Category: Mindfulness

Mindfulness

Pausing thought

Issy Martin

In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy we talk about how frequently we experience some form of trance in our everyday lives. Some of this daydream-like thinking can be positive. We can lose ourselves in memories of entertaining times we have spent with our friends. We become absorbed by the imagined reality of a holiday we’re looking forward to.

But unless we practice otherwise, most of us spend most of the time in negative trance. In negative trance we are criticising ourselves for something we did or didn’t do or say; or we are criticising someone else for something they did or didn’t do or say. In negative trance we are plotting, scheming, just-in-case-ing, imagining the worst and mapping out possible ways around it.

This negative inner dialogue comes with a heaped side order of anxiety, frustration, guilt, anger, and a bunch of other unpleasant emotions that spike our body’s natural stress response. When this happens our brain pumps our bodies full of stress hormones like adrenalin and cortisol, which in turn serve to maximise both our mental and our physical discomfort. The gates to our intellectual brains slam shut and we get locked inside our emotional primitive minds where every negative thought becomes absolutely, irrationally, unbearably, horrendous.

In his book Waking Up, neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris refers to this rumination, both positive and negative, as “the trance of discursive thinking“, to which the antidote is meditation.

In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy we combine solution focused therapy and hypnotic trance to reassure and guide our conscious minds towards a place of peace, where, just for a little while, they let go of their grip, and the inner dialogue quietens, the never-ending thought train draws to a temporary halt.

It is in this meditative state of trance that we can enjoy, as Harris describes “a mind undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky.”

And with our minds open, as Psychiatrist and Clinical Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson pointed out, we become much more receptive to ideas and understanding. We are more able to accept positive suggestions without our conscious minds jumping in to disagree.

When we press pause on the overwhelming blare of constant thought, especially the criticism, judgements, assumptions, and fears, we allow our minds space to breathe. To relax. To reduce our stress levels enough to unlock the door back into our intellectual minds where we can find perspective, reason, rationale and balance.

Mindfulness

Lockdown parenting: finding the positive

Issy Martin

With schools out for lockdown, and parents working from home, the four walls of the family home loom higher; some days casting an enormous black shadow over the occupants. Sharing space without reprieve is tough. Relentless multitasking is exhausting for our minds and for our morale. 

But what if we shifted our focus to what we have, rather than what we don’t? In place of time to think, we have extra time to spend with our children, whose younger years will slip through our fingers like grains of sand. 

In place of by-the-book parenting, we have a collection of imperfect parenting moments, that, as Brene Brown points out in Daring Greatly, become gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time.

In place of freedom to connect with friends, we have freedom to connect with our home, the space we come back to every night, the partners with whom we used to bookend each day with the scraps of ourselves we had left, the children we struggled to get more than two words out of when we asked about their day.

In place of a deceptive certainty of what the future holds, we have the glorious present moment, and as Sam Harris acknowledges in his aptly named book Waking up, that’s really all we have.

In place of plans and diaries bulging with progress, we have opportunities to take stock, to change direction, to connect with another path. 

In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, we spend time guiding our clients to reconnect with the strengths in their lives. To shift focus to the positive. Moving forward, this change in mindset can be both liberating and life changing. As Elliott Connie, Global Leader in Solution Focused Brief Therapy Elliott Connie says; “There is magic in being led by what you want, rather than what you don’t want.”

So embrace the moment; embrace the magic. And recognise that to do this is, in itself, an achievement. A demonstration of your powerful mind. 

References 

Connie, E. (2016). Small Things Can Lead to Big Things. Moments with Elliott Connie. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd3QIelHxhk

Harris, S. (2014). Waking up. Simon & Schuster.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. New York: Gotham Books.

Mindfulness

Does Google always have the answer?

Issy Martin

Feeling that something is physically wrong with ourselves or someone we love can be a huge source of anxiety. 

As humans, we harbour a fundamental fear of the unknown (Carleton, 2016). It makes us uneasy, and when we can start to negatively forecast the future. We imagine what will go wrong. So when something about our body doesn’t feel right and we don’t know why, we might fill our minds with negative thoughts like ‘What if it gets worse?’ ‘What if it affects my sleep?’ ‘What if it stops me from doing what I want to do?’.  

In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy we talk about how all of these negative thoughts are converted into anxiety in our minds. As our anxiety builds we spend more time operating from our primitive emotional mind: we become irritable and distracted. We lash out or we withdraw. And this anxiety fuels yet more anxiety. 

In our desperation to know and to alleviate the anxiety that comes with the unknown, many of us reach for our phones. It has been estimated that Google’s health related searches amount to approximately 70,000 every minute (Murphy, 2019).

However, new research from Edith Cowan University (ECU)  published in the Medical Journal of Australia this week revealed that online symptom checkers produce the correct diagnosis just 36 per cent of the time. 

So not only is this information inaccurate, it provides further fuel for our negative forecasting. It gives colour and detail to a number of possible negative futures, so that we can imagine them in more clarity, again and again, increasing our anxiety each time. 

