Posts Tagged ‘Cognitive hypnotherapy’

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Video Games Can Encourage Positive Behavior, Too

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

With so much bad press for video games and the people who partake in them, this article  from Miller-McCune makes a refreshing change

 By: Tom Jacobs  |  March 27, 2009  |  01:07 PM (PDT)  |  

 

If violent video games encourage violent behavior, as a series of studies suggests, do prosocial games — those that reward helpful behavior — inspire players to act in more constructive, cooperative ways? A newly published paper, featuring studies of three different age groups in three different countries, suggests the answer is yes.

“Video games are not inherently good or bad,” concludes the team of 12 researchers led by psychologist Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University. Their findings suggest this popular form of entertainment “can have both positive and negative effects.”

The paper, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, begins with a survey of secondary school students in Singapore (adolescents in the equivalent of seventh or eighth grade). They listed their favorite games, the number of hours they spend playing them each week and how often the games involve a) helping others, or b) hurting or killing others.

They were then asked a series of questions to measure their emotional awareness and empathy for others. After controlling for several variables, “prosocial game exposure was positively related to prosocial behavior,” the researchers report.

The second survey was of fifth-, eighth- and eleventh-grade students in Japan. They were asked how often in the past month they had played games in which characters help troubled people, or games in which friendship or a positive parent-child relationship was featured.

Finally, the youngsters were asked how often in the previous month they had acted in one of four specific helpful ways (such as “I helped a person who was in trouble”). The researchers discovered a strong relationship between playing prosocial games and self-reported prosocial behavior.

For the third study, the researchers conducted an experiment using 161 American college students, who were randomly assigned to play specific parts of one of six video games. Two of the games were violent (Ty2 and Crash Trinsanity), two were neutral (Pure Pinball and Super Monkey Ball Deluxe), and two were deemed prosocial: Chibi Robo, in which the goal is to make your family happy by cleaning up and helping out with the chores; and Super Mario Sunshine, in which players gain points by cleaning up a polluted island.

After playing one of the games for 20 minutes, participants were asked to assign a partner 11 puzzles to complete. They were told that if their partners completed 10 of the puzzles within 10 minutes, the partner would win a $10 gift certificate. They could choose puzzles from one of three difficulty levels, depending upon whether they were disposed to help their partner win the prize, or to place difficulties in his or her path.

The researchers found that “participants who played a prosocial game helped their partners significantly more than did either those who had played a violent game, or those who had played a neutral game.” Furthermore, “the violent gamers hurt their partners significantly more than did either those who had played a prosocial game or those who had played a neutral game.”

Taken together, the three studies found that “prosocial game play was significantly positively related to all four measured prosocial behaviors and traits” — helping behavior, cooperation and sharing, empathy and emotional awareness. These findings complement a 2008 study from Britain that found listening to songs with prosocial lyrics encourages charitable behavior.

According to Gentile and his colleagues, these results “make it clear how critical it is to separate amount of play from the content of play.” In other words, video game playing per se isn’t the issue: Rather, the important factor is the underlying messages contained in specific games.

“Content matters,” they conclude, “and games are excellent teachers.”

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Posted in Cognitive hypnotherapy, Training, brain, brain fitness, learning, mind, performance, positive psychology | 1 Comment »

Kids with ADHD May Learn Better by Fidgeting

Thursday, March 26th, 2009

This article published on March 25th 2009, in Time, Health & Science talks about a four year study which suggests that a better approach (than some of the medications currently prescibed)  for ADHD children (at least those who are not hyperactive to the point of breaking things) is to let them move around as much as they would like.

Cognitive Hypntherapy and NLP have long suggested that we need to work at our clients pace and allow them to do it their way, not our way. We, as therapists know that all behaviour has a purpose. It’s good to find our that studies back up our therories.

Here is the article. Hope you find it interesting.

www.anitamitchell.co.uk

 

By John Cloud

Like nose-picking and a preoccupation with feculence, the inability to sit still for long periods is a defining characteristic of childhood. But children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often squirm constantly, even when other kids can remain still. Many parents and teachers respond by trying to get ADHD kids, at any cost, to stop fidgeting. The assumption is that if they could just stop wriggling, they would be able to focus and learn.

But a new study suggests that a better approach for ADHD kids (at least those who are not hyperactive to the point of breaking things) is to let them move all they want. That’s because many kids use their movements — like swiveling in a chair or folding a leg underneath themselves and bouncing in a desk seat or repeatedly lolling and righting their head — the way many adults use caffeine: to stay focused. In other words, it may be that excessive movement doesn’t prevent learning but actually facilitates it. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)

Longtime ADHD researcher Mark Rapport supervised the study, which is set to be published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. Rapport, a professor at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, notes that our activity level — how much we move around in everyday situations — is one of the most fixed parts of our personalities. If you are a fidgety kid, you will be a fidgety adult, even if you learn to manage your movements with caffeine, stress-reduction, a personal trainer or other adult accoutrements.

