Tim Maude Hypnotherapy

Tag: mentalhealth

  • Controlling the Scrolling: Social Media and Mental Health

    Controlling the Scrolling: Social Media and Mental Health

    Social media is now part of our society. Research suggests that around 4.9 billion people around the world use social media, spending an average of 145 minutes (that’s nearly two and a half hours) every day. Studies suggest that this may cause an increase in anxiety and depression.

    Anxiety, Depression and Social Media

    You may wonder how social media can impact our mental health? It starts with the addictive nature of social media. These systems are designed to keep us scrolling. It effects the brain by giving us little hits of dopamine – when we see something we like, when someone likes our post, when someone mentions us … and so on. And the dopamine just encourages us to carry on scrolling, looking for the next hit.

    After a while, we need to keep checking our social media just to feel normal, and when we are deprived of it, we feel low – encouraging feelings of anxiety and depression.

    The content that we look at on social media can also cause feelings of anxiety and depression. When someone criticises you or your post, or when you are wondering why your post did not get as many likes as you would like – it creates bad feelings.

    When you see all the happy smiling faces of your friends, as they post about the highlights of their day, you may wonder why your day has not been 24 hours of delight as your friends appear to have.

    All these can lead to feeling bad about yourself. It allows the primitive, anxiety-and-depression-creating part of the brain to take over.

    Social Media Isn’t All Bad

    Please don’t think that I am saying that social media is a bad thing. It has many positive impacts too. It allows people to express themselves, maintains social contact with friends everywhere as well as being a useful source of information. It’s all about balance.

    Social Media Self-Control

    When I ask my clients what little thing they could do to improve their lives, one thing that often comes up is controlling the scrolling. They find that too much social media has a negative impact on their lives, so they resolve to cut it down. The common way to do this is to create self-imposed rules about when and where they use social media.

    Here are a few self-imposed rules that my clients have decided that they will take on:

    • Put the phone down at 8 in the evening – nothing more after that
    • No scrolling in bed
    • No scrolling while sitting on the toilet
    • No looking at the phone until after breakfast
    • Put the phone away while watching television
    • No looking at social media at meal times
    • A social media fast – a month without any social media

    You might like to think what self-control rules you might apply.

    And Finally …

    I always encourage people who talk to me about their anxiety or they mental health in general – find some changes they can do themselves to make it better. Even so, some people still need help.

    If you would like my help – I use hypnotherapy to help my clients regain control of their lives. I work in my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire as well as online, so Contact Me if you would like a chat about it.

    References

    Social media’s impact on our mental health
    https://health.ucdavis.edu/blog/cultivating-health/social-medias-impact-our-mental-health-and-tips-to-use-it-safely/2024/05

    Impact of social media on social anxiety: A systematic review
    https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=pTCRDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA129&dq=impact+of+social+media+on+anxiety&ots=YpmHilZJMr&sig=G5EGh9TTrSYkiZDpdVbsHt68qk8#v=onepage&q=impact%20of%20social%20media%20on%20anxiety&f=false

    Photo courtesy of fauxels on Pexels

  • How to Stay Mentally Fit – the Mental Health Hygiene Triangle

    How to Stay Mentally Fit – the Mental Health Hygiene Triangle

    I spend a lot of time talking about anxiety and what happens when things go wrong, why it happens and what to do about it. Today, I want to take a different approach.

    We brush our teeth each day even when our teeth are healthy. It’s just a dental hygiene habit. But what is the equivalent mental hygiene habit? This article looks at the mental health hygiene triangle.

    Mental Health Hygiene

    The mental health hygiene triangle covers body, mind and attitude. There are things we can do in each of these areas that will support our mental health. I have divided each of the three areas (body, mind and attitude) into three categories, making nine in all.

    Body

    1. Sleep Well – When we are asleep, particularly during the dreaming phase, our brains sort out all the stresses of the day. If we don’t get enough sleep, ours brains do not have time to sort it all out and so we wake up with stress that still needs to be sorted out.
    2. Eat Well – There is growing scientific evidence that eating poorly effects our mental health. In particular, eating a wide variety of plants (vegetables, fruit, nuts, grains and so on) has a positive impact on the gut biome, which in turn gives us a better mental outlook.
    3. Exercise Well – We don’t have to go down to the gym for hours each day (unless you really want to). Even going for a short walk round the block has a positive impact on our mental health.

    I know that not everyone can do all these things, but the more you can make changes to keep the body in shape, the better mental health you will have.

