I had a wonderful success story from a client this week, and want to share the joy and excitement! This is from a mum who brought her 8 year old daughter to see me. What an amazing duo! Here's what the mum reported to me earlier this week:

"I just want to share Charlotte’s success this weekend. She and her pony Buttons took part in their first hunter trial (basically riding across the countryside, jumping various obstacles and jumps). Anyway, a few months ago Charlotte would not have even considered taking part, but since your sessions her confidence has grown and grown, and she wanted to have a go.

As she entered the warm up arena – the old ‘un-confident’ Charlotte started to appear, with lots of comments of ‘Buttons, is going to be naughty, I can’t do it’ etc. etc.! I simply asked her, did she think that it was her primitive brain talking, because Buttons has never done anything naughty. She agreed that yes it was, because she KNEW that she and Buttons could do it, and she could visualise them having a great time going over the jumps.

And with that, she was off – cantering across the countryside, having an amazing time – jumping everything she had the chance to jump! And when she got to the finish line – she asked to go again!

It never ceases to amaze me how powerful and effective the knowledge you have passed onto us both is. So excited for Charlotte and Buttons future!"

​Cue tears of joy.

We are pleased to be hosting a week of community events in Newquay, bringing people together to understand stress and what we can do about it. As part of national Mental Health Awareness Week 14th-20th May (organised by the Mental Health Foundation) the sessions take place in businesses throughout the town including The Wave Project as well as Coffee on the Corner and Sprout Health Foods.

​Events are generally informal drop-in sessions with health professions on hand to discuss: stress and what can be done to alleviate it; young people and stress; mental health awareness for men; and a closing party / fundraiser at Newquay Hypnotherapy. The keynote event is a talk all about the neuroscience of stress and how to manage it.

Monday 14th May
Stress: what's what, who's who and what can we do, at Coffee on the Corner, 10-12pm
Young people and stress - how can we help, at the Wave Project shop, 1-230pm

Tuesday 15th May
Curry and Chaat - informal chat and knowledge sharing, Sprout Health Foods, 12=2pm

Wednesday 16th May
The Neuroscience of Stress - a talk by Adam Pearson, Sprout Health Foods, 730=930pm
​(free, ticketed event)

Thursday 17th May
Men and health - interactive session for anyone interested in men and health, at the Wave Project Shop, 1-230pm

Friday 18th May
Curry and Chaat - closing party and final presentation, at Newquay  Hypnotherapy, 730pm

Related links and information:

• Mental Health Awareness Week 2018
• Stress - are we coping? - points of view on stress in the UK
• Overcome fear and anxiety - a guide

More details and ticketing options can be found on our Facebook page.

I'm very excited to be joining the Yurt Academy in Brighton this week, delivering a couple of sessions on the Brain, and Positive Psychology. The Yurt Academy is all about flexible, face to face, bite-size learning - on a range of topics from the practical to the personal. You can 'learn anything and learn together' and you can also learn from some smart people ... er... that'd be me, apparently :)

I'm delighted to be invited.  A poet (now you know it). And you can find out more, book a seat, or express your demand for more courses here:

https://yurtacademy.com
https://www.facebook.com/yurtacademy/
https://twitter.com/YurtAcademy

Anyone who read my blog last year about Sandy who lost 22 lbs in 11 weeks (through self-acceptance and love, not will-power) will be pleased to hear she has achieved her goal of losing 60 lbs.  She has now achieved her target weight and she is for the first time back to the weight she was before surgery and events changed her life 10 years ago.  Bearing in mind that her surgery involved having part of her brain removed, this is a remarkable achievement. Congratulations Sandy.

At a more detailed level, this is a triumph of neuro-plasticity.  The human brain is a master of regeneration and repair. And it rebuilds itself - physically! - based on what we focus our attention on. So the choices we make are important.  Sandy chose this year to accept that she was worth looking after. She focused on herself, and her value. She decided to love and accept herself.

Sandy's story is proof that self-acceptance and love can be way more powerful than will-power. Emile Coue was a brilliant French chemist and pharmacist, but is most famous for his realising that "imagination is more powerful than the will".

What is life like when you love yourself? What do you imagine is possible?

This week only (9th-13th October 2017) to celebrate #worldmentalhealthday we are offering 50% OFF INITIAL CONSULTATIONS if booked in this week. This means a saving of £35 and also includes a free full-length audio session. Contact us this week to book in (the session itself doesn't need to be this week). #WMHDay17

The late summer has brought with it a determination amongst many people to overcome their phobias, particularly ones which limit their enjoyment of the outdoors.  The good news is that many people can and do get over even quite severe, long-standing phobias, often surprisingly quickly.

Surprising numbers of children and adults have a fear of dogs for example, and these can range from inconvenient to extremely unpleasant. Various polls suggest that a quarter of people with an animal phobia are cynophobes – they are afraid of dogs - and while more people overall are afraid of spiders or snakes, cynophobes are likely to experience their phobias more often, simply because there are so many dogs around.

Working with organisations such as www.dogfriendlycornwall.co.uk we are exploring ways to ensure that Cornwall gets even friendlier not only for dogs and their owners but for non-owners and cynophobes as well.  This should be a win-win-win.  There's no reason why all of these groups cannot peacefully and happily co-exist, even flourish.  The net gains for mental and physical wellbeing all round could be huge.  

