Hi I’m Amanda from the Hypnotherapy Lounge, and I’m delighted to have been asked to write a blog here. I was unsure what to write about at first, and was going to start discussing complex NLP techniques and then I thought, NO!! Lets go back to basics and talk about one of the MOST important things in life today - mental wellbeing. This is the key to living a balanced life. Hypnotherapy works dovetails into mental wellbeing beautifully because it doesn't make you think more positively; it actually changes how you perceive your old negative story, which in turn helps you think differently, and as soon as you change something, you think differently and behave differently.
I passionately believe mental wellbeing is so important it should be taught in primary school. I have done work with primary school children on mindfulness techniques and mental wellbeing and I can tell you the results were outstanding.
So if I can give you one piece of vital information about mental wellbeing here, it will be to understand the relationship between your thinking and the way you feel.
Let me be crystal clear here. When we have unhappiness or problems in our life (and we all do from time to time), these “problems” are not down to our circumstances, relationship, weight, job, friends, lack of money, parents, children or anything else outside of ourselves. The problem is ALWAYS how we deal with these issues - how we see them and how we react to them.
It's important to realise that we are constantly thinking - but don’t be fooled into believing that you know this already.
Stop and think for a moment about your breathing.
Until this moment, when you are read that last sentence, you had certainly lost sight of the fact that you were doing it. The truth is, unless you are out of breath, you simply forget that it's occurring.
Thinking works the same way. Because you're always doing it, it's easy to forget that it's happening, and it becomes invisible to you. Unlike breathing, however, forgetting that you are thinking can cause some serious problems in your life, such as unhappiness, anger, inner conflicts, and stress. The reason this is true is that your thinking will always come back to you as a feeling; there is a point to point relationship.
The fact is we live in the feeling of our thinking, not the feeling of our circumstances. Try getting angry without first having angry thoughts! Okay, now try feeling stressed out without first having stressful thoughts; or sad without sad thoughts; or jealous without thoughts of jealousy. You can't do it - it’s impossible. The truth is, in order to experience a feeling, you must first have a thought that produces that feeling.
Unhappiness doesn't and can't exist on it's own. Unhappiness is the feeling that accompanies negative thinking about your life. In the absence of that thinking, the unhappiness, or stress, or jealousy, can't exist. There is nothing to hold your negative feelings in place other than your own thinking.
You cannot fix an internal problem with an external solution - it has to come from the inside. The next time you're feeling upset, notice your thinking - it will be negative. Remind yourself that it's your thinking that is negative, not your life. This simple awareness will be the first step in putting you back on the path towards happiness. It takes practice, but you can get to the point where you treat your negative thoughts in much the same way you would treat flies at a picnic. You shoo them away, and get on with your day.
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