What is anxiety?

When you think about anxious feelings for a minute, what use do you think they have? I mean, our mind-body is an incredible work of art, and every positive and negative emotion has a positive purpose. Of course, too much of anything is not necessarily good. If a person was in a constant state of bliss, it would be wonderful, but would anything be done? In a constant, steady state of bliss, would a person eat, work and play, or would motivation be gone? Is it possible to experience bliss and motivational feelings at the same time? Perhaps different types of bliss would allow this, the bliss of enjoying food and drink with all of the five senses, the bliss of doing the work you love, the bliss of constantly enjoying the presence of loved ones, and the bliss of enjoying the memory of loved ones when they are not present. Would it be then possible to experience a blissful anxiousness, or an anxious blissfulness? What use does anxiousness have? Like every other emotion, it is hardwired in. Tad James describes anxiousness as imagining a future event ending badly. Afterwards, every time a person thinks of this event, anxious feelings arise. How could that possibly be useful? People who describe functions of the mind-body, are fond of going back to prehistoric times. A hunter gatherer who has a nomadic existence, spots a lovely comfortable looking cave in the distance. It would be nice to be able to spend the night in a warm dry place, they think. However, they spot unmistakable signs of a cave lion around the cave, and the signals from the body are anxious feelings. The hunter gather imagines what happens when they meet the cave lion in the cave, and feels anxious. They decide to find a different place which is less comfortable, but safer to stay the night. This allows the anxious feelings to dissipate. However, our mind body does not differentiate between a future event that causes our death if it ends badly, or a future event that ends in embarrassment if it ends badly. The feelings associated with an imagined bad ending for a future event lead to anxious feelings. So if you feel anxious about a future event (which is not life threatening in any way!), imagine floating forward in time to fifteen minutes after the successful completion of that event, and from there looking back to now, and notice how all the events between now and then align themselves in a way that supports the successful completion of that event. The check what happened the anxious feeling. Of course, it's possible that the future event won't actually complete successfully - but that can be chalked up to experience and learning! I am just writing about standard everyday anxious feelings, and not anxious mood disorders, in which people experience truly terrible and debilitating anxiousness, which seriously detract from the quality of life, and which can require psychiatric assistance.

Go to http://www.experiencetheworlddifferent.com/ for more details, or ring Daniel Madden on 085 1318344 to arrange your free consultation.

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Parts Integration

According to some Indian traditions, the best way to achieve bliss is to become one with the universe. Bliss is a state that does not have an opposite. For example, love has an opposite emotion - not hate, but fear. Hate can be described as a desperate cry for love, fear can lead to pushing others away, love brings others closer. As more and more things happen us during life, our psyche starts to split in different ways, not like split personalities, but rather different aspects of our psyche. For example, have you ever found yourself having an internal conversation similar to the following: "Ah, go on, have that bar of chocolate, indulge yourself". And another internal voice "No chocolate - its fattening". There may even be an internal debate, usually ending in the chocolate being eaten, and probably a mixture of satisfaction and slight guilt. When parts split from our psyche, they are usually the basis for internal conflict, which uses up energy which could be used more productively. It's like using up energy in an internal tug of war, instead of using both teams to pull the rope together and move somewhere. There are different ways of working with parts to achieve harmony. One way is to negotiate with the parts, find out their purpose, and find common ground, and then find more productive ways for the parts to achieve their positive purpose. For example, there may be a part that wants to eat food all the time, when the purpose is investigated, it might be for comfort, and then ways can be found for the part to achieve the purpose of comfort in a healthier way. Another way to work with parts is called parts integration. This assumes that when a part separated from the complete whole, it's opposite also separated. When those opposite parts realise that they actually have the same highest intention, they automatically reintegrate with the complete whole, and if those parts have been responsible for destructive behaviour for a long time, the parts integration can be very profound.

Go to http://www.experiencetheworlddifferent.com/ for more details, or ring Daniel Madden on 085 1318344 to arrange your free consultation.

Free Hypnosis mp3 to help reduce stress CLICK HERE ...

Email: dmadden@experiencetheworlddifferent.com

Download an explanatory brochure HERE.

How does our brain work?

It may surprise you that how the brain works won't be explained in a blog, but perhaps a couple of interesting things can be considered. We have two hemispheres to our brains, a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. The left hemisphere largely controls the right hand side of our bodies, and roughly corresponds to our conscious mind, and controls rational thought, logic, lists, analysis, linearity, letters, numbers, seeing details. The right hemisphere largely controls the left hand side of our bodies, and roughly corresponds to our subconscious mind. It controls imagination, symbolism, dreaming, flashes of intuition, pictures, and tends to see the world as a whole without the details.

There are deeper levels of brain function, our "reptilian brain", which controls survival instincts, our "mammalian brain", which controls our emotions, and our cognitive brain which controls our thinking. Of course, we have a huge network of nerves and glands for mind body communication, and energy flow.

Our subconscious minds handle vast amounts of information every second, all the sensations, all the sights, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes, where we are in relation to everything around us. It handles all the thoughts and memories we are having also, which also fire off the sensory parts of our brain. Our subconscious minds constantly evaluate our environment, if you were to compare the volume of information bombarding us to water flow, it is like a the volume of water the Niagara falls provide every second. Our conscious minds can handle between five and nine units of information at a time, e.g how long is a phone number, and how easy is it to hold a phone number in your mind before you memorise it?

Our subconscious minds then have the job of sorting through this Niagara falls flow of information, and provide our conscious minds with a flow of information equivalent to the flow from a tap. However, it usually provides us with the most important information that is relevant at the time. For example what is the correct meaning and context of a word (whenever you become aware of a word, your subconscious has to fire off all the associations it has with that word, and provide your conscious mind with the correct meaning based on context and comparision). Even if you are deep in conversation, and ignoring everything else around you, if your subconscious was to notice a tiger, it would immediately bring it to your attention by firing off your fight/flight response.

