Working as a hypnotherapist in London, I get a glimpse into the real-world issues that affect my clients every day. It can be hard for even someone like me who is well-trained in the gentle art of staying calm to be a picture of tranquillity when a tube door is slamming in my face or I’ve been snubbed by six taxis in a row on a wet Monday morning. Modern city life is stressful!

But I do know that I am equipped with a multitude of tools to rapidly calm down and stop irritations becoming a bigger problem. Some of these are things that I use during hypnotherapy sessions, and the reason they work is that during a hypnotherapy session we explore the root of the problem – be that wanting to stop smoking, get to grips with stress, tackle a lack of self-confidence or any of several other concerns – and change some pretty fundamental behaviour.

Calm beats stress

There’s a theory called reciprocal inhibition made famous by a psychologist named Jessica Wolpe in the 1950s and what she says is that the state of calm beats the state of anxiety – just like Top Trumps. Some people feel that this knowledge is behind why hypnotherapy works, because hypnotherapy is inherently relaxing when it is done properly.

When you are calm and you’re invited to think about something that irks you, you remove the normal response (stress or anger, for example) to the trigger. In hypnotherapy, a new response to the stimulus can be created. Indeed, a lot of what I do is all about getting people to that level of calm which is so often missing from their life. Any good hypnotherapist should be able to get a client into a state of calm.

Hypnotherapy also works because it sets out to tackle the issue. When you take medication for anxiety, for example, it can be effective, as can visiting a counsellor to talk about your problems. But neither method actually gets rid of the problem. In the case of the former, the drugs may reduce the body’s response to the stressor; in the latter, you’ve gathered some insight into why you respond to things in certain ways.

Retain emotional state

When you work with a hypnotherapist, however, we are hopefully giving the client solutions to deal with the problem as well as giving them skills to make sure they can retain their emotional state going forwards.

It’s important to feel confident in your hypnotherapist, and just as important that you know what to expect from a session. For this reason, all new clients at FixMyMind are offered a free initial consultation worth £50. There are no strings attached – just the chance for us to get to know each other a little better and see if hypnotherapy would be a suitable option.