So next time you feel the urge to reach out to Google for a medical diagnosis,  take a moment.  Make an appointment with a health professional, and then focus your attention on the present, on what you can do, right now, to trigger your parasympathetic nervous system and get your neurochemistry working in your favour. 

References

Carleton, R. N. (2016). Into the Unknown: a review and synthesis of contemporary models involving uncertainty Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 39. 30-43, 10.1016/j.janxdis.2016.02.007

Murphy, M. (2019) Dr Google will see you now: Search giant wants to cash in on your medical queries. The Telegraph. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/03/10/google-sifting-one-billion-health-questions-day/

Hill, M. G., Simm, M., & Mills, B. (2020) “The quality of diagnosis and triage advice provided by free online symptom checkers and apps in Australia”. Medical Journal of Australia doi:10.5694/mja2.50600

Mindfulness

Is mindfulness selfish?

Issy Martin

One of the criticisms often levelled at meditative practices, like self-hypnosis, is that they are selfish. Too introspective, too inward-looking. Drawing our attention away from all the bad things happening in the world that we should be out there trying to fix. Encouraging us to settle, to embrace inadequacies. To sit cross legged in a bubble of peace while everything around us collapses. 

In 2017, Psychiatrist Dr Alison Gray of the Royal College of Psychiatrists suggested that solitary meditative practices can cause us to become more self-centred (Petter, 2017). Instead, Dr Gray encouraged us to seek out a community with whom we can practice mindfulness.

However, as COVID-19 isolates much of the world in their own homes, away from their support networks and away from their communities, these solitary meditative practices can be a useful tool in lowering our anxiety, building our resilience, and connecting with our inner resources. Gifting ourselves some time each day to nurture our minds, release anxiety and embrace the present moment can be a powerful antidote to the feelings of frustration and helplessness brought about by the lockdown. We are locked down, but our minds don’t have to be.

Embracing mindfulness to protect our mental health can be far from selfish. As neuroscientist, philosopher and best-selling author Sam Harris writes in his book Waking Up, meditating alone doesn’t necessarily equate with self-centredness; in fact, it can amount to precisely the opposite: “One can […] spend long periods of time in contemplative solitude for the purpose of becoming a better person in the world – having better relationships, being more honest and compassionate and, therefore, more helpful to one’s fellow human beings.”

We don’t need to feel guilty for prioritising our inner peace sometimes, even while those around us are struggling, as we have more to offer them when we ourselves are calm and centred. As Sam Harris argues “The world is in desperate need of improvement – in global terms, freedom and prosperity remain the exception – and yet, this doesn’t mean we need to be miserable while we work for the common good.”

References

Petter, O. (2017, December 29). Mindfulness could be making you selfish, psychiatrist warns. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/mindfulness-selfish-mediation-psychiatrist-dr-alison-gray-a8133106.html

Harris, S. (2014). Waking up. Simon & Schuster.

Mindfulness

Daydreaming

Issy Martin

In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, we strive to break through inaccurate and media-fuelled misunderstandings of what trance is. We emphasise its normalcy, its ordinariness, as something fundamentally, and very basically, human. We talk about how we experience trance every day, several times a day, when we daydream while doing something relatively monotonous that doesn’t occupy much brain space, like washing up, or driving somewhere very familiar.

And yet, daydreaming itself is something that has been scorned, ridiculed, and undervalued, almost as much as trance. The unreachable windows of Victorian school buildings are monuments to education’s efforts to drill out our natural inclination to daydream. Society teaches us from a young age that daydreaming is inconvenient, a waste of time, something we are reprimanded for doing.

So we train ourselves to measure our day by its productivity and shake off our reveries as quickly as we can. We get increasingly good at doing this, so that by the time we are adults we inevitably feel lost, out of touch with our inner self, at a loss as to who we are, because we have spent so little time stopping to listen, to process, to understand.

In The School of Life: An Emotional Education (2019), Alain de Botton eloquently captures with his words, both the unfortunate reputation, and the significant value, of daydreaming:

“THE IMPORTANCE OF STARING OUT OF THE WINDOW

We tend to reproach ourselves for staring out of the window. Most of the time we are supposed to be working, or studying , or ticking things off a to-do-list. It can seem almost the definition of wasted time, It appears to produce nothing, to serve no purpose. We equate it with boredom, distraction, futility. The act of cupping our chin in our hands near a pane of glass and letting our eyes drift in the middle distance does not enjoy high prestige. We don’t go around saying, ‘I had a great day today. The high point was staring out of the window.’ But maybe, in a better society, this is exactly what people would quietly say to one another.
The point of staring out of a window is, paradoxically, not to find out what is going on outside. It is, rather, an exercise in discovering the contents of our own minds. It is easy to imagine we know what we think, what we feel and what’s going on in our heads. But we rarely do entirely. There’s a huge amount of what makes us who we are that circulates unexplored and unused. It’s potential lies untapped. It is shy and doesn’t emerge under the pressure of direct questioning. If we do it right, staring out of the window offers a way for us to be alert to the quieter suggestions and perspectives of our deeper selves.”

