The Psychology Behind Christmas

There is considerable debate surrounding the topic of Christmas and why the 25th December is celebrated. Christians would say it was the celebration of Jesus' birth and without disputing this, mid-winter festivals go back considerably earlier in time than Christianity in celebrating the winter solstice; the time of year when day is shortest and night longest. The celebration is not for the night, but instead for the turning point in winter, where the days would only get longer from that point on, and new life could be looked forward to. In bygone times this was obviously important as without electricity the sun was all the more important and completely dictated how we once lived. Read more here.

The Romans celebrated the winter solstice in a festival known as 'Saturnalia' between the 17th and 24th December, with the following day known as 'Juvenalia', an occasion where children were entertained through food and presents. The old darkness replaced by light and rebirth, and what better way to worship new beginnings than by celebrating children? Differing types of mid winter festivals are also associated with the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Pagans and Persians to name just a few; many of those celebrations based around the 'sun gods' and rebirth, in line with the winter solstice.

But is the turn of winter the only reason humans celebrate this widespread festival? It is known in countries that experience significant darkness in winter that levels of depression increase in line with death and suicide rate. One reason for this is that the lack of sunlight causes less serotonin to be released in the brain, causing depression. This is commonly known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or fittingly SAD, and can cause a variety of depressive problems.

Winter traditionally represents sparsity as little can grow and to a large part supplies from a successful summer harvest would have to be relied upon to survive. People both in those times, as well as now, would be less active especially in the outdoors with sleep time also increasing, making socialising less frequent and increasing the feeling of isolation and loneliness.With little natural light or warmth to count on the winter months would be a tough and unenjoyable time to live through even without SAD affecting the body's hormones.

It seems to me as though there is no better time to lift spirits throughout a community than in the middle of winter. A festival reverses many of the effects listed above by bringing people together to socialise and share, even for a short space of time. Presents are exchanged giving another sure fire reason to be happy, both in giving and receiving. The festival also has the effect of giving people something to plan and look forward to in advance, giving the community a united occasion where everyone is involved and everyone has an event they can discuss and share together, both before, during and after.

To counter the darkness light is brought into the family home traditionally through special candles or fires, with a new atmosphere being brought about through song and dance. Today everything is lit up by extravagant lights both inside and outside the house, lifting the so called gloom and darkness of winter throughout the month of December. Songs are still sung throughout with a strong emphasis on music and parties, both in the workplace and in the family setting.

While food may have been scarce in olden times, the winter Xmas festival is traditionally one of gluttony, epitomised by a fat Santa Claus, where food and drink are taken in abundance meaning feelings of deprivation can be completely forgotten. The modern day Xmas is not far different, even poor families shower one another with gifts and food, forgetting any economic problems they might have for at least a few days of the year.

These attitudes of expenditure are naturally very good for the economy. Food and drink are sold in abundance everywhere while businesses prosper as the stock from the year is sold with sales happening between Xmas and January making room for the new lines to appear. It is another parallel of the death and rebirth celebration originally set aside for the sun and our natural environment, but is certainly applicable to modern day customs as well. The new year comes in only a week later and again represents a time of renewal and new beginnings with 'new years resolutions' a common theme; people wishing to improve themselves for the year ahead.

Quick and Easy Self Hypnosis Methods

Hypnosis can be a hard mental process to break into, and to some it is too daunting to learn and try. Luckily there are some very simple practices that can be carried out in only a couple of minutes to experience how beneficial self hypnosis can be. Selfgrowth.com lists these 3 techniques to use for relaxation and stress relief: 

Self Hypnosis Technique #1: The Waterfall

This hypnosis technique takes only a minute or less and is a powerful stress reliever. Take a deep breath. Imagine a relaxing waterfall of energy either in front or behind you (whichever feels best to you). Imagine this waterfall is flowing with healing, relaxing energy. You might imagine it as cool or warm water, as a stream of air, or simply soft, relaxing energy. However you want to imagine it is perfect. You might see it in your mind's eye, or feel it, or simply know that it is there. Now imagine that you step into this beautiful flowing waterfall of relaxing energy and it flows from the top of your head all the way down your body, flowing over your shoulders, your back, your stomach, your legs, all the way down to the bottoms of your feet, and down to the center of the earth.

