One of the most common phobias is Emetophobia a fear of vomit or vomiting. This article looks the prognosis for this phobia and treatment options.   more »

My blog today is seasonal. It looks at Christmas phobias   more »

Peter Andre reported in his interview with Piers Morgan that he had suffered panic attacks. This article talks about what happens in the brain to cause a panic attack.   more »

This is the story of Dan and how with the help of therapy he overcame Panic Disorder   more »

In November 2011 a Survey on Intrusive Thoughts was conducted by Newport Cognitive Therapies. This blog shows the survey results and analysis.   more »

This article explores the reasons people with anxiety disorders quit therapy before it is complete.   more »

Read why I continue to train in psychotherapies and why I am rebranding Newport Hypnotherapy to Newport Cognitive Therapies   more »

How Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is used to treat Generalised Anxiety Disorder   more »

Ever wondered how stage hypnosis works? This articles helps takes some of the mystery out of stage hypnosis.   more »

A hypnotherapist looks back on the fear of flying that he overcame.   more »

Read about what happens when we fall in love, why women love chocolate and the sex life of prairie voles   more »

This article looks at blood and needle phobias. It examines the causes and treatments for these very common phobias.   more »

Christmas is almost over and most of us are a few pounds heavier so I thought my blog today should be about the psychology of weight loss.There is nothing wrong with gaining a few pounds over Christmas but for an increasing proportion of the population weight is becoming a dangerous issue.

This really hit home when I was watching a TV programme about celebrities who lost weight. The extreme punishment that celebrities put their body through to combat obesity is quite astonishing.

Ron Lester (Varsity Blues, Not another teen movie) turned to surgery and actually flat lined on the operating table. However it is not just celebrities that are turning to these extreme measures. Surgery is becoming more common in the general population.

Obesity is often seen as a physical problem so people look for a physical solution. However the causes are often more psychological than physical. Alcoholics put their health at serious risk with their drinking behaviour yet the NHS treat more people for obesity related health problems than alcohol. Alcoholism is treated with psychotherapies so why isn't obesity. Well that is beginning to change.

Like many celebrities Sharon Osbourne resorted to a gastric band but carried on eating too much causing her to vomit and then eat some more. In the end it was psychotherapy that she turned to in order to change these dangerous eating behaviours.

Surgery doesn’t solve the psychological issues and can be painful and sometimes even dangerous. Psychotherapy is painless and safe (although it is still not a walk in the park). Psychotherapy involves exploring your motivation, recognising sabotaging thoughts and challenging your limiting beliefs about yourself. It involves goal setting, behavioural experiments and education in the psychology of weight loss. The therapist acts as a weight loss coach but rather than trying to motivate you, they help you to find your own motivation from within.

Newport Hypnotherapy Weight Loss Coaching is a psychotherapy based programme that uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy reinforced with clinical hypnosis.

The effectiveness of combining of these two therapies is becoming increasingly more recognised in the medical world.

The British Medical Journal reported that "A systematic review has found that hypnosis enhances the effects of cognitive behavioural therapy for conditions such as phobia, obesity, and anxiety."

If you would like to know more about Newport Hypnotherapy Weight Loss Coaching visit the website www.newport-hypnotherapy.co.uk

The year is almost over and  I thought it would be a good time to reflect. Through this year I have helped clients with a wide range of goals and problems. These include phobias, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, public speaking nerves, smoking, weight loss and reactive depression.

Both I, and more importantly my clients, have been pleased with the results.

This year I also trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and introduced this effective evidence based therapy into my practice. It has combined really well with the hypnotherapy and I can see why increasingly these two therapies are coming together. My training also gave me the opportunity to meet practitioners from other areas of the psychotherapy community including counsellors, psychodynamic therapists, forensic psychologists, family and child psychologists and many others.Sharing in their knowledge and experience was invaluable.

The biggest challenge for me this year has been the cancellations. Cancellations are common with anxiety clients. The reassuring thing for me is that all the cancellations were the first session so I know its not anything I have done wrong. In fact all my anxiety clients who made it to the first session completed their course of therapy without any cancellations at all. I may talk more about cancellations in a future blog.

Cancellations aside, it has been a fantastically rewarding year for me. This is not just because I have seen my clients reach their goals but because I have met some wonderful people. I have met some really interesting people and some real charachters and we have shared some laughs (therapy is not all tears and sadness you know).

So I would like to wish all my clients past, present and future a merry christmas and a healthy, positive and anxiety free new year. I look forward to growing the business and helping even more people in 2011.

For more information about Newport Hypnotherapy visit www.newport-hypnotherapy.co.uk

Have any of the following thoughts ever entered your mind?

While driving, an impulse to run the car off the road
When in a public place the thought of becoming dirty or contaminated from touching a doorknob
Something is wrong with my health
An urge to say something inappropriate
The thought of harming someone

These may sound like thoughts that someone with a psychiatric disorder might have but in fact they are from a survey of ordinary people.

