Reducing stress with Solution Focused Hypnotherapy

It was a bit cooler this weekend and it got me thinking about the clients that usually start to contact me around this time of the year. The sunshine is finally giving way to rain, and the nights are starting to draw in. When the autumn months get into full flow it’s not uncommon for people to experience a low mood, you may have heard of the term SAD (seasonal affective disorder), this condition affects so many people, especially if they have enjoyed a summer break with lots of sea, sun, and sand. It can be tough to get back into the swing of things when the darker mornings and early commutes become combined with working in a stressful environment.

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help to improve people’s moods. Imagine inside your head you have a big bucket, we call it the stress bucket, every negative thought we have gets stored in our buckets throughout the day, but we have a way of emptying our bucket, it’s called rapid eye movement, (REM), it's where we dream at night.  REM helps process the information stored in the bucket so we can wake up feeling refreshed and ready to face the day. However, if all we do is focus on the negatives our metaphorical stress bucket will fill up, and the brain will have difficulty processing the information during our REM sleep, until eventually the bucket will overflow, then we can find it difficult to cope.

My job as a Solution Focused Hypnotherapist, is to help people empty their stress-buckets by encouraging them to focus on the three Ps, positive thinking, positive interaction, and positive action. I work in partnership with my clients helping them to find ways of changing the way they think about things, together, we find solutions that enable the client to move towards their preferred futures.

I also use hypnosis, which is often called trance. Trance is perfectly normal, we all go in and out of trance on a regular basis every day, it is simply the brain’s way of processing information and emptying the stress bucket. When a client goes into the trance state, we are effectively supporting them to empty their stress bucket and take back intellectual control.  

I’m never surprised at what some people throw in their bucket, stress can manifest in so many different ways including smoking, weight, anger, lack of sleep, pain, OCD, PTSD, anxiety, depression, along with phobias (such as a fear of flying), pain and so much more. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy can help with many of these symptoms as its designed to help people focus on how they want things to be, not on the problem itself. My job is to help someone move forwards by looking at ways to make tomorrow better than today. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is a fantastic tool for helping people reduce what they put in their stress bucket.