    Mind

    1. Mindfulness – Mindfulness is about focusing one the here and now. Focus your attention on everything you are experiencing right now – for example, the feelings of your arm moving as you raise a cup of coffee to your lips, the change in temperature of your face as the hot air from the coffee hits your face, the light reflected in the surface of the coffee, the taste of the coffee as it hits your tongue and so on. Just practicing mindfulness for a few minutes each day trains your brain to be able to focus on the here and now.
    2. Focus – Train your brain to be able to focus on one thing at a time – get absorbed into watching a film or reading a book, or playing a sport or whatever you like to do. If you notice the odd stray thought enter your mind, just notice it and bring your attention gently back to whatever you are doing.
    3. Reflection – Spend a few minutes each day reflecting on how things are going for you. In particular, notice the things you have experienced that have been good for you, things you have enjoyed – because those are the things you should do more of.

    You need to set aside time each day to practice these things. For me, it’s first thing in the morning over a cup of tea. For you it may be something different.

    Attitude

    1. Positive Thinking – We have a natural tendency to focus our thinking on the stuff that is going wrong in our lives – and this just creates a little bit more stress. So change the balance of your thinking – notice the good things in life when they occur – things that give you those little nuggets of joy in your life – things you are grateful for.
    2. Positive Action – Ask yourself, “What small thing could I do to make my life a bit better?” Then get out and do it – no matter how small. Small positive actions may seem to be trivial in comparison with whatever else is going on in your life, but those actions have a direct impact on your mental health.
    3. Positive Interaction – Spending time interacting with other people in a positive manner has a big positive impact on mental health. It could be chatting with the person at the checkout in the supermarket, a good chat with your friends over a cup of tea, or simply being with others going for a walk.

    Keeping your body healthy; training your mind so that it can be mindful, focused and reflective when you need it to be; and adopting a more positive attitude to life are three major tools you can start using today to improve and then maintain a good state of mental health.

    And Finally …

    If this is not enough for you to get your anxiety under control, and get you into a good mentally healthy state, you may need help. I help people with anxiety get their lives back in control using hypnotherapy from my clinic in Fleet, Hampshire. I can also serve people online. Give me a call or contact me if you want a chat.

  • The Changing Face of Hypnotherapy

    The Changing Face of Hypnotherapy

    Many years ago, I watched the final episode of the TV series MASH (broadcast 1983), where Hawkeye (played by Alan Alda) suffers a severe trauma and as a consequence is taken to a psychiatric hospital. The psychiatrist treats him by forcing him to remember the details of the traumatic event, which he had “suppressed”. Hawkeye recovers from his mental delusions and all is well again.

    Of course, this is all rubbish.

    There used to be a theory, with its origins in Freudian psychology, that traumatic or bad memories are suppressed. This would lead to psychiatric difficulties, which could be “cured” by resurfacing the suppressed memories. This lead to a lot of therapeutic practices that involved getting the sufferer to re-explore those memories.

    In hypnotherapy, “age regression” became the thing to do, whereby a client was asked to go back and relive a time when they were younger, all while under a state of hypnotic trance. Some hypnotherapists even went so far as to do “past life regression”, taking the client back to a memory from a “past life”. Of course, the mind becomes very creative in a hypnotic trance, so it is not surprising when clients create all sorts of experiences that never happened, which they may mistake for memories.

    These ideas are all based on the idea that to solve a psychological problem, you need to analyse the problem and understand it – in the same way that you would need to understand why your car doesn’t work before you can fix it. Of course, the brain is far more sophisticated than your car.

    Modern hypnotherapy is very different. Finding a solution to psychological problems is much more to do with looking for the way forward. The unconscious part of the brain – the part we are unaware of – is quite capable of reorganising itself, once you consciously start searching for solutions instead of analysing problems.

    In a solution-focused hypnotherapy session, you will find yourself talking with the hypnotherapist about what is good in your life, how to get more of it into your life, where you want to go with your life and what positive things you want to achieve. This discussion could be entirely unrelated to the problem you have. The second part of the session will be hypnosis. The hypnotic state gets you nice and relaxed – a relaxed body and a relaxed mind. While this is going on, the unconscious part of the brain – the part we are not aware of – can find time to start reorganising itself along the lines of the positive things that were discussed earlier.

    After a few sessions, clients start to realise that their problem is disappearing, and that they are finding a new way forward in life. This is the miracle that I always love to see.

    Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

  • Look after yourself

    Look after yourself