The idea that stimulants like caffeine (or Ritalin or even something stronger like cocaine) can help you sit still and pay attention seems counterintuitive at first. But that surprising fact lies at the heart of Rapport’s work: stimulants augment your working, or short-term, memory, where information is stored temporarily and used to carry out deliberate tasks like, say, solving a challenging math problem. ADHD kids have a hard time with working memory because they lack adequate cortical arousal, and Rapport believes that their squirms and fidgets help stimulate that arousal.

His study was small — just 23 boys ages 8 to 12 participated — but uncompromisingly meticulous; it took four years to complete. Twelve of the boys had an ADHD diagnosis. The other 11 were developing normally. All underwent a battery of tests at Rapport’s lab over four consecutive Saturdays.

Since I’ve always been fidgety, I asked Rapport if he wouldn’t mind putting me through the same tests he gave the boys. And so last week I found myself at the UCF Psychology Department, where a grad student affixed a device called an actigraph to my left wrist. Actigraphs look like digital watches and generate a signal each time they are moved, even slightly. They allow researchers to measure, quite precisely, a subject’s kinetic activity. The boys in Rapport’s experiments wore actigraphs on their ankles as well as their wrists because kids are often just as twitchy below the waist as above. (See the most common hospital mishaps.)

Wearing the actigraph, I sat before a computer in a small windowless room and took working-memory tests. For one test, I had to recite aloud a series of numbers that appeared on the screen. I was asked not only to remember the numbers but also to restate them in proper numerical order. So if I saw 4, then 3, then 1, then 8, I had to say, “One, three, four, eight.” Each series of numbers also included a random letter, which I had to state at the end: “One, three, four, eight, D.”

At first the test sounded simple, not least because I knew an 8-year-old could ostensibly complete it. But I found it quite difficult. Working-memory tests require intense concentration, and I was distracted because I was nervous. Rapport, several of his grad students, a UCF public relations official and a friend of mine were all watching me through an open doorway while I performed the tests. I ended up scoring worse than some of Rapport’s kids.

My experience of being nervous was instructive because it mimicked, in a way, the cognitive strain under which an ADHD kid takes such tests. ADHD compromises the brain’s executive functioning — its ability to master unexpected exercises. The same way I got nervous, ADHD kids get momentarily lost, their attention fractured for a few seconds. Think about when you’re reading and get to the end of a paragraph and realize you haven’t been paying attention: that’s what it’s like for ADHD kids, all the time. My actigraph scores confirmed that I wasn’t operating normally for a 38-year-old adult. Instead, during the experiment, I displayed the involuntary body movements of a typical 12-year-old boy. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

Rapport also conducted a control experiment with the boys in which they watched the pod-racing scene from Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. He showed me a video of a couple of the boys watching the scene, and I was shocked: even the ADHD kids who had spun around endlessly during their cognitive tests sat perfectly still while they watched the pod race. The film clip required almost no working memory, no concentrated effort. The scene simply washed over the passively watching boys, none of whom had to move around to stay alert.

Which suggests a classroom technique for ADHD kids: Don’t overly tax their working memory. Rapport, who used to be a school psychologist, says the average teacher doesn’t understand how ADHD kids process information. “If you go into a typical classroom,” he told me, “you might hear, ‘Take out the book. Turn to page 23. Do items 1 through 8, but don’t do 5.’ And you’ve just given them four or five directions. The child with working-memory problems has dropped three of them, and so he’s like, ‘Page 23 — what I am supposed to do?’ ” Similarly, a parent might tell a kid, “Take my keys, go to the car, get your sister’s toy, and before you go, take the trash with you.” The ADHD kid will get to the car without remembering what else to do. Their instructions must be broken down carefully because their working memory is weak.

When I asked Rapport whether there’s a cure other than breaking down instructions, his answer was a bit depressing: no. ADHD is incurable. Drugs like Ritalin are a common answer for controlling the condition, which affects about 3% to 5% of children, but Rapport notes that they have proven to be only a limited solution. In the short term, they can facilitate a child’s ability to read — undoubtedly a crucial benefit — but Rapport says longitudinal studies have failed to show that Ritalin or other psychostimulants have consistent long-term behavioral effects. (Even if they did, another question would arise: Would you want to be dependent on a stimulant for the rest of your life?) Rapport hopes that his work will lead to the development of early behavioral and cognitive interventions that could help the youngest ADHD kids recognize, predict and somehow avoid ADHD’s concentration gaps.

Such research is in its infancy, though, and if you have a child with ADHD, it’s important to understand that he processes the world in a different way. He might be (literally) running circles around you, but that may be his way of paying attention.

