Downloads Unwrapped – January 2012

Your life story matters

We all have a sense of narrative – a plot and characters. Some of these characters are ‘evil’, some are ‘good’, some are ‘heroic’. We can see patterns in our own lives, triumphs perhaps, and maybe the odd disaster or two. And how do you place yourself in your own life story? Hero or heroine? Victim? Villain, even? Or just a disinterested observer of life? I once asked a client to write down the story of her life as a story. She literally began with: “Once upon a time…” and then went on to describe all the ins and out of what had happened to her and what she had made happen throughout the years. I noticed that she herself featured in this story mainly as the ‘victim’ character. I asked her to write the same story out again, but this time from the point of view that she was the ‘heroine’. This exercise had an amazing effect on her.

She started to see herself and her life in a new, more positive light. She began to appreciate that there were times she had shown resilience, determination and courage, qualities she’d never seen in herself before. We are all surrounded by stories, on the news, in the gossip we hear, even TV plot lines. But the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves may be the most important of all. With this in mind, we’ve produced Your life story which should help you not only to see the narrative of your own life and the patterns of your choices and behaviour more clearly, but also to start to write a whole new plot if you choose.

Prime your mind to supercharge the placebo response

Placebo is immensely powerful. The key factor in whether, for example, an antidepressant works for someone (or not) seems to be whether they expect it to work (or not).⁽¹⁾ A placebo response is the expectation of future improvement or wellness. A placebo pill is generally an inert substance such as a sugar pill presented as an active medication so that the person taking it believes it to be a real medication and therefore expects it to work.

When someone gets better after taking a placebo, it doesn’t mean that their ailment was ‘all in the mind’. Expectations and mental and emotional processes do play an important rule in modulating things like the immune system and the pain response.⁽²⁾ However, it used to be thought that you had to believe that your medication was real in order for the placebo to get your psychological and or physiological healing systems into gear. That seemed logical. Only it isn’t true. Amazingly, it’s been found that knowing that what you are receiving is a placebo doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work for you.⁽³⁾ The new Placebo primer download can help real medication work even better and be used to prime yourself to feel a certain way regardless of whether you are on medication or not. For example, if you want to be relaxed and comfortable at tonight’s social engagement then setting your mind to expect that is, in a way, using the placebo response. We are going to love getting the feedback for this session.

Kids who gain confidence gain all kinds of other benefits

Being an under confident child can prevent learning from being as quick or thorough as it could be. This is because anxiety and worry can crowd out reasoned thought and the acquisition of new information and skills. Add in the emotional fallout of low confidence – the way it prevents the child from feeling able to enjoy times with other children, the way it prevents children developing healthy self esteem, so making them feel not as good as others, or not able to achieve or expect the best for themselves in life – and you have a pretty sad situation. Children learn through story telling (as do adults, of course) and story telling around the camp fire is perhaps the oldest form of ‘psychotherapy’ there is. Stories are naturally hypnotic and can lay down healthy templates for the child’s development and wellbeing even when times get tough. The new Confidence for children is designed to reassure and relax but also to inspire and enable a child to increase their sense of self confidence, not just now but throughout their future life as well.

Notes

(1) See: The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch PhD
(2) See: Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis by Ernest L. Rossi
(3) See ‘Placebos work even if you know they’re fake: But how?’

In uncertain times it’s pretty forgivable to find comfort in any ritual, any habit, you can. But it’s sadly true that many of the ways we use to comfort ourselves can, in fact, end up damaging us. If we need a lot of comfort (which can happen) eating for that comfort can be highly detrimental to health.

And the more we eat for comfort, the more comforting we may feel we need. Because we are eating so much and putting on weight. And then we have ourselves a perfect vicious circle.

One part of the problem is that ‘comfort foods’ tend to be fattening foods. They tend to give us a quick hit of blood sugar by releasing insulin into the blood stream. Insulin is the hormone that helps us store fat on the body. And ‘comfort eating’ can soon turn into ‘binge eating’ – home alone, in front of the TV, and hey presto, we’re undermining our health and putting on fat like there’s no tomorrow.

