Hypnosis To Combat Stress

A Vancouver-based reporter, who was accustomed to seeing stage hypnosis shows, decided to see how hynotherapy worked for his stress. He went to see Doug Osborne, clinical hypnotherapist.

Osborne states that he has "seen a stamped of people" come in for stress-related issues. In his sessions, he refers to a shamanic wheel's four compass points: emotions, the body, the mind and the spirit, to allow his clients to make connections to their sources of stress.

Osborne's approach also has the client identify a personality that the exude when under stress, referring to himself as "Mr. Grumpy." He believes that when you can isolate the parts of oneself in such a fashion, this will allow the client to have a better understanding of the source of stress. When the reporter asked if he would be under Osborne's control, he replied "I can't control you. If I could, I would go and see my bank manager and get him to transfer loads of money to an offshore account."

To read the original story, click Here.

Sanders Hypnosis Center
Maryland's ONLY Clinically-Proven Virtual Gastric Band Provider

The Top 5 Phobias....

...according to Steve Spears, staff writer for Florida's St. Petersburg Times. Spears conducted some extremely indepth and thorough research to come up with his list of phobias; he searched on Yahoo.

In any case, I thought it would be interesting to blog about his findings. The top five Yahoo searches for phobias are:

1. AGORAPHOBIA - The fear of being in places where help may not be available. For example, you're driving cross-country and your car breaks down hundreds of miles from civilazation, with no help to be found.

2. HAUNTED HOUSE PHOBIA - Yes, for real. Is there an official term for this? I don't think so, but I would love for somebody to correct me on this.

3. ACROPHOBIA: Fear of heights - a very common phobia that we work with at the Sanders Hypnosis Center in Pasadena, MD.

4. LEPORIPHOBIA: Check this one out. This phobia is the fear of mutant bunny rabbits or, more specifically, the Easter Bunny. Yes, killer bunnies.

5. ARACHNAPHOBIA: Most people are familiar with this thanks to the movie by the same name. The fear of spiders is another common issue we see at the Sanders Hypnosis Center. So, yes, if you have arachnaphobia, come see us and you'll soon have your very own pet tarantula.

You can view the original article here.

Sanders Hypnosis Center
www.SandersHypnosis.com

Halloween Phobia?

Yes, believe not, there is a phobia for Halloween. The clinical term for this is Samhainophobia. The word "Samhain" denotes an ancient Pagan day where dead druids supposedly roamed the Earth -but for one day only. Today our concept of Samhain has changed and we now call this Halloween.

L. Vincent Poupard wrote an interesting article last year on this topic. He noted that individuals who suffer from this condition can express a wide range of symptoms, from believing the children in costumes are really monsters to thinking that children will actually play "tricks" on them. It is believed that other underlying phobias are actually the cause of Samhainophone. For example, one individual whose mother had died on Halloween now dreads the approach of this day. Other related causes could include the fear of children or people.

Poupard Article

Sanders Hypnosis Center

Hypnosis advocated for breast cancer patients

The New Britain Herald reported today that hypnosis is recommended for breast cancer patients. Hypnosis can help clients prepare for the surgery by addressing the fears and concerns the patient has, greatly diminishing stress and anxiety levels. Following surgery and/or treatment, hypnosis can be utilized to enhance a patient's self-image, particularly after hair loss occurs.

One point that the article did not mention, however, is that hypnosis can be also be used to help manage pain and discomfort. It goes without saying that breast cancer patients would certainly benefit from this.

To read the article, click on the following link:
The New Britain Herald

Brian Sanders, MS, CH
Sanders Hypnosis Center

Virtual Gastric Band With Hypnotherapy

Have you thought about having a Gastric Band fitted or Gastric Bypass Surgery without doing your research? Do you comfort eat when you are unhappy, alone, bored or stressed? Do you think that having a Gastric Band fitted, which is an invasive procedure and can cause discomfort and has cost lives will change your attitude to only eating when you are hungry?

Interest in Gastric Bands and Gastric Bypass Surgery has increased with celebrity admissions such as Sharon Osbourne, Roseanne Barr, Al Roker, and Carnie Wilson, whom have publicly admitted they have used the Gastric Band or the Gastric Bypass procedure to lose weight. But is the Gastric Bypass or Gastric Band Surgery procedure 100% safe, the answer is no!