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Think ahead, live longer

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

This article published in ABC Health and Wellbeing is very much in keeping with thoughts from Cognitive Hypnotherapy – imagine the future you want, and then allow the unconscious mind to guide you towards it (whilst doing a little work along the way to help the process, of course! See my website for details www.anitamitchell.co.uk):

The Pulse

by Peter Lavelle

People who plan ahead and think of the future are often healthier than those living for the here-and-now, argues a prominent US psychologist. Published 12/03/2009 

Do you live for the present, without worrying about tomorrow? Do you view the future through the prism of what’s happened to you in the past? Or do you keep one eye on the future in everything you do? Whichever you do, will impact directly on your health, argues US psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo, Emeritus Professor at Stanford University, is the author of a new book The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life. In it he argues people tend to make decisions based on whether they are orientated to the past, present or future. Some people are dominated by their past experiences and this influences how they make decisions now. These past experiences may be positive – family or cultural traditions or rewards for good things they’ve done in the past – or they may be negative events – past traumas influencing what they do in the present. People with post-traumatic stress syndrome have been negatively influenced by their past. Other people are orientated towards the present. They seek immediate rewards, without much thought for the future, and are influenced by their body sensations and physiology (hunger, thirst, desire for sex etc) or what their peer group is doing. Rather than plan ahead, these people often rely on luck or fate and they tend to have lower levels of impulse control and emotional stability. Zimbardo says people who have addictions are very often present-thinkers, as are gamblers or those who run up credit card debts. Then there are people who are focused on the future, these people think of the consequences of their actions. They are good at controlling their egos and impulses; are conscientious, consistent, non-aggressive, and have low levels of depression. In reality we all have a bit of past, present and future orientation, but we tend to be skewed to one and underuse the others, says Zimbardo. He argues your time perspective may depend on many things including the climate you live in, your religion, your education (more educated people tend to be more future thinking), your gender (women are more future thinking than men), what income you earn (poorer people tend to be more present-orientated) and your age. In fact, we are all born present-thinkers, but become more focused on the future as we age, often in response to pressure from society. Many of the stories, nursery rhymes and games we play as kids encourage us to be forward-thinking; as does school and higher education. But being totally future-oriented is also unhealthy, says Zimbardo. Excessive emphasis on the future causes anxiety in the here and now, (as to how things might turn out) which can lead to social isolation and performance anxiety (especially anxiety about sexual performance). This is where present-oriented thinkers have some advantages; they make friends easily (being the ‘life of the party’), they are creative thinkers and have plenty of energy to enable them to achieve their goals. Being past-oriented (especially if your past experiences are positive) also has some advantages. Your family or culture may give you a sense of identity and continuity and provide you with positive role models. So what we need is a balance of all three ways of thinking. Healthy future So what does all this have do with your health? Zimbardo suggests there’s a very strong correlation between future orientation and health – the more future-oriented you are, the healthier you’ll be and the longer you’re likely to live. Research published in the British Journal of Health Psychology last month supports Zimbardo’s theory. Studies show people who are future thinkers tend to use drugs less, and adopt safe sex practices, the researchers say. Future thinkers also tend to be less likely to smoke and have healthier body mass indices, they conclude, after studying a group of about 400 people who answered questions about their health and lifestyles and who also underwent psychological testing including the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZPTI) – a questionnaire Zimbardo helped develop in 1999 to test how people’s time perspective affects their decision making. (If you’re curious about which orientation you might be, do Zimbardo’s inventory yourself – just follow the link at the bottom of this page). On the other hand, other studies have shown that future-thinking doesn’t have much effect on whether people will get vaccinated, or stick to taking blood pressure or cholesterol medications. So future-thinking seems to be a factor in changing some behaviour but not others, say the British researchers. Getting the message out One of the challenges facing policymakers and health workers in preventative health is how to get people to forego junk food, drugs and alcohol, a sedentary lifestyle, for rewards that may be long into the future. But some public health messages may not be reaching their intended audience, says Zimbardo. Anti-drug campaigns warning of the future health risks of drug taking, for example, may be doomed to failure because their target audience (people inclined to use drugs) often live in the present and won’t listen to messages about the future. Peter Sainsbury, an Adjunct Professor of Public Health at Sydney University, agrees one of the challenges of mounting an effective public health program is to get people to change their behaviour for long-term benefits. “So you may need to give them a reason to change their behaviour in the here-and-now,” says Sainsbury. “For example, smokers may be more likely to quit if they think there’s an immediate benefit – better smelling breath, more success with the opposite sex for example, rather than the promise of better health twenty years from now.”

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Sleep is needed to form memories

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

Sleep is something we all need! If  you need help having a good nights sleep take a look at my website to find out how I might help www.anitamitchell.co.uk.

From examiner, posted on 11/02/09

First-of-its-kind study shows how brain connections strengthen during sleep

PHILADELPHIA – If you ever argued with your mother when she told you to get some sleep after studying for an exam instead of pulling an all-nighter, you owe her an apology, because it turns out she’s right. And now, scientists are beginning to understand why.

In research published this week in Neuron, Marcos Frank, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, postdoctoral researcher Sara Aton, PhD, and colleagues describe for the first time how cellular changes in the sleeping brain promote the formation of memories.

