This content was created by Caroline Cavanagh. This content was uploaded by Caroline Cavanagh. This is a YouTube episode titled "Diary of a Hypnotherapist, Episode 27 | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist" (posted 2026-04-17). The excerpt is a first-person, diary-style monologue by hypnotherapist Caroline Cavanagh describing a shortened work week, examples from recent client sessions (a client in Sydney, a preadolescent girl, and an older woman with back pain), and a practical technique—shifting focus from negatives to positives—to reduce anxiety and improve wellbeing. She also references her YouTube channel, offers tips and shorts, and invites viewers to subscribe.
Chapters
Hi and welcome to this week's edition of Diary of a Hypnotherapist. And this has been a slightly shorter week for me this week because I had a couple of days off. But as always in my work, quite varied in what I did. I picked up with a client that I haven't worked with with a few months. He's based out in Australia, which makes it fun with the time difference. But it's one of the things that I love about, or very positive, should I say, that came out of COVID Because before COVID hit us, I had a perception that you couldn't do hypnotherapy ethically remotely. And when COVID hit, if I didn't work remotely, then one, I'd be breaking the law, but two, I wouldn't earn anything. And wow, there was a need for it at that time. So I was forced into working with people over a screen. And whilst I confess I much rather prefer working with people in person, the important thing is the impact of my work made no difference. It's just as effective whether someone is other side of the screen or other side of my room. And so it means now that I do have clients all over the world. And this particular individual is based in Sydney. Hadn't worked with me for a little while, but then something came up and he just picked up the phone and said, Caroline, can I have a session? Because I know chatting through this with you will help me sort it out much more quickly than if I try and do it for myself. And that's not uncommon now with the amount of people that I've worked with, and something I really value in that, yes, they have a great toolset from the series of sessions that we would have had, But even so, something can come in and knock your feet from underneath you. And by reaching out and talking things through, perhaps doing some work under hypnosis, then it really expedites getting the solution much more quickly. The other thing that happened this week, and actually today, is I worked with several people back to back where I almost found myself repeating exactly the same things. The first one was a young lady, preadolescent, still quite— still quite young, and someone that spent 7 days with mum and then 7 days with dad. But mum has got someone else in her life, and this young lady was finding that really, really difficult to get her head around, and thinking that mum should just be for her because she only got mum half of the time anyway, and I'm not going to share even more. And that was causing her an awful lot of stress and reciprocally mum too. And the second client was someone different end of the age scale, shall we say, but equally was struggling with pain. And with both of them, the common factor was what they were seeing, what they were giving their focus to. Focusing on the negatives. I don't get all the time with my mum. There's things I can't do now because of my pain. And the reality is, for all of us, what we focus on becomes our reality. That could be nothing more than a thought, but thoughts create feelings. And so when we focus on our thoughts, sitting here in this room, A woman broke out down into tears because of things that she couldn't do because of her back pain. A young girl worrying about not being able to sleep because there was another person in the house that was getting mum's attention and she wasn't. But when you change the focus, change the thought, the feelings also change. And this is a very powerful technique that may seem so simplistic, and in many ways It is. And there's a lovely exercise that I've done when in the past I've been into schools and run assemblies and say to all the kids, right, count to 5, look at all the green things in the room, how many can you see? And they all start shouting out numbers about how many green things they can see. And then I say, okay, but how many blue things are there? And there's always that one kid that goes, oh, but Miss, you didn't tell us to look for blue things. But then you see the pennies start to drop. The blue things were there all the time. And this is true. When we look for negatives, we see the negatives because they're there, and by seeing the negatives, you feel more negative. That creates anxiety, frustration, lots of feelings that are not congruent with happiness. However, good things are there too. So when you change the focus and start looking for the good things, you start to have more positive thoughts. The positive thoughts lead to positive feelings. So with the young lady, when we started to look, well, what's the positives? Well, Mum's more happy and this new bloke has got some kids, so I've now got some kids to play with too. And because she started thinking about those positives, she started feeling so much happier too, and this man very much less of a threat. And with the lady with her back pain, focusing on what she can do Rather than what she couldn't do. She could still do an awful lot of things despite her back pain. So rather than focusing on what she couldn't do, it completely changed her emotions too. So this is true for most of us, and I practice that sometimes as well when my head goes down that rabbit hole of things that aren't working out or aren't as I want them to be. Change the view, Change the focus, start looking at what is good, and those feelings change too. So I hope that's a little technique that you may be able to take on board and apply to some of the things that you may be focusing on—the lacks, the negatives, the it's not working—and seek the positive out of it and just see how you feel or how that changes your feeling. So there's a lot of tips like this that are also included on my YouTube channel. So if you're watching this, you're probably on the YouTube channel anyway, so do take a look at the Shorts. Lots of tips go up there regularly, and if you just click on that subscribe button, it will make sure that you don't miss any of them. And I will look forward to sharing more tips and more background about what a hypnotherapist actually does, how I can help people change their anxiety and live a more productive and happy life, something that's good for all of us. And I'll leave that with you for now and look forward to chatting to you again next week. Bye-bye for now.