Our Stop comfort eating download has been a favourite on hypnosisdownloads.com for a while and we’ve had great feedback for it, and now we’ve put some fresh ideas into it and made it even better. Comfort eating is such a trap. And it’s such a relief when it stops.

All my best

Mark

Self confidence and a healthy level of self esteem are vital for children, enabling them to feel they can explore their world by learning, without having to worry constantly about how they compare with other children or how they might ‘fail’. Lots of situations can knock a child’s confidence, from being bullied to going to a new school or moving area, or going through a family break up. Early school years can be challenging and attitudes such as pessimism, defeatism or low self-worth can all too easily be ‘caught’ from others.

The new hypnosis session for children uses hypnotic story telling (the ideal way for a child to learn), to enable children to absorb attitudes of resilience and habits of self confidence that can not only help them as children but also throughout life. To be able to trust your own opinions and feel you are okay in having them, to feel able to focus your attention positively on work and play and not be overly swayed by ‘group think’ or be too prey to worrying about what others think of you – these facets of living are important to all of us. And a great time to develop them is when you’re young.

We’re really excited about the new Confidence for children now available at hypnosisdownloads.com

All my best

Mark

We all build up a narrative for ourselves, weaving it out of selected instances that stand out to us from our past, or in response to ‘narrative feeds’ from others. Sometimes we feel we are the hero or heroine of our narrative, sometimes the victim, and sometimes even the villain of the piece. Much of this narrative may be unconscious. But we all have a sense of the coherence of our lives and the narratives we weave about ourselves and others are a primary source of identity. As such, they have the power to shape (and reshape) our sense of self.

We are all storytellers, even if we just tell stories to ourselves about the roles we have played (or are playing or will play) in our own and other people’s lives. Some stories damage us (such as the narrative that goes “I have always been unlovable/unlucky/dysfunctional”) and some have the power to ennoble us and help us be resilient ( such as “I have always found a way to make things work – I never give up!”).

When we become fully our own ‘authors’ rather than allowing ourselves to be ‘authored’ or ‘scripted’ by others then we start to truly become individual. We start to live more comfortably in our own skin, to feel we are living through our own eyes and not trying to be some character someone else has invented.

The new Your life story download will help people become more flexible around who they believe they ‘are’ in relation to what they have done or what has happened to them. If we condemn ourselves to some negative or minor character role in life then we miss out on giving ourselves the best of all chances.

All my best

Mark

Placebo is incredibly powerful – because expectation is incredibly powerful.

A placebo is an inert (that is, inactive) substance or ritual that we believe will cure us. It’s the belief that forms the expectation of future wellness that then produces that wellness. People have been relieved of great physical pain by taking placebo, and placebos are as effective as antidepressants in lifting symptoms of depression. It’s the expectation that is key.

But here’s a thing. It was long believed that for placebos to work the person taking them had to believe they were real drugs. But it’s now been established that we can know quite well that a placebo is just a placebo but it can still work for us. This is astonishing. For example, in one study people were given pills that were clearly labelled as ‘inert substances/placebos’ for irritable bowel syndrome and still showed significant improvement. (1)

Now it’s important to understand that when placebos ‘work’ it’s not because the person wasn’t ‘really’ ill or couldn’t have had ‘real’ pain. What happens is that taking a placebo prompts a very real healing response within the patient’s body. When a real drug works, it will work even better when someone expects it to work well. So placebo medicine might be a significant part of all (or at least some) medical treatments.

We see the placebo response as a form of post-hypnotic suggestion. So it makes perfect sense to use hypnosis to ramp up your expectation that whatever medicine you are taking is going to be super effective for you. The new hypnosis download Placebo Primer is designed to do just that. When your subconscious and conscious expectations become more positive then you are much more likely to experience more of those positives.

All my best

Mark

Note

(1) See: Kaptchuk TJ, Friedlander E, Kelley JM, Sanchez MN, Kokkotou E, et al. (2010) Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome. PLoS ONE 5(12): e15591. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015591