Every so often an irrational thought or urge may enter our mind. Most of us think "where the hell did that come from" and then forget about it. This is completely normal even though few people talk about these sort of thoughts.(for obvious reasons)

People with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are unable to forget about these thoughts. They worry so much about the thought that it dominates their life. This leads to changes in their behavior. An obsessive thought about contamination may lead to lengthy and frequent cleaning rituals. Thoughts of harming someone may lead to avoiding people and hiding knives (even though someone with OCD would never actually harm anybody).

Many people have OC traits but it is nothing to worry about. However if rituals or ruminating on the thought is for more than an hour a day or it is disrupting your life then it is classed as a disorder and should be treated.

OCD is extremely debilitating and also the hardest of all anxiety disorders to treat especially if it has been left untreated for a long time. The most effective treatment is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This sometimes has to be supplemented with medication.

So if your wife likes all the cushions perfectly line up don't worry. It isn't OCD it is just part of the rich variety of thoughts and behaviours that make us all so unique.

If you would like to know more about how Newport Hypnotherapy can help treat OCD visit www.newport-hypnotherapy.co.uk

Why is public speaking so scary?

Your heart is racing, you are sweating, you are breathing fast and shallow. Are you being attacked by a savage lion? No. Its worse than that. You have just remembered that last night after a few beers you agreed to speak in public. Whether it is a best man speech, a business presentation or just being asked to say a few words in a meeting, many people find public speaking terrifying.

So why is public speaking so scary?

One interesting theory put forward by psychologists is that it is evolutionary. Our ancestors learned that if a crowd was gathering around them it usually meant that they were about to be violently removed from their position as tribal leader. So the ones who learned to be scared survived and the ones who didn’t see the fear got chucked off a cliff.

So there may be genetic link. But the main contributor to public speaking fear is the way we represent it to ourselves.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy identifies a number of maladaptive thought types that raise anxiety levels

Catastrophising

e.g. I will forget my words, I will panic and go red. Everyone will think Im stupid, I will probably faint and be taken to hospital and …..etc etc

Generalisation

e.g. It will be just like that time I got that joke wrong and everyone laughed at me instead of the joke.

Mind reading

e.g Everybody will be looking for mistakes and judge me and think how they could do it better

Polarised Thinking

If its not a complete success it’s a complete failure. You are either a good public speaker or a terrible one.

Fixation on these negative ways of thinking creates memories, images and feelings in our mind that create anxiety. CBT teaches us to counter these thoughts with more realistic positive ones. This can be difficult though. Hypnotherapy supplements CBT by helping us relax, suggesting more positive realities and creating positive images and feelings in our subconscious. By changing the way we think, public speaking can even become enjoyable.

I have had a couple of requests recently for past life regressions. This is not something I offer but it is a fascinating subject so I thought I would write a blog explaining what it is. I will try to give a balanced view as best I can within the constraints of my own beliefs.

Proponents of past life regression believe that we have all lived before. They also believe that we can access memories of past lives by accessing our subconscious through hypnosis. The hypnotist takes the subject back in time (regresses) to one or more past lives. Subjects often see themselves in clothes or surroundings from another era and some may even experience the circumstances of their own (real or perceived) death. I have experimented in this area on myself using self hypnosis. But I struggled to see more than the odd image of a few horses. The reason I probably struggled is that it doesn’t fit with my beliefs. I don’t believe in reincarnation.

So this leads on to my beliefs, views and reasons not to offer past life regression. My first issue is evidence. There have been many studies on hypnotherapy for anxiety disorders, smoking, weight loss etc. Many of these studies have shown good to excellent success rates for these applications. However there is no evidence that past life experiences are real. There is simply no way of proving it.
One of the main tools used in hypnotherapy is visualisations and imagination. So how do we know that the ‘regressed’ subject is not just imagining he is a knight of the round table or a carpenter living in Droitwich in the 17th century.
The other problem I have with PLR is that it seperates hypnotherapy from the mainstream psychotherapies. Although the British Medical Association and British Medical Journal have been very positive about the medical and psychological uses of hypnotherapy most NHS trusts will not offer hypnotherapy on the NHS despite its effectiveness. I believe being associated with something non evidence based and spiritual does not help the hypnotherapy industrys cause.

However as I said it is an interesting subject and everyone should make up their own mind. I don’t see any danger in anyone trying it but I will continue to just help people deal with their problems in the here and now. Maybe one day I will find out what those horses are all about and change my stance on PLR.

http://ukhypnosis.com/2010/07/18/hypnosurgery-live/

The above link is a fascinating BBC documentary on surgery using hypnosis instead of an anaesthesia. It involves a lady having a tooth out and a man having a hernia operation without even local anaesthetic. (The lady I think does take some aspirin for the tooth beforehand).
Unfortunately there are some daft claims made by rogue hypnotherapists from penis enlargement to cancer cures. These are of course nonsense.
But this programme caught my interest. It appears to be a controlled experiment in front of the BBC cameras and relevant experts. It also fits in with what I have learnt about pain control but I just didn't think it could be taken to this level. To me it shows that more research is needed into the use of hypnosis for medical applications. Unfortunately some of the sillier claims have held back the medical communities interest in hypnotherapy. However more doctors, dentists, psychotherapists and anaesthetists are now training in clinical hypnotherapy so hopefully this will help hypnotherapy gain recognition.
As a final note, I am not planning to offer hypnosurgery. Personally I would have offered the hernia guy treatment for his fear of anaesthetia but I guess that would have not made the programme half so interesting.