Your fight/flight response works without emotions. Have you have ever experienced an emergency situation where you acted coolly and calmly, and after the situation had been resolved, then the emotions e.g. fear, anger kicked in? The emotions are secondary responses to the action required from flight or flight and are there for the purpose of teaching you responses to similar situations. However, what can happen is that an inappropriate emotion can get associated with an event that is actually safe, but which your subconscious has labelled as an event that is dangerous. This is an important survival mechanism for a simple world that is full of dangers, and sometimes does not serve us well in a safer but much more complex world. It is the cause of PTSD, where fear and/or anger can serve well for survival in a war situation, but are not at all useful when back in peacetime.

Go to http://www.experiencetheworlddifferent.com/ for more details, or ring Daniel Madden on 085 1318344 to arrange your free consultation.

Email: dmadden@experiencetheworlddifferent.com

Download an explanatory brochure HERE.

Under Your Control

What you can control is under your control, and what is not under your control cannot be helped. Imagine spending huge amounts of mental energy trying to control the weather, and then feeling great when its sunny, and blaming yourself and feeling stressed when it rains. Sometimes it can be comforting to know that stuff happens, and it happens for a reason. After the great depression, banking regulations were tightened up dramatically. The law can be an ass sometimes, but if there are no laws, there would be chaos. For example, everybody more or less follows the laws of their native language. If everybody made up their own language, our communication would not be very effective! Bank regulation laws that were enforced could have prevented or at least hugely reduced the current economic pit. The pit is a lot shallower and easier to fill in than the pit Ireland was in during the great famine, yet even that pit was filled in eventually. We have control over the things we can control, and it is important to separate them from the things out of our control. We now have the opportunity to develop and build skills that we would never have gained when the hosepipe of easily available finance was spraying us all.

Go to http://www.experiencetheworlddifferent.com/ for more details, or ring Daniel Madden on 085 1318344 to arrange your free consultation.

Email: dmadden@experiencetheworlddifferent.com

Download an explanatory brochure HERE.

ICHP Blog on Hypno Analytical treatment for Cancer Patients

Click the link below for the Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy (ICHP) blog on using hypno-analysis to assist in Cancer Treatment.

http://ichphypnosis.blogspot.com/2010/10/cancer-hypno-analytical-psychotherapy.html

Go to http://www.experiencetheworlddifferent.com/ for more details, or ring Daniel Madden on 085 1318344 to arrange your free consultation.

Email: dmadden@experiencetheworlddifferent.com

Download an explanatory brochure HERE.

Things you can nearly remember, but not quite

It happens to all of us. We almost know what the answer to that thing that is bugging us is, that snatch of song we keep remembering but cannot place (really annoying when you just have a snatch of melody and don't have the lyrics for googling!), a face out of context. For instance, recently on watching Love/Hate on RTE, I saw a familiar face. I knew I knew that actor well! I let my subconscious chew on it - the answer bubbled up - he was an actor on "the Wire". I checked my answer on Google. "The wire" was correct - but I had associated the face with a different character. Of course my subconscious knew the true answer, because I went "Of course", when I saw the actor in his suit, as on the Wire. Why does our subconscious do that to us? It can be embarrassing sometimes, when you cannot think of a word or name that should pop instantly to mind. Richard Bandler in his book "Frogs into Princes" once hypnotised a linguistics professor who sometimes forgot words at his classes. Richard asked the professors subconscious mind why it did this, and the answer was - "His conscious mind is too damn cocky"! Our subconscious mind can have many, many motivations for the different things it does, but its motivation always has a positive higher purpose, but it does not use logic for its reasoning!

Go to http://www.experiencetheworlddifferent.com/ for more details, or ring Daniel Madden on 085 1318344 to arrange your free consultation.

Email: dmadden@experiencetheworlddifferent.com

Download an explanatory brochure HERE.

Working Together

Do you think working with a group of people is more effective, or sometimes less effective? Does it depend on who is in the group? What will happen when the various finance spokespeople get together with the minister for finance? Compromise of even more chaos?

Sometimes just bouncing something off one other person can clarify your own thoughts, if you have to explain your thoughts to someone, you also have to explain them to yourself! Things you missed can be pointed out to you, sometimes even blindingly obvious things.

If people in a group have different agendas, there is going to be chaos. To make progress, a common goal has to be agreed upon, and then see what can be taken out of the different agendas to work towards that common goal. When everybody has the same aim, and conflict is minimized, that is called congruence.

The same goes for our inner minds. There are parts of us that control out heartbeat, breathing, respiration, senses, everything you can think of. When two parts of our mind are in conflict, the result is like a tug of war, and the stronger part wins, but even though the stronger part is winning, it still has to use a lot of wasted energy to achieve its aim. When the two parts are congruent, working towards a common agreed goal, it becomes much easier, and there is much less wasted energy and stress. 

Parts therapy is commonly used in hypnotherapy to mediate between two parts which are warring or in conflict, and to negotiate different and congruent ways to achieve goals that are beneficial to the person as a whole.

For example, it's common for one part of a person to want to stop smoking, and a stronger unconscious part that wants to keep smoking. Once both parts are congruent in their goal to be a healthy, weathier, energetic person free from that smoking habit, it becomes very easy to stop.

Go to http://www.experiencetheworlddifferent.com/ for more details, or ring Daniel Madden on 085 1318344 to arrange your free consultation.

Email: dmadden@experiencetheworlddifferent.com

Download an explanatory brochure HERE.