Tag Archives: Hypnotherapy

Quick Rewards Works Better

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Improve the odds of success with earlier rewards

Improve the odds of success with earlier rewards.

In a study published by Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers discovered that feedback given earlier in learning sessions tend to bring about better grades over the long haul and improve students’ performance overall.

I’ve found this same phenomenon in hypnotherapy and Rapid Eye Technology sessions. When clients discovered early on that the process I was using was working, they tended to get better results overall – achieving therapeutic goals quicker and with far less effort. When clients believed it would take several sessions to show improvement, they tended to go slower and often struggled to make progress. Conversely, when clients felt immediate results (positive feedback) they tended to feel more successful and confident with the processes we used.

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What a Country!

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Sometimes you have to look from the outside to see the truth. Thank you, Stephen Fry, for pointing out the obvious (except to us in the USA, that is).

If you’re going to imprison 1% of your population, wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to offer real help to those who are imprisoned, rather than letting them languish or using them as slave labor? It seems to me that most prisoners are there because of drug usage. Drug dealers are in there, too, but I wonder if most of those are busy running their criminal enterprises from the relative safety of prison.

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Placebo Effect Redux

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"To my surprise, it seemed to work for many of them."

"To my surprise, it seemed to work for many of them."

In another post, I recommended utilizing the placebo effect to improve the likelihood of successful outcomes. An interesting study from the Harvard Medical School corroborates my contention. Further, they suggest that the placebo effect, far from being benign, is very effective therapy or treatment in and of itself.

“[Our] findings suggest that rather than mere positive thinking, there may be significant benefit to the very performance of medical ritual. I’m excited about studying this further. Placebo may work even if patients know it is a placebo. Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had ‘placebo’ printed on the bottle. We told the patients that they didn’t have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills.” – Associate professor of medicine Ted Kaptchuk

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Feeling Low? Maybe It’s OK

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It's perfectly normal for humans to have mood swings.

It’s perfectly normal for humans to have mood swings.

Feeling a bit low or blue during the winter months? Or maybe just feeling a little depressed now and then? Well don’t despair or feel anxious over it – adding to the feeling. It’s perfectly normal for humans to have mood swings – and to have negative moods that can last for days or even weeks.

The slightest shift in the balance between serotonin and melatonin, adrenalin and noradrenalin, and other chemicals in the body can affect our moods – and it is NORMAL for us to do so and feel that way when we do.

According to University of East London psychologist Professor Mark Rapley, “Bottling up anger and sadness is never a good way of dealing with things; problems tend to come back and bite us harder further down the line. The trouble is, we’ve become so obsessed with being happy that we now see being down as a real problem – when, in fact, it’s perfectly normal.

“We’re constantly encouraged to be anxious about whether we are happy or depressed, yet these feelings are not illnesses, simply part of regular human experience. Life would be so much duller if we just muddled along in the middle without feeling any emotions at all. Learning to recognize that it’s normal to feel angry or sad is a good thing for our mental health.”

Balance is boring!

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Change Literally in the Blink of an Eye

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You can make those life changes you want to make in the blink of an eye.

You can make those life changes you want to make in the blink of an eye.

New research out of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, shows that brain neurons can change in as little as two minutes even in adults. For years scientists have known about the plasticity of the brain – that it can change neuronal connections and even grow new brain cells. But until recently, no one had studied the speed at which these changes can occur.

It is unlikely that a brain cell would grow to maturity and make all those dendrite connections in just two minutes. Some other mechanism must be at work.
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