Around 1 in 10 people will experience a panic attack at sometime in their life. It may be linked to a phobia but often can be caused by just a build of anxiety due to the stresses of life. For about 1 in 50 the panic attacks becoming recurring and this is known as panic disorder.

Sufferers of panic disorder often feel fine one minute, and yet the next may feel totally out of control and in the grips of a panic attack. Panic attacks produce very real physical symptoms from a rapid increase in heartbeat to a churning stomach sensation. Its a bit like the fear you would get if a lion attacked you but there is no lion. These physical symptoms are naturally unpleasant and the accompanying psychological thoughts of terror can make a panic attack a very scary experience. For this reason, sufferers start to dread the next attack, and quickly enter into a cycle of living 'in fear of fear'.

Because the panic attacks don't seem to have any particular trigger the sufferer can start to avoid many situations which may lead to agoraphobia and a severely limited life.

Hypnotherapy (particularly when combined with cognitive behavioural therapy) can be very effective in reducing the sufferers anxiety and fear of the panic attack. As the fear and anxiety reduces so the severity and frequency of the panic attack decrease. This allows the person with Panic Disorder to claim their life back and regain their confidence.

For more information, visit my website www.newport-hypnotherapy.co.uk

When you mention hypnotherapy most peoples first thoughts are of people on stage acting like superman or pretending to be a chicken. Unfortunately stage hypnosis has tarnished the reputation of a very valuable therapeutic tool. Stage hypnotists can create the illusion of mind control but in reality hypnosis has nothing to do with mind control. Stage hypnosis and how they create this illusion is too big a subject to discuss here so I will concentrate on what clinical hypnosis is.

Our conscious minds are constantly concentrating, analysing and dealing with day to day thoughts and activities but can only deal with about 8 things at a time. Our sub conscious minds hold all our memories, emotions, learning, creativity and many other wonderful things. The subconscious mind does not analyse. So if the conscious mind tells it that you need to smoke (even though you know its bad for you) then the subconscious accepts and develops a habit that is hard to give up. Similarly if a child sees adults screaming because of a thunderstorm the childs subconscious learns to respond to thunder and lightning with fear. This fear can carry over to adulthood.
The good news is that the subconscious can be easily accessed through fixated attention and guided relaxation. Thats where clinical hypnosis comes in. The Hypnotherapist asks you to fixate your attention on something like a relaxing visualisation and guides you to relax even more. Gradually as you become very relaxed, your conscious mind becomes quiet (because it has nothing to do or worry about) and your subconscious mind becomes open to suggestion provided the suggestion is not against your beliefs and principles.(If it is then your conscious mind would become busy again telling the therapist to get lost)
The therapist then gives suggestions (which are pre-agreed) to help you reach your goal. Direct suggestions are one tool used in hypnotherapy but there are many others.
So what does this hypnosis thing feel like? It feels like you are sitting in a comfy chair with your eyes closed with a man (or woman) talking to you. Thats it. There is no weird feeling, flashing lights or out of body experience. There is no amnesia. The one thing everyone notices though is how amazingly relaxed they feel afterwards.
This of course leads to people saying "I went to a hypnotherapist and nothing happened." If this is the case then the hypnotherapist has not explained properly what clinical hypnosis is. Hypnotherapy requires the client to be at ease and happy to follow the therapists instructions. Noone can reach this relaxed and beneficial state if they do not want to. It is not mind control (there is no such thing).
It should be mentioned that clinical hypnosis is only one part of a hypnotherapy session.( between 5 and 12 minutes). Education and cognitive behavioural techniques often form a large part of the therapy also. Occasionally, particularly on the first session clinical hypnosis will not be used at all. For more information on hypnotherapy and hypnosis visit www.newport-hypnotherapy.co.uk

If  people are nervous of something or dislike it, they may say I have a phobia. However a phobia is much more than this. A phobia is a pathological and irrational fear. It is charachterised by the panic response (e.g. racing heart, fast breathing, intense fear, even dizziness ) and avoidance. A phobic will irrationally avoid their trigger to prevent the unpleasant panic response that they expect.This avoidance actually worsens the fear.

Depending on the type of phobia it can be extremely disruptive to the phobics life. For instance if you have a fear of blood (haemophobia) or hospitals, this will not affect your daily life until you or a sibling has to go to hospital. In extreme cases haemophobes have been known to refuse life saving operations because of their fear.

Phobias are thought to be caused in part by genetic predisposition but learned fears (e.g. from parents), stress and anxiety, traumatic events (perceived or real) can all be possible causes or contributors. Phobias usually develop over a period of time. This is a process known in therapy terms as sensitisation. What starts off as a mild fear can become gradually more intense and disruptive. Hypnotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy are effective in treating phobias because they help to desensitise the phobic to their fear trigger. For more information on phobias visit www.newport-hypnotherapy.co.uk