“This is the first real direct insight into how the brain, on a cellular level, changes the strength of its connections during sleep,” Frank says.

The findings, says Frank, reveal that the brain during sleep is fundamentally different from the brain during wakefulness.  

“We find that the biochemical  changes are simply not happening in the neurons of animals that are awake,” Frank says. “And when the animal goes to sleep it’s like you’ve thrown a switch, and all of a sudden, everything is turned on that’s necessary for making synaptic changes that form the basis of memory formation. It’s very striking.”

The team used an experimental model of cortical plasticity – the rearrangement of neural connections in response to life experiences. “That’s fundamentally what we think the machinery of memory is, the actual making and breaking of connections between neurons,” Frank explains

In this case, the experience Frank and his team used was visual stimulation. Animals that were young enough to still be establishing neural networks in response to visual cues were deprived of stimulation through one eye by covering that eye with a patch. The team then compared the electrophysiological and molecular changes that resulted with control animals whose eyes were not covered. Some animals were studied immediately following the visual block, while others were allowed to sleep first.

From earlier work, Frank’s team already knew that sleep induced a stronger reorganization of the visual cortex in animals that had an eye patch versus those that were not allowed to sleep. Now they know why.

A molecular explanation is emerging. The key cellular player in this process is a molecule called N-methyl D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR), which acts like a combination listening post and gate-keeper. It both receives extracellular signals in the form of glutamate and regulates the flow of calcium ions into cells.

Essentially, once the brain is triggered to reorganize its neural networks in wakefulness (by visual deprivation, for instance), intra- and intercellular communication pathways engage, setting a series of enzymes into action within the reorganizing neurons during sleep.

To start the process, NMDAR is primed to open its ion channel after the neuron has been excited. The ion channel then opens when glutamate binds to the receptor, allowing calcium into the cell. In turn, calcium, an intracellular signaling molecule, turns other downstream enzymes on and off.

Some neural connections are strengthened as a result of this process, and the result is a reorganized visual cortex. And, this only happens during sleep.

“To our amazement, we found that these enzymes never really turned on until the animal had a chance to sleep,” Frank explains, “As soon as the animal had a chance to sleep, we saw all the machinery of memory start to engage.” Equally important was the demonstration that inhibition of these enzymes in the sleeping brain completely prevented the normal reorganization of the cortex.

Frank stresses that this study did not examine recalling memories. For example, these animals were not being asked to remember the location of their food bowl. “It’s a mechanism that we think underlies the formation of memory.” And not only memory; the same mechanism could play a role in all neurological plasticity processes.

As a result, this study could pave the way to understanding, on a molecular level, why humans need sleep, and why they are so affected by the lack of it. It could also conceivably lead to novel therapeutics that could compensate for the lack of sleep, by mimicking the molecular events that occur during sleep.

Finally, the study could lead to a deeper understanding of human memory. Though how and even where humans store long-lasting memories remains a mystery, Frank says, “we do know that changes in cortical connections is at the heart of the mystery. By understanding that in animal models, it will bring us close to understanding how it works in humans.”

 

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Slow Starvation of Brain Triggers Alzheimer's

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

www.anitamitchell.co.uk

By LiveScience Staff

posted: 24 December 2008 01:06 pm ET

 

A slow starvation of the brain over time is one of the major triggers of the biochemistry that causes some forms of Alzheimer’s, according to a new study that is helping to crack the mystery of the disease’s origins.

An estimated 10 million baby boomers will develop Alzheimer’s in their lifetime, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. The disease usually begins after age 60, and risk rises with age. The direct and indirect cost of Alzheimer’s and other dementias is about $148 billion a year.

Robert Vassar of Northwestern University, the study’s lead author, found that when the brain doesn’t get enough of the simple sugar called glucose — as might occur when cardiovascular disease restricts blood flow in arteries to the brain — a process is launched that ultimately produces the sticky clumps of protein that appear to be a cause of Alzheimer’s.

Working with human and mice brains, Vassar discovered that a key brain protein is altered when the brain’s supply of energy drops. The altered protein, called eIF2alpha, increases the production of an enzyme that, in turn, flips a switch to produce the sticky protein clumps.

“This finding is significant because it suggests that improving blood flow to the brain might be an effective therapeutic approach to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s,” Vassar said.

The best ways to improve blood flow to the brain and thereby reduce the chances of getting Alzheimer’s is to reduce cholesterol intake, manage high blood pressure and exercise, especially entering mid-life.

“If people start early enough, maybe they can dodge the bullet,” Vassar said. For people who already have symptoms, vasodilators, which increase blood flow, may help the delivery of oxygen and glucose to the brain, he added. The study is published in the Dec. 26 issue of the journal Neuron.

No candy bars

When it comes to prevention of Alzheimer’s, eating candy bars is not the solution to improving the flow of blood glucose to the brain, Vassar told LiveScience.