Mindfulness

Back to nature

Issy Martin

In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy we talk about the creation of anxiety through negative thinking. Negative thoughts about the future, about what might happen. Negative thoughts about the past. About what did, or didn’t happen, and why.

This forward-thinking, backward-thinking machine can be incredibly difficult to switch off. Our subconscious minds get stuck in fight, flight or freeze mode, and our conscious minds, if they get a look-in, rationalise (incorrectly) that what we’re doing is productive thinking.

This constant back and forth can feel like being on a never-ending Pirate Ship ride, and the physical symptoms can be remarkably similar. Nausea, headache, dizziness, confusion…

So if you’re struggling to switch off, and if you can, get out. Immerse yourself in nature. Breathe. And ask yourself,

What can I hear?

What can I see?

What can I smell?

What can I touch?

Mindfulness

Connect to your inner self

Issy Martin

As varying versions of the COVID-19 lockdown continue across the world, fear remains around how we can safely reconnect with those we love. Many are isolating alone, and for lots of us, isolation is far from over. In such times, the solution focused approach of connecting to our inner strength can be a balm, helping us to build our resilience, so that loneliness doesn’t become overwhelming. You can take the words below as a moment for you to stop, switch off the news, focus on the present, and feel a sense of connection.

Take long deep breath, and release. You’ve got this.

Stay safe.

Connection

From the moment we are born,
We have a primitive need to be held. Soothed.
To feel the warmth of touch.
To feel connected to something bigger than ourselves.
So, in a time when connection is tainted with fear,
And touch, with frightening consequences,
We can feel lost.
Helpless to meet our deep desire to connect.

But something magical happens,
When we start to connect with our inner self.
To nurse our fear with our own inner strength.

So take a moment to close your eyes,
And feel your breath.
See light in the centre of your chest,
Beating with your heartbeat.
Let that light fill your chest cavity.
Let it drop down your torso,
Down through the water table, the rock and magma.
Connecting you right down to the centre of the earth.

Allow yourself to bathe in the warmth,
Of that grounding cord of light.
Feel its strength,
Beaming out to every living thing.
You are a part of that beautiful firework.
Connected to everything.

Mindfulness

Running for my lockdown life

Issy Martin

In the UK, during the COVID-19 lockdown, 1 hour of exercise per person is the daily allowance, stipulated by the government and enforced by the police, with increasingly hefty fines per offence. The focus of many a critic has been on how little time we have to escape our four walls every 24 hours, and go out into the ghostly world beyond.

And yet, spoilt as I am with a yard and two frequently empty communal gardens, I hadn’t quite realised the importance of this restriction. Until today. When I saw it as a prescription (with the help of my husband who described it as such and all but pushed me out of the house).

Just as your GP will prescribe antibiotics to help you shake that lingering chest infection or paracetamol to ease a tiresome headache, the government has prescribed us an hour of daily exercise to fight that creeping darkness that threatens to swallow us while and spit out a mumbling, distracted, irritable gremlin in our place, who puts their phone in the fridge, shouts at everyone about pretty much everything and weeps over broken biscuits and lost socks.

I thought I was going outside enough. I went out in the garden to play with the kids, put the recycling out, brought parcels inside. OK, perhaps part of me was aware that I needed to break out and go further afield for an hour, pound the pavements and be alone, but I kept finding reasons not to. A thesis to write, a child to soothe, a dinner to make, a wash to put on. The list was endless and grew longer and more confused as my mind became jumbled, squeezed and suffocated by the four walls of our home.

Until today, when my husband braved the gigantic atmosphere I had taken to carrying around the house with me for the last few days, like a rock-filled rucksack that I couldn’t remember how to take off. ‘I prescribe a walk out around the river’ he said, and realisation dawned. That was exactly what I needed. I had spent the morning incredibly frustrated by the feeling that I couldn’t find something but couldn’t figure out what that something was, and that was it. I needed to get out. I felt like crying with relief, that someone had realised.

The walk was beautiful. I looked at clouds and the boats and smiled at others who were out exercising. I even ran a bit and felt the wind and my lungs burn. And I banked a whole heap of what we call in Solution Focused Hypnotherapy the three P’s: positive actions, positive interactions and positive thoughts. These three elements work together to produce patterns in the brain that give us a steady flow of happy hormones such as serotonin, which we need to feel good in both mind and body.

So listen to the government guidance through the lens of what it is telling you to do, rather than what it is telling you not to do. It’s telling you, if you can, for one hour a day, to get out. Go. Experience. Drink in the confidence that comes with being proactive, drink in the hope that comes from positive interactions with the nods from passing strangers, drink in the positivity that fills your mind when you treat your body to sunlight, movement and connection.