Everyday hypnosis

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So you get up in the morning and you feel just awful. You had too much to drink last night, the baby kept you awake, or you just didn't sleep well.

Now you've got the whole day to feel bad.

Or do you?

Here's the first way you can use hypnosis today. Go and have some breakfast - something with protein in it to keep you going longer, then sit down and do self hypnosis for just ten minutes. Do it in the bathroom when you get to work if you have to. And notice - I said sit down, not lie down - you don't want to fall asleep again - especially if you're in the bathroom at work.

Towards the end of your session, imagine yourself on a big rollercoaster to get your excitement levels up, so you come out of trance nice and bouncy and ready for the day.

So let's assume that next you start work, and that email that you haven't answered in weeks is still sitting there in your Inbox glaring at you. You have no idea how to solve the problem it presents. No matter - you resolve to make it the focus of your post-lunch hypnosis and move on.

You remember that you have a presentation to make at midday, and you get the familiar lurch in the pit of your stomach. You've done your preparation, but you know you're going to feel horribly nervous before it. This time though, you resolve to do a 15 minute relaxed rehearsal in hypnosis before it starts. Because you've practised self hypnosis you know you'll be able to get yourself so calm, there's no way you'll get as nervous as before.

The day goes on and you use your hypnosis as planned. The presentation is much more comfortable - you even found yourself enjoying it. And after lunch, when your body is crying out for relaxation, you did a short session fo-cusing on that email problem, and lo and behold - your unconscious mind popped up a creative solution. A solution so neat in fact, that you know you'll be commended for it, and you make a mental note that you're much more creative in hypnosis, and you must use it more often.

Early afternoon, after your break, you marvel at how good you are feeling despite your awful night's sleep and decide to tackle the backlog of email stacked up in your Inbox. For the next hour your focus is total, you are undistractable, and you clear an immense amount of fiddly work. Then, still feeling in the zone, you write the first draft of a proposal you have been thinking about for a few days.

By now your mental reserves are flagging with the classic mid-afternoon dip. Knowing how your brain fluctuates between left and right hemispheric dominance, you are aware that you need to take a break. Instead of sitting down to do self hypnosis, you go for a walk and deliberately keep your thoughts off work. Self hypnosis has taught you to take control of the contents of your thoughts. Instead, you let your mind drift, until after ten minutes or so, you suddenly remember that you have a report to be in by five o'clock. Once again, given some quiet time, your unconscious mind has come to your rescue.

Suitably refreshed by your break, you race back to your desk and rattle off the report during that last hour of work. Again you take a moment to reflect how that last hour used to be dead time before you learnt how to manage your brain better.

On your way out of the office, you think about whether you can be bothered going to the gym. But then you remember that's a pretty poor way to motivate yourself. So instead you focus on how good you are going to feel in an hour's time going home after an hour's workout, and without any more thinking, you're there, exercising hard.

Now of course, your day may not be quite like this, and you might not be able to use hypnosis in any of these ways. But I'm sure you can see the flexibility of hypnosis and its relevance to your own life. Hypnosis provides a problem-solving tool par-excellence and if you are creative enough you can apply it to almost any problem.

Whether it's dealing with a difficult person, helping yourself or others through illness, creating new business ideas, or just things to do with your child, hypnosis is an astonishingly powerful tool. And it's your birthright - use it.

Roger Elliott

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