A decreasing blood flow to the brain happens over time, as we age, and that slowly starves the brain of glucose. This could be a general aging phenomenon, or it could be that some individuals are particularly prone to it, Vassar said. Also, decreased blood flow is associated with atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, and hypertension, or high blood pressure.

“We need to improve our cardiovascular health, not eat more sugar,” Vassar said. “What is coming out in terms of the epidemiological studies is that exercise during mid-life is one of the best prevention strategies for Alzheimer’s disease, so people should stay active physically, and they should watch their diets and reduce cholesterol intake, because cholesterol contributes to atherosclerosis, and that is true for the heart and the rest of the body as well as for the brain.”

Vassar said it also is possible that drugs could be designed to block the elF2alpha protein that begins the formation of the protein clumps, known as amyloid plaques.

Earlier Alzheimer’s findings

Ten years ago, Vassar discovered the enzyme, BACE1, that was responsible for making the sticky, fiber-like clumps of protein that form outside neurons and disrupt their ability to send messages.

But the cause of the high levels of the protein in people with the disease has been unknown. Vassar’s new study now shows that energy deprivation in the brain might be the trigger starting the process that forms plaques in Alzheimer’s.

Vassar said his work suggests that Alzheimer’s disease may result from a less severe type of energy deprivation than occurs in a stroke. Rather than dying, the brain cells react by increasing BACE1, which may be a protective response in the short term, but harmful in the long term.

“A stroke is a blockage that prevents blood flow and produces cell death in an acute, dramatic event,” Vassar said. “What we are talking about here is a slow, insidious process over many years where people have a low level of cardiovascular disease or atherosclerosis in the brain. It’s so mild, they don’t even notice it, but it has an effect over time because it’s producing a chronic reduction in the blood flow.”

Vassar said when people reach a certain age, some may get increased levels of the enzymes that cause a build-up of the plaques. “Then they start falling off the cliff,” he said.

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The Observer on Sunday Part II

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Part II of the article in The Observer newspaper on Sunday 6th July 2008.

Teach yourself self-hypnosis

Cognitive hypnotherapist Katie Abbott suggests some positive-thinking techniques that can be tried by anyone, anytime, anywhere 

 

 

Sometimes in life, we feel or act as though we’re in a trance. We do things or feel things we know aren’t good for us, but we carry on doing them regardless. Cognitive hypnotherapy works to take you out of that trance, to dehypnotise you so that you are free to be the way you want to be. Whether you’re at home, at work or on holiday, these simple self – hypnosis exercises will enable you to perform simple mind maintenance …
Article continues

Learn self-hypnosisThis can be done any time, anywhere, and is a great way to combat stress, re-energise or bring yourself out of a negative mood …

1. Breathe slowly, deeply and evenly from your stomach, not your chest.

2. With every exhale, say a word that represents the way you want to feel. For example, say “calm” or “energised”.

3. Recall a comforting image or memory from your past. Vividly re-experience it, remembering the sights, sounds and smells around you. Was it warm or cold? Were there any intense colours, or perhaps a scent in the air?

4. Try adding your own elements to this – add to the surroundings or environment to make it even more comforting. Practise this for three to five minutes a couple of times a week, and enjoy the benefits it can bring you.

Acting “as if”

There are no physiological differences between real and acted emotions. When you watch a film you may cry if there is an emotional scene, or you may cover your eyes during a frightening scene. You know that these are actors and the story is fictional, yet your mind and body still react as if they are real – your emotions are affected by your imagination. In the same way, acting as if you are happy can allow your brain to believe you are actually happy. The steps to achieve this are simple …

1. If you want to try to change your mood, just remember to act “as if” it were different.

2. If you feel nervous and tense, act as if you are confident and relaxed. If you want, you can even act as if you are someone else – whoever you want to be. Almost immediately, your physiology and mood may alter – it’s that simple.

Rehearsal

If at any time you are faced with a future event you are concerned about, such as an important meeting or interview, rehearsal is a quick way to change your instinctive or emotional response to that situation. This very simple (and very effective) technique conditions you to associate a comforting feeling with the event you are anxious about …

1. Start breathing deeply to encourage a feeling of relaxation.

2. Rehearse the event as if you were at your very best, from the beginning through to its successful completion. Don’t worry, you are not aiming for an Oscar.

3. Imagine there’s a cinema screen in front of you, on which you can see, hear and feel yourself being exactly the way you would like. Enjoy watching yourself in this state, and look forward to a future where you can always be like this.

Tasks

Being given a task can open up many new possibilities for yourself and those around you. The benefits manifest themselves in many surprising ways. Tasks can be tailored to suit individuals, but here are a couple everyone can try.

Random acts of kindness

Try performing one act of kindness a day. It could be buying a plant for a colleague’s desk, or simply making a cup of tea for someone.

Observe humanity

Sit in a cafe alone for no other reason than to observe passers by. Look at the people and things around you. Just observe life as it passes by, and see what you notice.