The Waterfall Technique is powerful and helpful if you need a quick pick-me-up. You can flesh out the background, too. For ultimate stress relief, maybe you imagine you're in a tropical forest or on a gorgeous beach. You can imagine lush surroundings that are relaxing and comforting to you to round out your refreshing hypnosis experience.

Self Hypnosis Technique #2: Breathing

Another super quick and easy hypnosis technique is (yes, you guessed it!) breathing. Simple deep breathing is one of the best starting points for any hypnosis technique (see technique #1). Begin by suggesting to yourself to just breathe. As soon as you give yourself this suggestion, you might notice that you take a deeper breath than your last one. Imagine that you can fill both lungs all the way to capacity, letting the air reach even the bottom region of your lungs. You can also imagine that you can breathe into remote body parts, like your feet or your hands. Imagine that you can breathe into a sore spot in your body and revitalize that spot with the cleansing fresh oxygen. This is the easiest hypnosis technique of them all, and the best stress buster in you only have a few seconds.

Self Hypnosis Technique #3: The Mini Power Nap

This hypnosis technique takes about 5 minutes or less, but the power in it is amazing. If you're feeling tired, run down, or generally lethargic, this is the technique for you! You'll need a quiet place to sit or lie down for just five minutes. If you're very tired, sitting might be better so that you don't fall asleep (hypnosis is so very relaxing!).

Start by taking a deep, cleansing breath, and notice any tension in your body. Give yourself the suggestion that any and all tension can simply let go, and in it's place, direct a relaxing flow of energy to ease and relax your body. Bring you attention to your breathing, and imagine that you can bring yourself to the center of your being. You might imagine a beautiful garden or a powerful guide at your side or a safe cave at the center of your being. Anything that makes you feel good, safe, and centered is perfect hypnosis setting.

Now give yourself the simple suggestion that you have five (or four or three) minutes for a super-charged hypnosis power nap. You might say to yourself, "I have this time here and now to allow myself a relaxing power nap to recharge and energize my mind, body, and spirit." Let your eyes close and keep following your breath down to the center of your being. Allow this self hypnosis technique to relax your eyes and your mind. Tell yourself that it's OK to let go and allow relaxation to flow through you for this short hypnosis power nap. Keep suggesting that this is a hypnosis power nap, and that when you are ready to open your eyes, you will feel refreshed, recharged and energized.

Read the full article here

8 Things Everybody Should Know About Concentration

People all over the world struggle consistently with concentration and is a huge cause for frustration whether it be in school, at home or in the workplace. Just how can we put our minds into gear and make ourselves concentrate better to be more productive with our time? The 8 points below are taken from an excellent article written Scott Scheper, and can be read in full here.

1. You can’t start concentrating until you've stopped getting distracted

The phrase above is self-explanatory. Yet, it’s amazing how most people look for some crazy, obtuse solution for the reason why they can’t concentrate. They reason, “I just have ADD. I can’t concentrate.”  In the late 80′s, two researchers asked themselves a chicken-egg question. (“What came first the chicken or the egg?”). Their version centers on distraction and boredom. They asked themselves, “What came first, distraction or boredom.” What they found is rather subtle, yet it’s profoundly significant. They found that distraction leads to boredom (not the other way around). This displays that we must cut out distraction in order to get focused; or else, we’ll get bored.