According to a study by researchers at the University of Washington, it was found that 1 in 50 people die within one month of having gastric bypass surgery, and that figure jumps nearly fivefold if the surgeon is inexperienced. Gastric Band Surgery is also extremely risky. Not only has this procedure caused discomfort with patients, but it has also claimed the lives of Gastric band patients including the life of Bernadette Reid, Suzanne Murphy 29, and Marilyn Wardrop 54, just to name a few. One life lost to an invasive procedure is one life to many.

There is a range of post-operative problems reported with gastric bands, and over 80% of patients will experience one or more of the following symptoms:

Nausea and vomiting (50%)
Reflux or regurgitation of food (35%)
Slipped band (25%)
Obstruction or blockage (15%)
Constipation
Diarrhea
Difficulty swallowing

If these complications cause you serious discomfort your band may need to be adjusted or removed. This involves further surgery, exposing you to all the associated risks once again.

Losing Weight when you have temptations or no will power is not an easy route to take but if you are trying to lose weight only to then pile more pounds on, then you should think about losing weight the safe way, by having a Virtual Gastric Band.

A Virtual Gastric Band, also known as Gastric Band Hypnotherapy or the Hypnotic Gastric Band, allows you to be convinced that you have a Gastric Band fitted where you will have all of the feelings without the risk and discomfort that an Invasive Gastric Band Surgery would bring, and you will still lose weight.

Here are some of the Benefits that a Virtual Gastric Band with Hypnotherapy would bring:

1. With Virtual Gastric Bands (Gastric Band Hypnotherapy) or (Hypnotic Gastric Band) there is NO invasive Surgery
2. No fears about having surgery to have a Gastric Band Fitted
3. No Discomfort with having a virtual Gastric Band
4. Virtual Gastric Bands are much more cost effective
5. No Time off work with a Virtual Gastric Band fitted
6. No Gastric Bands Complications with Surgery

Recently, several European gastric band hypnosis practictioners have been highlighted in the news. ABC News ran a nationwide story on the positive successes of the Gastric Mind Band System and Chicago's ABC Affiliate aired a similar story on the Virtual Gastric Band system. The Virtual Gastric Band System, which is the approach used at the Sanders Hypnosis Center, has had documented clinical success in a recent UK study where National Health Service patients saw a 95% success rate in group trials.

Call the Sanders Hypnosis Center today at 443-494-9766 for your free telephone consultation, and to see if Virtual Gastric Band hHypnosis is right for you.

Why Do Successful People Use Hypnosis?

A successful person has a lot of major qualities which together form the foundations which lead to success. To have the confidence in oneself, the belief that you have a good idea, the belief that you can do it is clearly a major factor. This is needed by the barrel load. Tenacity is also required, the tenacity to keep on going, to fight for your ideals, for your goals no matter what obstacles get in your way. Determination and commitment are essential ingredients, as is a burning desire to succeed. This is what causes you to leave no stone unturned. The ability to focus on your goal and turn a blind eye to distractions is also involved. What else is needed in order to stand out from the crowd? The icing upon the cake is to have imagination, to have vision. The most essential thing of all is the ability to see the end result which you so desire. How could you make a chair if you could not visualize it first? How could you design an airplane if you did not imagine flying first? How could the electric light bulb be invented without first having a vision of the light which it would create? If you were to read the biographies of almost all successful people, they would say that the key to their success was that they had vision. They had the ability to see something in their minds eye and this is what enabled them to set about its creation. If you dig a little deeper you will find that their most creative moments came in times when their mind was relaxed, when they were in a meditative state, when in a state of relaxed focus. This state of relaxed focus is hypnosis. Many successful people intentionally induce this state of creativity, whilst others inadvertently drift into this state. Either way, this state is essential to creativity and to remarkable vision. Hypnosis is a state of relaxation at one with a state of heightened awareness. When in hypnosis your subconscious mind comes to the fore and you get past the critical aspect of the conscious mind. Your imagination is enhanced and your ability to problem solve comes to the fore. I'm sure that you can relate to times when you perhaps had forgotton a person’s name and no amount of trying helped your memory, but when you stopped trying that name just popped into your mind, seemingly from nowhere. In effect, if you focus on an end result you want to achieve, and relax, your subconscious mind will come up with the answer. At night when you dream, whilst in the REM state, your brain performs the task of conflict resolution. This task happens each and every night, whether or not you are aware of it, and this is essential to human survival. It happens automatically, it is just how your mind naturally works to keep you in a state of balance and equilibrium. Hypnosis creates a similar REM state and therefore you access the creativity and problem solving abilities which come naturally at this time. It allows you to tap into a far deeper ability to imagine and create that you would otherwise be capable of. In actual fact, when in a normal state of waking consciousness you are really only accessing a very limited percentage of your minds capabilities. Every successful person accesses this state of relaxed focus, this state of hypnosis, be it deliberately or instinctively. The great thing is that we can all use hypnosis, we can all access our inner creativity and thereby enable ourselves to be more creative and successful than we ever dreamed to be possible. You can get a free hypnosis download from my website and try it for yourself. By Roseanna Leaton, specialist in hypnosis downloads for motivation and success. Sanders Hypnosis Center Blake Professional Building 2528 Mountain Road, Suite #103 Pasadena MD 21122 www.SandersHypnosis.com