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The Observer on Sunday Part I

Monday, July 7th, 2008

This article appeared as part of a supplement to the Observer on Sunday newspaper for 6th July 2008

 

Cognitive hypnotherapy

Cognitive hypnotherapy provides overworked minds with the toolkit they need to fix their own stresses and strains. It is based on modern psychology and neuroscience and, don’t worry, there’s not a pendulum in sight …
Sunday July 6, 2008 
 

 

What is it?Chances are, when you think of hypnotherapy, you either imagine a swinging pocket watch or a hapless audience member being made to cluck like a chicken on stage in the name of entertainment. Neither of these preconceptions is true. Cognitive hypnotherapy combines cognitive behavioural therapy and hypnosis with theories based on modern neuroscience.

We all go into natural hypnotic trances every day without even knowing it. It’s comparable to being so absorbed in a book or film that the hours seem to fly by, or being in a meeting where your mind has wandered. It is this natural state of mind that is used in cognitive hypnotherapy. You never lose control and are certainly never put under the control of anyone else. Practitioner Katie Abbott explains: “There are no over-the-top, annoying motivational speeches or long, arduous hours of difficult analysis. Cognitive hypnotherapy is just an extremely effective way of making positive change.”

 


Is there any evidence?Controlled trials have shown that hypnosis can reduce anxiety (particularly before medical procedures), although there is still some doubt that the hypnotic state actually exists. In the past five years, however, scientific research has become more credible, thanks to the latest brain imaging technology; brain scans now prove that hypnotised subjects are more susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. In one study, volunteers were given hypnotic suggestions to “see in colour”. Scans showed that areas of the brain associated with colour perception were activated, even though the pictures they were looking at were black and white.

Where does it come from?

In the 18th century, Austrian doctor Franz Anton Mesmer used magnets to practise a form of hypnotism (hence “mesmerising”). His patients claimed they felt no pain while being treated under his trance. Mesmer was later dismissed as a charlatan, but his methods have since been investigated and developed into the form of hypnotherapy we know today.

In 2001, Trevor Silvester set up the Quest Institute (questinstitute.co.uk) and introduced the idea of combining hypnosis with cognitive behavioural therapy, tools from positive psychology, cognitive theory and neuro-linguistic programming.

Who can do it?

“We all see the world in different ways, so hypnotherapy works to readjust your particular frame of reference,” Abbott says. “There’s no one way to treat stress or to encourage relaxation, it all depends on the way you see things – your model of the world. As part of a session, the client is supplied with a toolkit for the mind. This enables them to use different tools to fix different mental states.”

So the theory is that everyone has the capacity to adopt new mental tools, and anyone can be hypnotised. The only prerequisite is to be open to the process.

What results can I expect?

Usually, cognitive hypnotherapy needs two or three sessions in which the foundations for change are effectively put in place, although you are likely to feel relaxed after just one session.

According to Katie Abbott: “Most people report a change after their first meeting. It’s a change of mindset, the move towards a goal. Hypnotherapy can teach you how to control your body’s responses and reactions, and anchor you in calm when you become worried.”

Contra-indications

The hypnotic state is not dangerous, but people with severe depression, psychosis or epilepsy should consult their doctor before seeing a hypnotherapist.

How was it for you?
Kate Abbott (worrier)

I never thought hypnotherapy would be the thing to calm me down, but that’s what Katie Abbott has done for me, Kate Abbott. As I approached the treatment room, I panicked. What if I actually do lose my (self-diagnosed as endearing) neuroses? Or, scarier still: what if my namesake steals my identity?

But as soon as I was ushered into Katie’s Harley Street haven, I realised she wasn’t going to brainwash me like the horror movie reel running through my mind. The session started with a simple chat. We discussed our goal of relaxation versus my reality as a worrier. What followed was an hour of gentle conversation that induced a state of complete calm.

Throughout the session, I was unsure if I was “hypnotised” or just had a case of the cathartics, but I submitted entirely, visualising my past, present and future from a different perspective (“It’s OK not to be perfect”, I tell my 11-year-old self).

The result of this enlightening delve into my personal timeline is the self-hypnosis that I now practise at home. Katie asked me to concentrate on the present moment and to call to mind three things I could hear, three things I could see and three things I think about regularly, and comment on them. As I told Katie about he-who-shall-not-be-named, any angst I’ve ever experienced about relationships, past or imminent, eased off.

I didn’t care when I stumbled out on to Oxford Street moments after my session (I have been known to cry in the face of teeming crowds), and I didn’t experience so much as a sweaty palm onboard a plane the next day. I was in control, calm and confident.

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Lisa Butcher boosts her confidence with Cognitive Hypnotherapy

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

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Lias Butcher is one of the presenters of the BBC’s What Not To Wear. She recently began a new monthly column in the Mail on Sunday magazine, You. In it she reveals that she visited a Quest-trained Cognitive Hypnotherapist to boost her confidence in front of camera.