A phobia is defined as an excessive fear, often recognised as unreasonable or irrational, which leads to avoidance and anxiety and interferes significantly with someone’s life. These fears can be learned from direct experience, observation or from 3rd-hand information or attitudes.  It’s theorised that they can also be inherited, perhaps as genetic modifications from previous generations.  Or they can be seen as a sort of evolutionary remnant - a brain function which may have made more sense in earlier, more dangerous times but which has not yet evolved away.

When undergoing treatment for a phobia it doesn’t seem to matter much where they come from.  Most successful treatment methods focus on visualisation and positive outcomes rather than examining any cause.  People can and do recover from even the most severe and long-standing phobias, often quite quickly.  Some treatments, including hypnotherapy, use techniques which relax the ‘fight-flight’ part of our mind, allowing it to learn more appropriate responses, while strengthening and activating the more rational, sensible parts of the subconscious mind.  This is a nice way to overcome a phobia, because it doesn’t require exposure.

At the Newquay Hypnotherapy practice we see a lot of people, including children, with dog, spider and other phobias.  A few lessons emerge which might be helpful for parents. 1) Trying to rationally talk someone out of a phobia doesn't work - they've definitely tried that. 2) Deliberate exposure risks making it worse. 3) More helpful strategies include: acknowledge the fear, give reassurance and try to use sensible, realistic language when talking about dogs. Maybe tell positive stories involving dogs.

Parents also report spin-off benefits from helping their children. Using positive modelling (showing good examples of response and behaviour) seems to help enormously, and not only for the people being 'modelled' to. One mother recently reported "After modelling good responses for my daughter I found my own fear completely disappearing - now I'm totally fine with spiders."

Changing our perspective can also help.  It’s worth remembering that dogs can be anxious too, and a small child at the same eye-height might be quite scary to a dog.  Renee Payne, co-author of Be a Dog's Best Friend points out that kids under the age of 5 or 6 tend to “do all the things dogs think are impolite.  Like standing still and staring."  Maybe we should think about improving our manners!  Similarly, it's worth remembering that dog owners may be quite unaware of how frightening some people may find their dogs.

I believe many answers to blossoming human-dog friendships can be found in changing the way we think.  Some professionals who work with dogs find that people seem to relate better to the dogs when they are dressed up – even just with a bandana.  Perhaps we’ll be seeing more colourful collars, coats and costumes on the dogs of Cornwall.  For the time being, we can at least imagine this, and smile - which itself might help.

I have just been awarded another qualification by the National Council of Hypnotherapy, in recognition of some extensive case studies as well as a bunch of reading, writing and supervision over the past year.  I've learned for example how neuroscience can now explain why, when it comes to achieving what we want, imagination is more powerful than than the will.  A bit like an amazing cocktail's better than a tequila shot - it's more enigmatic, evocative, interesting, and it's still there five minutes later.

On a more historical note, did you know that hypnotherapy originated in surgery?  In the days just before anaesthetics came about, a Scottish doctor named James Esdaile noticed that people manage pain and recover much better and faster  (and indeed survive more often) if they are helped to relax beforehand.  That was in the 1840s!  In the same era another Scottish surgeon, James Braid coined the term ‘hypnosis’ and for the first time placed it’s causes in the brain and psychology, as opposed to the more mysterious or external forces referred to by others before him.  To this day we're understanding more and more about pain, how it happens in the brain as much as the body, and how we can manage it using mental techniques.  Given the massive prevalence of pain - amongst the well as well as the unwell - and a wide-spread reliance on opioid painkillers, which have been shown to be often much less effective than we give them credit for, there is so much potential here.

It has been a demanding process wading through texts, discussing at length with tutors and colleagues and deepening my understanding of these great minds from the past. Achieving it is a significant step towards helping us move another step closer to being the best we can be.

Reflecting on the past and imagining the future helps get the most from the present.

A mathematician recently noted that if you take 6 standard lego blocks there are 915 million ways of putting them together.  And hence I suppose the choice:  follow the instructions, or go solo - either way you're bound to come up with something fun! Applying this to our lives, we can all no doubt remember times when things just seemed to fall into place ... when out of the hundreds of millions of possible answers we just seemed to arrive at the right one ... right?

One way to achieve more is to USE the lego sets in our brains.  There are three things we can do to make the most of the absurd collection of multicolour blocks in our heads:

1. Understand it
2. See ourselves using it, and
3. Enjoy the journey!

It is useful to understand that the brain is a bunch of lego blocks.  There are 100 billion of them and each one has thousands of connectors (known as axons and dendrites) so the possibilities are effectively endless.

This is why we need focus.  When we see ourselves doing or achieving the things we want, we are setting out specific and unambiguous instructions to the subconscious brain which acts like a perfect team saying "Ok boss, leave it to us. We'll get it done" and we are sometimes surprised at how quickly the team delivers.  Lego the company very nearly went bust in the 1990's, losing focus and control of everything from theme parks to the colours of its blocks.  A new CEO saw the future quite differently (simple colours, social input into design, girls as customers).  It's now the No.1 toy company in the world.

Finally, it's when we enjoy ourselves that we are most effective and our visions most likely to come to reality.  Enjoyment is essentially evolutionary encouragement. Positive activity, interaction and thought are enjoyable precisely because they produce chemical responses in our minds which encourage more of the same - and that's good for our survival. Perhaps the little people with removable hair and hooks for hands (who now outnumber humans in the world by the way!) are onto something - thanks to them there is now even a Professor of Play at Cambridge University.

We all have lots of lego in our heads - let's USE it!