kids to school, and in the 25 minutes, precious time when you've got the kids alone, he'd been thinking about work and hadn't actually said a word to them. So, compartmentalization, if I can even say it properly, is a lovely exercise that uses visualization because the subconscious mind loves thinking in pictures. And we set up a mental image of an old-fashioned Victorian train, where there's compartments that are separated by buffers, and you have the work compartment, you have the dad compartment, in his case, the partner compartment, the play compartment. We can have a number of different carriages in our trains, and it's a technique that really helps the mind to go, when I'm in my work carriage, be in work, because worrying about other things means that I'm not working effectively, not being the best that I can. But then when you finish work and you go into the dad carriage, be dad. Don't bring the work problems in there because then I won't be the best dad I can be. It's a very simple exercise, but my goodness, it is so powerful. And it really builds on an innate neurological ability, or should we say tendency, to create habits. When we're in this mode, this is what we do. So, it builds on those neural networks to say, when I'm being in the dad carriage, be a dad. Don't try and be the entrepreneur. Don't try and be the son. Be the dad, because you can be those other things when you're in those carriages. So, he's left with an exercise to put this in place over the coming weeks. It won't be perfect, but he's really optimistic and went away thinking, right, I'm gonna not take my phone into the bedroom, because bedroom is like the sleep carriage and my phone is related to work. so it doesn't belong in there. And already thinking through things that he's going to change that will really help build on this neurological tendency anyway. So, it's been a great week. Really looking forward to those new clients, to taking them forward in the weeks to come. And even more important, it's now the weekend. So, I will finish this by saying thank you very much for listening to me. I hope by sharing some of this information and what I hypnotherapy can do to help people may widen your awareness that it's not just smoking cessation, even though that works really well. There's lots that can be done, and if you think hypnotherapy may help you change something about your life that's not working for you, give me a call. We'll have a really quick informal chat where I can tell you a little bit more, and we'll just go from there. But in the meantime, I wish you a wonderful weekend ahead. Bye-bye for now.