In her words,“When I started work on What Not To Wear at the BBC, the clothes I wore were important, but that was not enough to give me the confidence I needed. I discovered a solution in cognitive hypnotherapy/ neuro-linguistic programming with the Quest Institute. I went to two sessions and that was enough to build up my strengths and deal with my anxieties.”

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Cognitive Hypnotherapy as part of CBT

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

This is a reproduction of Trevor Silvester’s blog regarding CBT and how Cognitive Hypnotherapy fits into its model. Trevor is a Director of The Quest Institute – the home of Cognitive Hypnotherapy who train therapists to an extremely high standard. More infomation is available at www.questinstitute.co.uk. 
Trevor writes:
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is an umbrella term that covers a number of different therapies that share common elements, such as Cognitive Therapy, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and Motivational Enhancement Therapy. Cognitive Hypnotherapy is another approach that fits under this umbrella, which is pleasing having heard the news that the Government is going to spend £170 million on making this approach more available to the public. At the same time our approach has several things that differentiate it from most other forms of CBT, which we think offer useful alternatives. Let’s begin with the similarities:CBT approaches assume an interaction between how we think (cognition), how we feel (emotion) and how we act (behaviour).
Our thoughts can influence our feelings and behaviour – if you’re thinking about something pleasant your overall mood improves and you’re more likely to engage in productive behaviours.
Our emotions can influence our thoughts and behaviour – if someone upsets you at work those feelings are likely to impact on your thinking about other things going on in your life, and how you behave ‘in the moment’. Our emotions act like lenses that colour everything we experience.
Our behaviour can influence our thoughts and emotions. Research has shown that changing our physiology can change our emotional state and the quality of our thoughts. If you’re nervous, but stand as you would if you were feeling confident, you will feel better and be able to think more clearly.This inter-relationship suggests that change in one area is likely to bring change in the others.
Most CBT approaches emphasise the primacy of our thoughts in creating our problems, an example of which is their utilisation of a model developed by one of the founders of this approach, Albert Ellis. The ABC model, as it’s called, suggests that an Activating Event (a situation you find yourself in) triggers a Belief you have about that situation (in therapeutic situations usually negative and limiting beliefs about yourself, the world, or the future) which leads to the Consequence – the disturbed feelings or dysfunctional behaviours that arise as a result of this cognitive process.

Beliefs are thoughts we have about situations, and CBT makes a distinction between conscious thoughts, and automatic thoughts. The latter are thoughts we have no control over. Most CBT approaches work to bring these automatic thoughts to light (i.e. make them conscious) in order to contest their usefulness, often by keeping a journal and using questioning techniques to logically deconstruct the negative thoughts. This ‘contesting’ of beliefs is often accompanied by behavioural tasks; in the case of someone with a fear of germs and infection, for example, they might be made to wash their hair in the toilet (as seen on the programme The House of OCD).

Where Cognitive Hypnotherapy differs is in its emphasis on two things; the existence of an adaptive unconscious, and the presence of trance states in our life generally, and in our problems, specifically.

The Adaptive Unconscious

Nowadays we use ‘the unconscious’ as a figure of speech without giving it a thought, and largely accept its presence, again without giving it much thought. However, neuroscience and other scientific fields are finding more and more evidence to suggest that it plays a huge role in our daily functioning, and is capable of acting independently of the conscious – that part of us that believes it chose to read this article. We use the term adaptive to make the point that the unconscious is purposeful, its actions aren’t random or baseless. Every thought and action the unconscious generates has a reason. Which is why Cognitive Hypnotherapy completely accepts that we have conscious thoughts and that we have what were termed earlier, automatic thoughts – but we pay much more attention to the unconscious processes that create the latter. Professor Timothy Wilson suggests that we all have two personalities, our conscious self and our adaptive unconscious. Both meet Allport’s definition of a personality. Both have distinctive, characteristic ways of interpreting the social environment, and stable motives that guide people’s behaviours. We believe that change needs to occur through the unconscious, because that’s where the mental miscalculations we call our problems are created and manifested, and why logically understanding your problem does little to change it. The unconscious does not use the rules of logic to make its decisions.

We also contend that emotions are the ‘language’ of the unconscious, and precede consciousness. The emotional centres (the limbic system) in the brain have twice as many connections leading to the cortex (our ‘thinking’ area) as the cortex has leading to the limbic system. This isn’t surprising because the limbic system evolved long before the cortex and explains why, in situations assessed by the brain as negative, threatening or unpleasant, we tend to get emotionally hijacked and feel as if we’ve lost control of our actions until the situation changes. From this comes one of our key presuppositions – all behaviour has a purpose. Our unconscious has a purpose behind the behaviour it generates, and that purpose is a positive intention. Our personal problems often feel as if they’re designed to make us miserable, but, when you think of it, why would that have any evolutionary benefit?

