Treatments
Stress & Anxiety
Stress tends to be a short-term response due to external pressures and immediate demands.
Stress can leave us feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, or tense. Daily tasks that felt easy can suddenly seem harder.
You might struggle to focus, lose motivation and find your thoughts, habits and reactions harder to manage.
Anxiety is more future focused, often linked to worries about what might happen and can be a reaction to ongoing stress.
Anxiety can cause feelings of fear, nervousness or dread that don't go away easily. You might notice physical symptoms like a racing heart, tight chest, restlessness, feeling tense, or trouble sleeping. It can also make it hard to concentrate or relax.
Both anxiety and stress can be beneficial in the right situation, they can motivate us and keep us alert, but when they become constant of overwhelming they can start to affect our wellbeing and may need support to manage.
For most of us, fully removing the stress and anxiety from our everyday lives is just not possible.
According to the NHS Generalise Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is when anxiety becomes more constant and leads to a person feeling anxious most days, worrying about many different things and struggling to relax.
Physical symptom's linked to GAD include difficulty sleeping, muscle tension, headaches, persistent worrying, IBS, stomach pain and panic attacks.
So, how we manage it is key, and this is where I can help. I will show you how to recognise and understand your unique responses, you will also discover how to apply your own solutions to your problems through understanding and utilising the tools and techniques that hypnotherapy will give you.
Using a blend of clinical hypnotherapy, NLP & CBT techniques, I can help you:
- Feel calmer, reduce overwhelm and feel more in control
- Fall asleep easier, stay asleep longer and wake feeling refreshed
- Feel stronger, capable and more positive about yourself
- Improve concentration, clarity and productivity
- Build healthier patterns and feel more in control
- Feel lighter, more peaceful and able to enjoy life more
- Communicate better, feel calmer and handle conflict with ease
- Ease physical tension and support relaxation
Depression & Low Mood
Leading a happy life, free from feelings of depression and low mood is a key goal of solution focused hypnotherapy.
Through a mixture of talking therapy and hypnosis I will help you to reach your goal of where you want to be by increasing self confidence and self belief.
We work together on techniques to boost positive brain chemicals such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin that make you feel happier and more able to cope with life and its challenges.
The tools I give and the techniques I teach help to break the negative cycle of depression and provide skills to staying in control of positive emotions and thoughts.
Using a blend of clinical hypnotherapy, NLP & CBT techniques I can help you:
- Feel calmer and more at peace
- Sleep Better
- Feel more confident
- Enjoy life more
Grief
Many people struggle to overcome feelings of loss or bereavement, I can help you understand what is happening in your brain during grief and support you in processing those emotions.
Simply ignoring the pain or keeping it buried does not lessen the grief or sense of loss. It takes some time to work through the grieving process, but some people may struggle to deal with their loss which can impair their healing and lead to deep-seated feelings of heartache and depression.
For some people, time is enough to help them come to terms with their loss. However, this does not always happen.
Together, we can work on easing the pain, managing overwhelming thoughts and beginning to heal those emotional scars. Hypnotherapy can give you positive suggestions to help cope with anxiety, insomnia, deep sadness and depression, and other symptoms of grieving and help you to find ways of coping in the future.
Sport Performance
Anxiety in sport can be caused by many things, some being:
- Overthinking - focusing too much on technique, outcomes, or past mistakes.
- Fear of failure - worrying about letting yourself, your team, or others down.
- Pressure to perform - high expectations from coaches, teammates, or yourself.
- Past negative experiences - previous mistakes or poor performances.
- Perfectionism and comparisons - trying to be flawless or comparing yourself to others.
The greater the fear of failure, the harder it is to deliver optimal performance.
Sport is all about competing and winning. The increased stress of competitions can affect athletes negatively affecting their performance with physical and mental symptoms such as:
- Freezing mid game - you know what to do, but your body just stops.
- Mind going blank - you can’t access your usual thoughts or strategies.
- Overthinking everything - every move feels high-stakes, and you second-guess yourself.
- Rushing or hesitating - you either act too fast or overthink and miss opportunities.
- Loss of confidence - skills you normally have feel out of reach.
- Physical tension - muscles tighten, your heart races, or your breathing feels off.
Using a blend of clinical hypnotherapy, NLP & CBT techniques, I can help you
- Calm your body and mind to reduce tension and stress.