2. Just do one important thing per day

Scientists also found that we can only focus on one thing at once. Nobody does that. We’ve always got something going on in the background of whatever we’re doing. We’ve always got two-dozen tasks on our to-do list. On top of this, we’ve got a handful of projects that we try and finish simultaneously. When you've got a mountain of paperwork on your desk, the best thing to do is clear it all off. Pick it all up and place it in a drawer. Do anything required to get it out of your sight. After this, kick your feet up and daydream. Yes, I'm serious. Daydream and ask yourself the following question: “What’s the most important thing I can do right now?” Once you've identified the item that will actually make a difference, do it. Try and make it a goal to do just one critical thing per day. This habit proves much more effective than living the routine everyone else lives: doing many insignificant things a day. They live on fooling themselves into thinking they've added value.

3. Chunk into three’s

Most of the time your one important thing that you can do per day takes more than just one action. Oftentimes it takes a series of smaller steps to accomplish. For this reason, it’s very helpful to chunk activities into sets of three. If you set out to accomplish one important item without a plan, you’ll be just as ineffective as the crack-berry work-a-holic running around the office making copies. Outline your three-step to-do list using an offline to-do planner (which we outline in another chapter); or if you’re working online, use a three-item FocusList to keep you focused on the task at hand. Click here for a simple, effective, downloadable To-Do List.

4. Questions that kill procrastination

The brain processes meaning before detail. This is where procrastination stems from. Your boss, professor or co-worker tells you that the task on your desk is important, but your brain doesn’t yet agree. If you push forth anyways, and embark on the task before understanding its meaning, you’ll end up frustrating yourself and wasting time because you may have to do it all over. For this reason ask yourself the following questions: 1. Does this really need to be done? 2. Can I delegate this?

5. Be Smart With Your Time

The Pareto principle is founded on a theory that 80% of effectiveness is driven by 20% of our activity (or causes). I argue that it’s more like 99%:1%. It’s amazing how many insignificant tasks we’re constantly filling our lives with. Don’t make it your goal to involve yourself with 20% of meaningful items during the day. It gets too confusing, and your untrained mind will still end up taking-on too much. As stated above, just do one important task per day. Say no to everything else–even your boss. Be humble, but be logical.

6. Mind Maps

Whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s critical to allow the mind to disentangle itself by mapping out your thoughts on paper.

There’s two types of mind maps: (i) PS Map, and (ii) Fear Map

7. Blame something

Other times, sitting down to concentrate is as simple as blaming a simple object for your inability to concentrate. As we discussed above, lazy people are those that blame almost everything on their environment. You don’t want to do this, as it’s not a long-term, sustainable solution. However, in instances where you can’t get excited to actually pump blood to your prefrontal cortex (phase 1 of concentrating), a simple object can help you out. Such an object would be coffee, a drink, a Bonsai tree or a walk. You can reward your mind for concentrating by saying, “OK, mind, here’s the deal–it’s hard to concentrate on this right now, but I’ll pick up a bonsai tree, which will create a more compelling environment to concentrate.” You’ll find that this object-based motivator actually works.


8. Interest

Researchers found that concentration is not a gift. It’s not about intelligence. It’s not about being a prodigy with a gifted memory. It’s not about possessing the ability to recall an insane amount of facts (That’s what Google’s for). Researchers found that concentration is driven by interest, and interest is driven by attitude. If your attitude towards a specific project swells with interest, intrigue and passion, concentration is astonishingly easy.

Sleep Paralysis

I've blogged a few times recently about dreams/nightmares and what they mean, but sleep paralysis is something that affects us in our sleep that is quite different altogether. For anyone who has experienced sleep paralysis it can be quite unnerving, and having episodes of it myself in my later teenage years I certainly built up an interest in the subject. Wired.com describe a sleep paralysis episode like this:

'You wake up, but you can’t move a muscle. Lying in bed, you’re totally conscious, and you realize that strange things are happening. There’s a crushing weight on your chest that’s humanoid. And it’s evil. You've awakened into the dream world'

Penn State Live Official News Source has an excellent article on the subject, which the following paragraphs are taken from:

Less than 8% of the general population experience sleep paralysis, but it is more frequent in two groups - students and psychiatric patients - according to a new study by psychologists at Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania.

