Take a moment to think about a pile of words.

Imagine a pile of words on the floor to your left. Then consider those words being as follows: winter, miserable, cold, sleet, hail, shivering, damp. Okay? Done it? Now if those words were to be a colour, what colour would they be do you imagine?

Now imagine another pile of words but to your right. In this pile imagine words such as smiling, summer, beach, happiness, energy, colourful. Now, what colour do you imagine these words would be?

Possibly the words on the left are a duller colour to the words on the right? Which pile do you prefer? We reckon the words on the right may have turned out to be lighter or brighter?

What we sometimes take for granted is the power of words. In certain situations, words can provide a catalyst for change. Not just at an intellectual level, but from the sensory perceptive level too. Many people will have painted the negative words with a negative colour. So, you can imagine what effect those words have on the brain, especially if we play them through our minds repeatedly. They could change the way we colour our lives.

Focus on the positive

If you choose to focus on something POSITIVE, whether it’s a word or an image, you start retraining your brain to automatically lean towards the POSITIVE!

It’s rather like thinking about the first record you ever bought – remember that? If you really start to think about it, you might tap into the sounds of that record or where you were when you bought it? The thought process will then probably lead you down a negative or positive track in your mind which will have an effect on the chemicals in your brain. Either increasing positive chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine or, if the thought process turns out to be negative, then it’ll increase negative chemicals, such as Cortisol.

The power of our thoughts

In teaching our students how the brain works, we give them an understanding of the power thoughts, either negative or positive. We also understand that it’s not easy to take control of your thoughts – if only we could simply snap our fingers and let all negative thoughts fall away! However, we teach our students how they can help their clients gradually change thought processes and thereby encourage an increase in positive chemicals. This allows us to feel happier and more in control.

“Watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become habits.”

In our Hypnotherapy Training, the  Initial Consultation involves about 10 minutes of information gathering. We ask our clients a few pertinent questions that rather quickly gives us a picture of the client’s stress levels. We go onto discuss these later in the first meeting.

Probably the most telling questions we ask revolve around sleep. The majority of our clients will report that they have trouble getting off to sleep at night. Perhaps they wake up too early, or they have trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

The value and importance of getting a good night’s sleep cannot be underestimated. We explain why this is so in the Hypnotherapy Initial Consultation.

The Stress Bucket

We use the metaphor of the ‘stress bucket’ – a place where we store all our negative thoughts that come into our minds during the day, or things from the past that have not been resolved. Some are big things that could have severe consequences but the small things also go in there. Some of these things we just make up in our minds, negatively forecasting what might happen in the future. The more we have in our stress bucket, the more negative we get and the more we tend to pile things into our stress bucket. So, we can get into a bit of a vicious cycle.

REM Sleep

When we are asleep at night, our brain is actually working quite hard to empty the stress bucket. During a particular phase of sleep, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, the brain examines those unresolved issues of the day and takes away the emotional content. By morning, we may have forgotten the argument we had with the boss that day, or we may be thinking “I don’t know why I got so wound up about that”.

REM sleep makes up only part of our sleep cycle and it can run out if the bucket is full or overflowing, and this in turn can cause early morning wakening. REM sleep also uses up a lot of energy, so we can wake up feeling tired and a bit fed up.

Keeping the Stress Bucket Empty

With Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy, we encourage the client to think in a more positive way, so that the ‘stress bucket’ does not fill up so easily. We can also improve on the client’s REM sleep by providing them with a relaxation download to listen to as they go to sleep. The relaxation download acts like an extra boost of REM sleep, assisting the brain in emptying the stress bucket.

So, by putting less negative stuff in the bucket, and having more ‘bucket emptying’ going on during sleep, the bucket starts to empty and the client begins to sleep better and to feel better too. One of the first positive outcomes the client will see when having Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is usually this improvement in sleep.

Our students on the training course can also see this in their volunteers in the very early days of their training. This early positive change is really motivating for the client volunteer,  and of course, the student.

It used to be thought that, once we got to be adult, the brain lost it’s ability to change – but thanks to neuroscience, we now know that many of the aspects of the brain can be altered through adulthood.  This ability of the brain to change is termed ‘neuroplasticity’.  Neuroplasticity is often described as:

“the ability to make adaptive changes related to the structure and function of the nervous system.”

This ability to make changes in the brain means that we can continuously learn and adapt and there is lots of evidence to support this. For example, the brains of a group of London taxi drivers were examined while they were acquiring ‘the knowledge’ of London’s road layout. The results showed that there were changes in the brains of these taxi drivers associated with learning that were not seen in the control group not taking ‘the knowledge’.

When we learn a new task or skill, new connections and pathways are made in the brain that enable the information to stick. At first it may be difficult (think of learning to drive a car), but in time the skill becomes second nature and we can do it without thinking.  The neural pathways, with constant use, become ‘hard wired’ in the brain.

Studies in people recovering from stroke also provided support for neuroplasticity. With a stroke, there can be whole regions of the brain destroyed and it has been found that the unaffected regions of the brain that remained healthy could sometimes take over, at least in part, and perform the functions of the area that had been destroyed.

We can even make changes to the brain by thinking in a certain way.  It has been shown that imagining playing a piece on the piano has the same effect on changing the activity of the brain as imagining practicing the same piece on the piano. Indicating that the brain does not know the difference between what is real and what is imaginary.

Some very ambitious claims have been made by neuroscientists regarding neuroplasticity; that brain exercises may be as useful as drugs to treat diseases as severe as schizophrenia; that plasticity exists from the cradle to the grave; and that radical improvements in how we learn, think, perceive, and remember are possible even in the elderly.  Research continues in this area.

In our role as Solution-Focused Hypnotherapists, we can assist our clients in using this remarkable ability of the brain to change, this neuroplasticity, to ‘retrain their brains’. We can use this to help with lots of different issues.

Our clients often repeat patterns of behaviour that are unhelpful and damaging but in normal circumstances they find these patterns difficult to break. But by using Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy, we can help our clients to focus on how they want things to be, not on how they don’t want things to be. We help them to use their imagination to visualise their preferred future. In this way, they are able to identify the small achievable steps towards leaving old habits behind and developing new, helpful patterns of behaviour.