Click here to watch this excellent Ted Talk from Matt Walker, an English scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and he is also the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. His research focuses on the impact of sleep on human health and disease and his work reveals the true impact of the widespread sleep deprivation in our modern world and the threat this poses to health, including long term mental impairment. 

Sleep problems is one of the most common conditions I treat today and am glad to say with great success. So for anyone who is not getting a regular 8 hours of quality sleep per night, this talk should be a wake up call to get this sorted as soon as possible and prevent the very real and truly scary consequences of sleep deprivation.

Typically, people who come to me for treatment for anxiety and stress have become “chest breathers” and forgotten how to breathe deeply and naturally in a way that counteracts stress.  I teach each of my clients a simple yet powerful breathing technique called 7/11 breathing (breathe in to a count of 7, exhale to a count of 11) and also to breathe as a child does i.e with the diaphragm not the chest!

To find our more about the virtues of ‘belly breathing’ and how to do it, click here  for a great short article on the subject- it’s from Harvard Medical School health publishing (which by the way is a a great website free source of helpful advice).

A team at New York University trawled the internet to find the most common claims about a good night’s sleep. Then, in a study recently published in the journal Sleep Health, they matched the claims to the best scientific evidence.

They hope that dispelling sleep myths will improve people’s physical and mental health and well-being.

So, how many of the 6 myths below are you guilty of?

Myth 1 – You can cope on less than five hours’ sleep

Myth 2 – Alcohol before bed boosts your sleep

Myth 3 – Watching TV in bed helps you relax

Myth 4 – If you’re struggling to sleep, stay in bed

Myth 5 – Hitting the snooze button (the notion that an extra few minutes in bed makes all the difference!)

Myth 6 – Snoring is always harmless

To read more about each myth and the researchers findings, see this post on the BBC website here

And of course if you have sleep problems which you want to overcome, just give me a call on 07976 701223 or email  gerry@envisionhypnotherapy.com

For anyone who wants to know more about stress this super animation, which is just 90 seconds long, gives a good explanation of the impact of stress on the body. To watch the video click here

This animation was produced to accompany the BBC programme called The Truth About Stress in 2018  and if you are interested in this hour long show, you can find this on  BBC iPlayer here

Good article on the BBC website recently entitled ‘Are you ready to break up with your phone?’

It included some top tips from Catherine Price who wrote the book How To Break Up With Your Phone after having a baby and realising one day that the baby was watching her and she was watching her mobile!

“Breaking up with your phone does not mean dumping your phone or throwing it under a bus, it just means taking a step back to create a relationship that is actually good for you. It’s becoming friends with your phone.”

“I realised I didn’t want that to be her impression of a human relationship, but I also didn’t want it to be the way that I was living my own life,” she said.

In her book, Ms Price lists a 30-day plan to reclaim this “friendship”. Her top tips include:

• Turn off all the notifications you can bear to. Just leave the ones you actually want; for me that is phone calls and text messages because they are real people trying to contact me, in particular, in real time – plus my calendar and maps

• rearrange your home screen so that it only contains apps that have a practical purpose that are not tempting. Your home screen should not have email, or social media, or the news or a dating app, or games. Put them into a folder on an interior page so you can’t see their icons, you have to actively open them

• Get your phone out of your bedroom. You will need to have something on your bedside table that takes the place of the phone… like a book. When you go to reach for that phone you will encounter the book instead

• Get a standalone alarm clock. If your phone is your alarm clock you are guaranteeing that your phone will be the first thing you interact with in the morning

• There is a plug-in called Facebook Demetricator, which stops you seeing you how many times your post has been “liked”. You still may go back to see that people have liked your post, but you’re not going to be checking compulsively to see when 17 gets to 20 and 25 gets to 30 – it can help break that habit.

I, like many other parents of teenage children, have been concerned for some time about the addictive nature of modern technology, especially smartphones and social media apps, and the impact on the emotional and mental well being of young people. A look around any restaurant or public place will show that many adults also appear addicted to their smartphones to the exclusion of the people and the world around them but the impact on young people is, to me at least, especially worrying. This is why I have developed my new approach to the treatment of technology addiction using hypnosis.

This article in The Economist(USA edition) published in 2017 makes interesting reading for anyone who shares my concerns about Smartphone use. It shows there is no definitive causative proof as yet but the scientific evidence is growing to support anecdotal evidence and our own everyday experience of Smartphone use by people around us.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/11/23/teenagers-are-growing-more-anxious-and-depressed

For anyone wondering what hypnosis is and how it works, this short succinct article should prove useful reading  https://doublewoodsupplements.com/pages/is-hypnosis-even-real-how-does-it-affect-our-brains

A report in the Daily Telegraph last month tells how Holmer Lake Primary School in Telford, Shropshire called in a hypnotherapist to help Year 6 pupils deal with the pressures of SATs.   The children were taught breathing and other techniques and the head teacher said that it has helped pupils to achieve record SATs results as well as enabling the children to feel happier, calmer and much more self-confident too. If only schools in Sheffield and elsewhere were so enlightened!  I still fervently hope and dream that one day all children are taught from an early age how to use their mind well, boost their ability to learn and be happy and prevent problems such as anxiety, low self esteem and lack of self confidence from occurring in the first place.

An interesting and useful article by Dr Michael Mosley in January http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42788280  In my experience, people who come to me for weight loss often have anxiety, stress and issues and of course hypnotherapy treatment then must also involve addressing these unmet needs as well as changing eating habits.  Impact of poor sleep is more significant than most people recognise.

Not that it is a paper that I personally would choose to read but journalist Bel Mooney describes how after trying different insomnia treatments over her long years as an insomniac, hypnotherapy has made the difference.  A useful read for anyone who is wondering if hypnotherapy could help with their own sleepless nights. Overcoming insomnia is not as hopeless as it might seem.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5596195/Hypnotherapy-helping-beat-chronic-insomnia.html