Create A Winning Mindset Using Hypnosis

Do you know anyone who always wins? Sure you know that person, everything just works out for them. They go into business and they are an instant success. They enter the dating scene and their phone rings off the hook. If they were in the Olympics, you just know they wouldn't settle for anything less than the gold. It seems as though they always win.

Why is it that some people just have IT and others seem not to? Want to learn the secret to their success? Ready? Here it comes....the secret to unstoppable success...drumroll please....Winners EXPECT to win!

That's the big secret. Simple, huh?

But, think about it for a moment...Winners actually SEE their success BEFORE it happens! Do YOU expect to win BEFORE you have even entered a situation...or do you assess your chances AFTER you are already in the situation? Or, even worse, do you imagine failure?

BEFORE selling a piece of real estate, winners EXPECT to get their asking price. BEFORE buying a car, winners EXPECT to get a discount.

Before running an Olympic race, winners EXPECT TO WIN the gold, so they do win! This one small thing gives winners a tremendous advantage over others.

Want to be a winner? Try the following exercise...

Close your eyes for a full minute and THINK about achieving a goal in your life...go ahead, close your eyes for one minute and really THINK about achieving it.

OK, now close your eyes again for one full minute and EXPECT to get it. Did you notice a difference? When we simply THINK about getting something, our thoughts tend to be vague.

There are also two options...getting it or not getting it (winning or losing). But, when we EXPECT to get it, there is only one possibility...getting it (winning).

So now that you know the secret, the next step is applying your powerful knowledge and getting yourself to that point where YOU ALWAYS EXPECT TO WIN. I suggest that you take a full minute pause right before entering any challenging situation. During that minute, close your eyes, and imagine winning. See it, feel it, hear it, imagine yourself already having won. Guess what...you will have programmed your mind to pull you powerfully in the winning direction.

When you do enter that situation, your words and actions will be generated from a winning mindset. Your path will be straight to victory...you will already know the way and EXPECT to get there...so you WILL get there. Using the power of hypnosis, you can easily program yourself for a constant winning mindset.

Until next time,

Live in abundant possibility!

Steve G. Jones, CHt

About The Author
Steve G. Jones is a board certified Clinical Hypnotherapist who works extensively with Hollywood actors, writers, directors, and producers, helping them achieve their very best.

Hypnosis: A Powerful Tool in Complementary Cancer Care

Complementary therapies, while not given the attention that more traditional cancer therapies may receive, are perhaps equally important while undergoing treatment for certain types of cancer. Patients diagnosed with difficult to treat malignancies will often use these types of therapies in conjunction with traditional surgical, chemotherapeutic, or radiology techniques to form a more comprehensive and effective treatment regimen. Among the most important and effective alternative therapies utilized by those diagnosed with cancer is hypnotherapy.

Hypnotherapy has been used for many years in clinical settings. Hypnotherapy’s role in cancer management however, is relatively new and indications are that its utilization has not been fully maximized yet. Effective cancer treatment often depends on the patient’s ability to not only defeat the cancer through treatments but also to maintain their health and mental spirit throughout the painful side effects of cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation. 

Often, the symptoms and effects of the cancer itself on the body are negligible compared to the pain and other side effects of chemotherapy and radiation. This is where acupuncture has been said to be most effective. Cancers such as mesothelioma, which are often unable to be removed by surgical means, are often treated with some combination of chemotherapy and radiation. While these potent therapies can be effective in eliminating some of the tumor mass and growth, they also profoundly affect the health of the surrounding tissue. Symptoms of these effects including fever, nausea, and general pain have been dramatically reduced through the utilization of hypnosis. Patients, who are able to withstand these symptoms and recover quickly, will often be able to be more aggressively treated, increasing the efficacy of the treatment regimen as a whole. Some specific hypnotherapy techniques utilized in pain management for mesothelioma patients, include altering the neurophysical configuration of pain, control of anticipatory anxiety, and targeted imagery.

