Stress Management

What is Stress? What is its function? Is it good or bad?

The Stress response is the body’s response to an emergency, only to be used sparingly. Animals in the wild use it effectively – once the zebra is out of its predator’s reach, it settles down and the Stress response switches off, normality returns.

Stress is neither good nor bad, it is our response to it that determines whether it damages us because stress affects every system in our body.

Humans can create emotions purely through thought alone. Unfortunately, relentless Stress has become a major modern illness. Stress impacts every system in your body, some increase in activity, others stop working. If you are a zebra being chased by a lion, you don’t want to waste energy digesting food, killing germs in your body or thinking of reproduction. These are some of the systems that shut down whilst others, like your heart, lungs, musculoskeletal system, all get turbocharged to fulfil the demands on your body. This is how our systems prepare us to either fight or take flight – it helps us stay alive.

Clinical Hypnotherapy

Clinical Hypnotherapy is a much maligned technique. Used wisely and in the hands of a skilled practitioner, this can yield astounding results for anxiety, stress, trauma including PTSD, depression to name just a few conditions.

Hypnotherapy is not the same as hypno-sensationalism such as seen on the media – you won’t be asked to ‘perform’ as a monkey, nor will you be asked to behave contrary to your values.

Hypnotherapy is a way to access your Unconscious mind to find solutions to your problems. The FiXme Way follows Milton Erickson’s Utilization approach, which means that at no point in time will you be controlled or forced into paths that are not beneficial to you. From the detailed consultation that precedes treatment, we will determine what you need and decide the way forward, e.g. we might feel you need to access resources that have become buried or perhaps look for causes of the presenting difficulties. The practice of self hypnosis forms a central part of the treatment protocol, and simple techniques such as anchoring are used. For deeper longer held traumas e.g. PTSD, PARTS therapy provides good results.

PLEASE BE ASSURED: Whatever path is decided upon, it will be with your full consent. The essence of hypnotherapy can be described as follows: we will communicate with the Unconscious mind whilst your Conscious mind will remain quiet but remain fully aware of all that is going on and capable of interjecting at any point.

Everyone is talking about Mindfulness – companies such as Google and Yahoo have made it part of their employee Wellness Programme. So what is its charm?

Mindfulness is a great Stress Management tool, simple and effective and desperately needed in our chaotic demand riddled lives. Essentially, Mindfulness is about keeping attention focused on the present moment instead of allowing our minds to fantasize about the future or regret the past. It temporarily gets us off the hamster wheel of our mind and helps us regain some calm, like sitting on the beach, quietly watching the waves. As Dr Charles Tart, an American Psychologist specializing in Consciousness, says in his excellent book Mind Science – ‘we are all ‘thoughtaholics’ and practising Mindfulness is our version of the AA’.

Mindfulness is over 2500 years old and forms the central practice in Buddhism but don’t worry, you don’t need to be a believer to use it.

It was in the 1980s that Jon Kabat Zinn a molecular biologist and a life long practitioner of Mindfulness devised a programme to help patients manage their Pain and Stress using Mindfulness. Since then MBSR & MBCT have become known world wide and are being used extensively to treat chronic problems, including Pain, Stress & Depression.

At FiXme, Mindfulness forms an essential part of your treatment programme and again, there is no cause for concern because you will be fully supported in developing this technique.