- Retrain the brain to focus on natural movement and confidence rather than fear.
- Reframe negative thoughts into positive, performance-focused thinking.
- Build mental resilience so pressure situations feel manageable.
- Improve focus, consistency and enjoyment of your sport.
- Access your skills, knowledge and resources in a high pressure situation
- Increase your confidence
- Help you maintain Intellectual Control and avoid ‘freezing’
- Calm your mind and rid it of distractions that can get in the way of gameplay
Hypnotherapy is widely used in elite sports to help athletes improve focus, manage stress, and overcome mental blocks.
Famous athletes who have used Hypnotherapy include Michael Jordan (basketball), Tiger Woods (golf), David Beckham (football), Jonny Wilkinson (rugby) and Michael Schumacher (Formula 1), as well as female athletes such as Serena Williams (tennis), Gabby Douglas (gymnast), and Annika Sörenstam (golfer).
Across sports such as Golf, Football, Rugby, Tennis, Cricket, Gymnastics, Athletics, Snooker and Formula 1 Hypnotherapy is helping athletes of all levels build confidence, mental resilience, and peak performance.
School Anxiety
For some children the experience of school brings such intense anxiety that attending school becomes an insurmountable challenge. Some people call this “school refusal.”
Numerous factors, such as anxiety, depression, family crises, and traumatic experiences like bullying, can trigger school refusal.
Young Minds, a youth mental health charity reported that 80% of the children they surveyed in 2023 said that their mental health had deteriorated during the Covid Pandemic with many reporting higher levels of anxiety.
If you, as a parent or guardian, suspect that your child is confronting significant anxiety related to school, and are considering seeking assistance from a professional therapist I am happy to have a free phone consultation with you.
Clinical hypnotherapy offers a unique pathway to address stress and anxiety. Unlike pharmaceutical interventions, hypnotherapy delves into the subconscious mind to untangle negative thought patterns and cultivate positive reactions to challenging situations.
Hypnotherapy helps teens experiencing school refusal by giving them an understanding of what is happening in their brain — and helping them feel a sense of calm, control, and choice again.
The NCH articulates this, stating that hypnotherapy “unlocks the potential you have to break free of negative thought patterns, and to react more positively and more confidently to situations in your life that may have previously made you anxious.”
Exam Anxiety
Young people are under a lot of pressure to do their best and get good results throughout the year. The strains of school life can sometimes get on top of them, making it harder for them to continue with their work.
Exam stress, in particular, can cause problems with eating, sleeping, anger and anxiety levels. If the student is already experiencing emotional problems or mental health difficulties, exam stress can be the last straw.
SFH can help control exam nerves and clear the mind to ensure students maximise their potential.
A rising number of UK youngsters are seeking help to cope with the stress of exams, according to the charity ChildLine. They state that young people consistently told counsellors exam stress was contributing to ‘depression, anxiety, panic attacks, excessive crying, low self-esteem, self-harming and suicidal thoughts’.
Solution focused hypnotherapy helps with exam anxiety by engaging relaxation techniques, building confidence, strengthening resilience and focusing on positive outcomes.
Through visualisation and tailored sessions, we replace negative thoughts with empowering beliefs and practical coping strategies.
SFH reduces stress responses and improves sleep, enhancing one's ability to stay calm, focused, and resilient during exams.
Fears & Phobias
Hypnotherapy is one of the most powerful tools for retraining the mind to overcome Fears & Phobias.
Since these challenges originate in the sub conscious mind, hypnotherapy can create rapid and lasting change by directly addressing their root causes.
There are two types of fear/phobia: Simple and Complex.
Simple phobias are usually treated in 3 to 4 sessions. They tend to centre around animals, activities or situations. For example animals (spiders, dogs, insects), bodily (vomit, blood, injections) and environmental (heights, flying, enclosed spaces).
Complex phobias are usually treated in 6 to 8 session, but can take more. They tend to be associated with anxiety about particular situations. For example social anxiety or driving anxiety.
I work with both Simple and Complex by using:
- Hypnosis to calm the nervous system and reframe subconscious responses
- CBT and NLP techniques to reshape unhelpful thought patters and build confidence
You will also learn mindful tools and techniques to help you manage and reduce anxiety effectively, giving you practical strategies to stay calm and in control in everyday situations.
For more information on about phobias please click this
NHS link.