Hypnotherapy techniques may not be appropriate for all patient’s pain and individual symptoms but it’s certainly worth exploring as it can do very little harm in experimenting with integrative therapies. The goal with alternative therapies, as with traditional therapies, is always to increase the effectiveness of treatment as a whole. If hypnotherapy can assist in any way in helping patients recover or manage symptoms of chemotherapy or radiation, then it will have contributed to the treatment regimens overall efficacy and should certainly be utilized. 

By Jack Bleeker

February 9, 2010

References

Erickson MH: Hypnosis in painful terminal illness, in Haley J (ed): Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy: Selected Papers of Milton Erickson, MD. New York, Crune & Stratton, 1967.

Sunnen, Gerard M.D. , Hypnotic Approaches in the Cancer Patient Ozonics International, LLC

An Online Guide To Hypnosis

Hypnosis is one of the most effective alternative healing methods available. There has been tons on research on hypnosis and hypnotherapy, and the results have been very encouraging. Today, a lot is known about hypnosis - what it can do and what it cannot do.

What Hypnosis Is Not

1) Don't expect hypnosis to be some kind of magical healing method that will take away all your problems with the wave on a wand. It doesn't happen that way. For hypnosis to work, you must be prepared to put in some time and effort.

2) Hypnosis is not a coercive method. In other words, if you are not a willing party, hypnosis cannot work on you. Let's say you are trying to quit smoking. But you know that you don't really want to do so. In this case, since you are not really willing to quit smoking, hypnosis will not be able to help you.

3) Hypnosis is certainly not mind control. The subject is aware that the suggestions are being made to the mind, and can refuse to participate further at any time. The ability to choose is never impaired during hypnosis.

Sometimes, on television, we see hypnotized subjects behave in ways that they would never behave in when under hypnosis. This is an illusion created by the performers. They tend to choose subjects who are willing to participate in these shows. In other words, they are all willing participants. But that's just entertainment. In a real world healing situation, hypnosis is used very differently.

What Hypnosis Is

1) Hypnosis is an alternative healing method. Note that it is not meant to replace scientific healing methods. Instead, hypnosis can be used effectively with medical healing methods with no conflicts at all. Hypnosis doesn't deal with drugs and medicine. The most commonly seen tool that is used in hypnosis is audio. Through audio, suggestions are being made to the subconscious mind.

2) Hypnosis works on changing existing habits through the method of suggestion. Many health problems are related to habits. Smoking is a bad habit. Some people just need to smoke after a meal. Eating can also become a bad habit. Many people become obese because they just can't stay away from junk food. Deep down, these people know that they need to stop smoking or eat better, or their health will suffer. However, in many occasions, these habits are so ingrained that they find it hard to get rid of them. In such cases, hypnosis can help tremendously.

By making constant suggestions to the subconscious mind, the affected individual starts to lose the need to smoke or to overeat. Of course, the healing process many take some time, depending on the severity of the situation. But with patience, hypnosis has shown to be highly effective.


Article by Jake Rhodes


Brian Sanders, MS, CH
Sanders Hypnosis Center
2528 Mountain RD, Suite #103
Pasadena MD 21122
www.SandersHypnosis.com

This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis – New York Times

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized “saw” colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.

“The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations” is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. “But now we’re really getting at the mechanisms.”

Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950’s to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders.

There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.

Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible “magnetic fluid” that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured.

Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep.

Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.

In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.

Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function. One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.

For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher – in terms of function – region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower’s identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.
Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.

These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call “top down processing.” What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information – as a flower or a hammer or a face.

The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled. This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.

According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable. One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said.

In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he “wanted to do something really impressive” that other neuroscientists could not ignore.

The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue.

For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect.

Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz’s lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said:
“Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them.

“This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self.”

Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized. Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner.
In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz’s instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors.
When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened.
Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to “drain” color from a colorful abstract drawing or “add” color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said.

Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. “We imagine something different, so it is different,” he said.

Originally published in The New York Times
by Sandra Blakeslee
November 22, 2005

Brian Sanders, MS, CH
Sanders Hypnosis Center
2528 Mountain RD, Suite #103
Pasadena MD 21122
www.sandershypnosis.com