Sleep paralysis is defined as "a discrete period of time during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, yet ocular and respiratory movements are intact" the researchers state in the current issue of Sleep Medicine Reviews. Hallucinations may also be present in these transitions to or from sleep.

Alien abductions and incubi and succubi, as well as other demons that attack while people are asleep, are implicated as different cultural interpretations of sleep paralysis. The Salem witch trials are now thought possibly to involve the townspeople experiencing sleep paralysis. And in the 19th-century novel Moby Dick, the main character Ishmael experiences an episode of sleep paralysis in the form of a malevolent presence in the room.

Brian A. Sharpless, clinical assistant professor of psychology and assistant director of the psychological clinic at Penn State, noted that some people who experience these episodes may regularly try to avoid going to sleep because of the unpleasant sensations they experience. But other people enjoy the sensations they feel during sleep paralysis.

"I realized that there were no real sleep paralysis prevalence rates available that were based on large and diverse samples," Sharpless said. "So I combined data from my previous study with 34 other studies in order to determine how common it was in different groups."

He looked at a total of 35 published studies from the past 50 years to find lifetime sleep paralysis rates. These studies surveyed a total of 36,533 people. Overall he found that about one-fifth of these people experienced an episode at least once. Frequency of sleep paralysis ranged from once in a lifetime to every night.

When looking at specific groups, 28% of students reported experiencing sleep paralysis, while nearly 32% of psychiatric patients reported experiencing at least one episode. People with panic disorder were even more likely to experience sleep paralysis, and almost 35% of those surveyed reported experiencing these episodes. Sleep paralysis also appears to be more common in non-Caucasians.

"Sleep paralysis should be assessed more regularly and uniformly in order to determine its impact on individual functioning and better articulate its relation to other psychiatric and medical conditions," said Sharpless. He looked at a broad range of samples, and papers were included from many different countries.

People experience three basic types of hallucinations during sleep paralysis - the presence of an intruder, pressure on the chest sometimes accompanied by physical and/or sexual assault experiences and levitation or out-of-body experiences.

Wired Science documents another researcher in Sleep Paralysis, David McCarty from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center’s Sleep Medicine Program. He says the good news is that sleep paralysis experience is pretty standard but rarely persists or causes serious life damage. 

“It’s very common, way more common than people realize, but usually it doesn't recur,” he said. “It’s not frequent enough to make people come in and ask the doctor for help.”

How To Quit Smoking With Hypnosis

Along with losing weight, quitting smoking is probably the biggest business for hypnotherapists because it is something so many people wish to do. But just why are there so many people out there who want to stop smoking but struggle to do so?

Everyone knows the long term damage smoking causes, there is evidence of it even on cigarette packets themselves nowadays. Cigarettes are a cocktail of more than 7000 chemicals that cause high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer of the mouth, throat, lungs, circulation problems to name but a few of main dangers (to both smokers and the people they smoke around), and in combination with causing poor oral hygiene these factors would surely put most people off, wouldn’t they?  (If you want to know more reasons to stop smoking click here) (Or here) (Or here)  

The cost is also frightening, in the UK cigarettes cost something in the region of 7 GBP (approx. 10 USD), so if a single pack are smoked daily you’re looking at around 50 GBP per week (75 USD), 2600 GBP per year (3900 USD) - and if someone did manage to survive 50 years of smoking your looking at a bill of 130,000 GBP (195,000 US) for the pleasure! And that's if prices stay at their current level which on current form they won't with taxes rising everywhere, not to mention the excess drinks that are bought to combine the smoke with as well as the time and cost of dashing out for cigarettes on a regular basis. Read more on the price of cigarettes.  I'm sure the average persons finances could do without such a burden to bear.  The smoking ban that has taken effect in many places around the world has also left smokers suffering often outside in the cold, huddled in groups together by doorways facing exclusion from numerous public places, because of the known effects that can be transferred lethally to others. To any non-smoker there seems little going for smoking… yet why do so many people continue with it despite wanting to stop?

