Stress Management Brisbane

How we manage and deal with stress is done by the unconscious mind.

Hypnotherapy Builds Your Capacity To Deal With Stress

Stress Management Brisbane – Stress, what is it? Stress is our reaction to a perceived threat. We all know when we feel ‘under stress’, ‘stressed out’, ‘stressed to the max’, ‘burnt out’. We recognise it in others and in ourselves. It is measurable in our bodies through tension, heart rate, blood pressure, DHEA and Cortisol levels.

We are constantly adapting to changes in our accelerating world. Faster and faster we are confronted by not getting what we want and expect, and getting what we definitely don’t want and expect. The adrenalin surge in the fight or flight reaction is triggered more and more as we perceive threats in our everyday lives.

We can become restless, driven, needing lots of holidays, we self-medicate with food, alcohol, coffee and cigarettes. Then we hit survival mode where we are living on adrenaline, irritable, inefficient, complaining, trouble with sleep, mental organization and repeated ailments of one sort or another.

The good news is that you can control stress by ‘re-wiring’ yourself to feel great and in control of your reactions. You can strengthen your resilience, feel confident in your own resources, and live from a feeling of being much bigger than your problems.

4 sessions of Hypnotherapy and learning the skills of self hypnosis is enough to get back on track.

Are you feeling stressed and need some help?

Insomnia & Sleep Disorders

Insomnia and other sleep disorders can be caused and worsened by stress and anxiety. A vicious cycle of stress, exhaustion and insomnia can build up, with one feeding off the other. People turn to hypnosis because it offers a natural approach to calmness and rest, without the side effects of some pharmaceutical drugs have.

Insomnia can be caused through excessive worry and you may have had difficulty ‘switching off’ and relaxing enough to begin your journey into sleep.  To go to sleep you need, of course, to relax. Worry, rumination or too much excitement produces adrenaline which keeps you awake.  In a hypnotherapy session your mind can learn the technique of being able to ‘switch off worry’.  You’ll find that sleep and relaxation can be a by-product of the relaxation gained from hypnosis.  Forget trying to sleep. In hypnosis your mind and body is trained to relax deeply. Natural deep and refreshing sleep will begin to develop as a happy side effect.

Here are some tips to actively encourage deep sleep.

  • Avoid alcohol before you retire. Alcohol may help you get to sleep but it will also wake you up later in the night as your liver processes it.
  • Use your bedroom only for sleep or sex.
  • Doing work accounts or watching TV will create an association with alertness with your sleeping area.
  • Avoid any stimulants such as coffee, tea or hot chocolate after 6pm because you need to have a gradual wind down period before retiring to bed.
  • Any vigorous exercise you do needs to be done at least three hours before going to bed to give the body a chance to return to normal so you can start to relax.
  • Stop watching TV or surfing the net at least one hour before bedtime as these activities stimulate your system.
  • Take a hot bath or shower. This helps because in order to go into sleep your body needs to cool. After a bath or shower the cooling will encourage sleepiness.
  • Make your bedroom dark. Darkness encourages the brain chemical melatonin which promotes sleep.

Use lamp light in the evening as bright light encourages your brain to respond as if the sun is coming up. Also the light from TV, computer screens, tablets and mobile phones is stimulating and keeps the brain in high alert.

Chronic Worrying

THE word worrying comes from an old English expression meaning to ‘strangle’.  If you’ve ever worried (and most of us fall into chronic worrying to some extent at times), you know how appropriate that origin is – when you can’t stop worrying, it can feel hard to breathe and move forward from the issues causing the worries.

Persistent worrying can turn into an uncomfortable habit that is so hard to shake. Worrying is not harmless; it has consequences. The more we worry, the more stress hormone we produce and the more we dream at night. In turn, over-dreaming caused by unresolved worry can cause clinical depression (something else to worry about!), so using hypnotherapy to stop worrying has multiple benefits.  Chronic worrying has been called a ‘thought disorder’, but it’s more a misuse of the imagination.

And imagination is not just ‘all in your head’.  It has measurable, palpable effects, both physical and behavioural.  Hypnotherapy works positively with the imagination to alter physical phenomena (for example improve immune response, take away pain, lower blood pressure) and behavioural responses (for example, help someone stop smoking or overeating).   The common denominator is the imagination and whether a person uses it constructively or destructively.

Worrying that doesn’t lead anywhere is like a dog chasing its tail and leads to over-dreaming. Ultimately, worry should be a tool or a signal that lets us know when something might need addressing. We shouldn’t lose this tool completely, but no tool should ever be allowed to enslave its owner.