We believe that such problems are ‘programming blunders’, errors made using normal rules of thumb the brain has used over millions of years to help us survive. An example would be the child who is shouted at by a teacher for getting a sum wrong. Children are primed to avoid the withdrawal of approval (in the cave it could lead to death), so in some children this situation could trigger the rule of thumb designed to protect them from this situation – they’ll try to work out how to go about avoiding this consequence. One child might withdraw from situations that could lead to a similar consequence and become an underachiever who avoids anything they could fail at. Another child might over-compensate by never being satisfied with anything less than perfection. Both are likely to grow up unhappy as a result of a calculation designed to keep them safe. A third child’s brain might not connect the teacher’s behaviour to this rule – it isn’t seen as a threat, and so doesn’t develop any compensatory behaviour. But at lunchtime the dinner lady tells her she’s a ‘fat little pig’ for taking a second desert…

Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, our brains don’t use logic to come to conclusions anywhere as much as we’d like to think they do. 90% of our actions each day are generated by the unconscious, and research by people such as Gerd Gigerenzer is showing that these actions are arrived at by the ‘rules of thumb’ I mentioned earlier, algorithms the unconscious uses to make decisions. Essentially they’re the calculations that lead to what we tend to call our intuition. By understanding how these rules of thumb can lead to errors – usually as a result of our immature brains taking a limited understanding from an experience – we can use them to help people change the programming that generates the issue, and by using trance we can actually make the change in the root of the problem – the memory.

It’s all trance, Dude.

This is where hypnotherapy comes in. Most CBT approaches don’t use trance in their work, or recognise it in the client’s problem. We do. We think that trance is an everyday experience for us all – think about daydreaming or losing yourself when driving, or playing with your baby. Also think about when you ‘lose it’ with someone, when you see a spider and can’t help yourself running away from it, when you realise you’ve eaten a whole packet of biscuits watching television after watching what you eat all day long, when your mind goes blank when asked to speak in front of a group of people, or when you miss the putt that the match rested on. We think these are all examples of trance, so people are actually in an altered state (which could be termed hypnosis) whenever they are doing their problem, and we think this is the way the unconscious wrests control from us in order to carry out its ‘rule of thumb’ action, itself driven by something that probably started many years before. Our job as therapists becomes one of helping client’s ‘de-hypnotise’ themselves; in other words, enable them to remain in control of their actions in a situation where in the past they weren’t able to.

Why you might choose Cognitive Hypnotherapy if you’re looking for CBT?

Because trance is a component of a problem, it’s also a route in to their solution. The reason why people can logically know that their problem is stupid, but can’t stop it, is because (we would argue), the logical centre of the brain isn’t where the problem pattern is stored – emotion trumps thought in these situations, so it’s that part of the brain that needs addressing. Trance appears to enable the mind to access these algorithms – the strings of memory that lead to negative beliefs, fears, anxieties etc – and re-tune the brain, to undo examples of bad programming and create better ones. The brain is constantly changing, and has been shown to be plastic in its learning, so anything can be re-learned or reinterpreted. Techniques from approaches such as Neuro Lingustic Programming give us great ways to change unpleasant or unhelpful thoughts and images very quickly, and with much less stress on the client than tends to be the case with the CBT practitioners so beloved by reality television.

Unfortunately many people who could benefit from CBT are driven from it by the terror of having to confront their fears – remember the toilet hair-washing? Research has demonstrated that imagining change can have the same effect as experiencing it, so in Cognitive Hypnotherapy we can use trance to assist the client in incrementally addressing their fears in their own minds until they get to the point (usually quite quickly) where the change is such that their fear is no longer present in their reality, and with no drama (it’s why you haven’t seen us on those kinds of programmes, our clients get better too easily).

Finally, in Cognitive Hypnotherapy, we aim to be extremely sensitive to the differences in the way people think – because everyone is unique in that regard – and tailor our therapy to use these differences, instead of seeing them as obstacles or resistance. Some client will respond better to emotional techniques, while for others its thinking or behavioural interventions that create the change. For some the evidence that they’re improving needs to be the realisation that the way they feel about their past is different, for others it’s the way they think about their future, some need to be able to influence their present. And so the differences stack up. That’s what makes therapy fascinating – finding what works with each person – and why we are dedicated to evolving our model to include everything that is found that helps, wherever it comes from.

This is an exciting time. There is excellent evidence that shows the effectiveness of utilising trance in therapy. The biggest ever meta-analysis of therapeutic approaches showed cognitive approaches to be the most effective, followed closely by hypnotherapy. I hope you agree that a synthesis of these two approaches could lead to even more powerful means of helping people.

To end, let me return to one of the elements we share within CBT One of the common elements is the view that a client’s issues stem from the way they create an awareness of their situation – and a philosophical connection to the philosopher Epictetus who stated that “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them”. By understanding the way we each create the meaning of what happens in our life we can learn the means to influence this act of creation in order to live the most fulfilled, productive and happy lives possible.

References:

Channel Four: The House of Obsessive Compulsives
The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders
Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer
Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy Wilson

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