True addiction is not to be underestimated. I’ve heard many people argue that they could stop eating something like cheese despite being addicted to it, so why couldn’t a smoker? Cheese for one thing does not have the addictive chemicals in it that cigarettes do. Physically the body craves the nicotine content it has become accustomed to over time. The mind also craves the relaxing sensation smoking brings, with many smokers claiming it is the only thing that allows them to ‘de-stress’. Despite the ‘anti-smoking ban’ smokers still see smoking as a very social pastime, and the ‘Let’s go for a smoke’ mentality bonds them together in a kind of exclusive club.

So where does hypnotherapy fit in? Hypnosis has been proved a successful method to help people quit smoking because it tackles at least a large segment of the problem at its root. Nicotine gum/patches may well prevent the body from craving the nicotine, but what about the habitual processes and the de-stressing factors that have little to do with the nicotine? Hypnotherapy tackles those very issues.

To understand hypnotherapy a basic knowledge of the two parts of the mind must be taken into consideration. On one side you have the conscious aspect of mind, the reasoning, critical ‘voice inside the head’ that is the voice of our thoughts and our decision maker. On the other side is the subconscious mind, the aspect we are not aware of but regulates all parts of ourselves we are not actively thinking about e.g. our breathing, regulation of hormones. The subconscious is also the seat of our emotions and our habitual behaviour, behaviour that has become so embedded we no longer think about it. Smoking addiction would fall into this category. Smokers light up a cigarette so frequently they no longer think about it and therefore we know this pattern of behaviour is controlled by the subconscious mind. Read more about the background of hypnosis and the subconscious here. 

The conscious mind of the smoker understands all the reasons stated above telling them they should not smoke. The conscious mind even agrees they should stop and actively attempts to stop smoking. But this decision has not transferred into the deeper subconscious that is still programmed to want cigarettes. The subconscious will send urges and cravings to the conscious mind continually for however long it takes until a cigarette is reached for, be it days, weeks, months or even years. The subconscious will always overcome the conscious in the end.

What hypnotherapy does is break the old unwanted thought patterns. Under hypnosis the conscious mind is bypassed leaving the subconscious open to manipulation as though it can be talked to directly. In this state the subconscious can be reprogrammed to behave in a different way, and so the hypnotherapist might reinforce the knowledge that smoking has so many drawbacks, giving smoking a negative association in the subconscious, while offering healthy new ways to de-stress and enjoy quiet moments. Using simple self-hypnosis/meditativemethods the individual can learn relaxation techniques that do not require smoking. They can also learn how to get rid of the urges that come to them so frequently without the need of a cigarette using visualisation and breathing techniques. After all, smoking is itself often a process of deep breathing and inner thoughts, so what better way to replace it than a like for like method?

Another key method in a hypnosis stop smoking program is to change the physical habits of smoking. Breaking the engrained habits even in small ways can help shift and eradicate the habits in the long term. For instance, if a smoker is used to a cigarette after lunch sitting in their favourite chair, smoking Marlboro reds with their right hand – that should be one of the first things altered. Change the brand to something different like Camel, smoke with the left hand and do not smoke after lunch or in your favourite chair – try a new less comfortable place at a different time. Of course going cold turkey is one way forward, but many find it easy to taper off and if you do so while breaking your old habits for many it is easier to give up for good in the long run.

Quitting smoking is not easy, and for a true addict will power alone is not always enough. Using hypnotic method hand in hand with strong will power makes stopping a lot easier, but it is very important to stress that the will power must be there and there must be a strong desire to quit smoking in the first place for hypnotherapy to work. Hypnosis can’t alter your opinion, so if people are urging you to stop and you don’t really want to, hypnosis just won't work for you. But if you do want to stop and are having trouble doing so under your own steam then hypnotherapy can certainly be a fantastic tool to quit permanently.

If you have a strong desire to be a non-smoker why not send me an email and let me know about it?