Overcome anxiety with Solution Focused techniques

Hi!

I’m so excited to welcome you on board and introduce you to the Calmer Mind Courses blog. My aim is to demonstrate that you can overcome anxiety for good by changing your current habits of thought and action. We’ll be looking at practical steps you can take in all aspects of your life to calm down your overthinking mind and gain a proper perspective on life’s challenges.

I promise everything I share will be positively-oriented, whether that’s the latest research from neuroscience and psychology, or simply feelgood stories that don’t make the mainstream news. Everything will be inspired by the fundamental concepts of adopting a solution focused approach to life, principles that I’ve followed all my life and were crystallised when I made a life-changing decision to change career.

In 2007 I fulfilled a lifelong ambition to find out more about how our brains work, especially the effect our minds can have on our bodies. I stumbled across a hypnotherapy course where the emphasis was very much brain-based, drawing on the latest findings from neuroscience, rather than focusing on a more mystical approach to hypnosis.

Signing on to the Hypnotherapy Practitioner Diploma course at Clifton Practice Hypnotherapy Training (CPHT) in Bristol was, quite simply, the best career move I’ve ever made. After 10 months of weekend training, supplemented by hundreds of hours of home-study and seeing dozens of volunteer clients, I qualified as a clinical hypnotherapist in August 2008.

During the course I’d learned not only what causes anxiety, depression and anger, but more importantly, how to help clients overcome these unhelpful responses for good. An unexpected bonus was that the anxiety I never knew I had disappeared completely, as a result of practising specific solution focused techniques with my fellow students.

Month after month we shared our case studies in class (anonymised of course) and were all surprised and delighted at how quickly and effectively we could transform our volunteer clients’ lives, using the techniques we learnt and practised during course weekend.

And it all hinges on neuroplasticity, the ability of our brains to forge new connections between its nerve cells. With appropriate training, our brains can learn to stop overthinking, ruminating and catastrophising, and instead learn to be calm, optimistic and upbeat. With continued practice, those new anxiety-free behaviours become embedded, so we might remember that we used to fear the worst in any situation, but we can’t think like that any more. Living life to the full, free from anxiety, becomes the new norm.

What few people realise, until they experience hypnotherapy, is that it’s not just about hypnosis. Most hypnotherapists combine a talking therapy (psychotherapy) with hypnosis to help clients achieve their desired outcome.

In our case the talking therapy is based on Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), a future-oriented process designed to move clients forward toward their preferred future, without the need to analyse their past. This approach is ideal for anyone who does not want to revisit their past, or who has already worked with an analytical therapist and has a good understanding of why they are where they are.

Solution Focused techniques are a million miles away from the more traditional Freudian-based analytical approaches that were used almost exclusively in the first half of the 20^th century. SFBT’s goal-oriented techniques sit alongside other more modern approaches like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Positive Psychology, freeing clients from their past and helping them to move forward positively. Today, the emphasis in therapy is very much on helping clients to learn skills and behaviours that will enable them to live happier, more contented and meaningful lives.

Instead of encouraging clients to replay events, behaviours and destructive thought patterns that led them to their current situation, solution focused therapy draws a line in the sand and retrains clients’ brains by subtly rehearsing how they want things to be. We do that by using only positive, solution-focused language. ‘I want to be calm,’ is much more likely to produce a positive outcome than, ‘I don’t want to be stressed.’

Since qualifying in 2008 I’ve set up a thriving hypnotherapy practice in East Devon and helped well over a thousand clients transform their experience of life. Often from anxiety so debilitating that they’ve been unable to leave their house, to living life to the full with a calm and tranquil mind.

And I’ve done this by helping them to understand that their brains can change and by training them to use the same solution focused techniques that so transformed my own life all those years ago. It’s not just about what to do to reduce anxiety, but how to do it. And that makes all the difference.

In the intervening years I’ve broadened my work as a clinical hypnotherapist by helping to establish a professional association for Solution Focused hypnotherapists, training to become a clinical supervisor and being appointed as a senior lecturer for CPHT. I was amongst the first hypnotherapists in the country to gain an Advanced Diploma in Hypnotherapy, currently the highest hypnotherapy award available in the UK.

In the blogs that follow, I’ll be sharing some of the latest research from neuroscience and psychology, as well as uplifting news from around the world. I’m looking forward to helping you see that you can live a life free from anxiety, by adopting a solution focused attitude to life’s inevitable ups and downs.

Great stuff, see you next month!