WHAT HAPPENS

Your unconscious mind, just like anyone else's, can not tell the difference between the truth (i.e. your actual experience) and a lie (i.e. your imagined experience).

By this I mean that if you imagine a negative outcome to a set of circumstances you will feel exactly as you would were that outcome to occur.

 

Because you feel the same, you body will respond to your imagined experience by:

 

• tensing up
• causing you to sweat
• giving you a headache
• giving you a stomach ache
• causing you to feel nauseous
• flooding you system with adrenalin
• or whatever else you body does when you are stressed.

 

Negative Emotions

Your mind will engage in a thought process, one thought leading to another and another in a familiar pattern until you arrive at the worst scenario possible, or the one you fear or dislike the most, and you will feel the corresponding negative emotion.

Repeated Patterns

Once you have repeated this pattern a few times, the process will automatically speed up so that just a thought can trigger both the negative sensations and the negative emotion, without the whole thought process leading up to it.

Positive Outcome

The same will happen if you imagine a positive outcome, but in that case everything will be working fine and you won't have a problem.

Automatic Responses

In either case, each time you imagine the same set of circumstances and set off the mental, emotional or physiological response, the response will become more and more automatic. Over time, the physical and emotional sensations will become more and more pronounced.

Learned Behaviours

This is because every behaviour in which we engage is a learned behaviour. And without realising it, every time we use our imagination while thinking about something, we are in fact teaching ourselves to have a stronger and stronger habitual experience.

 

LEARNED RESPONSES

Remember the first time you learned to ride a bicycle - you had to think about where to put your feet and how to control your balance.

But it didn't take long for you to reach a point where if you did think about you feet or your balance, you would have disturbed your own flow and fallen off your bike.

This is because you deliberately focused your conscious mind on learning to balance, then you repeated many times what you knew how to do.

Then you no longer had to think about it because you'd succeeded in programming your unconscious mind with a new behaviour.

More Confident

Once this had happened, each time you rode your bike you became more confident. You felt more comfortable. Perhaps sometimes you even flew along on your bike feeling the exhilaration of becoming one with the bike.

And the feeling of exhilaration probably got stronger over time, and stays with you even now when perhaps you no longer ride.

The Negative Response

This is also true of the imagined negative response we were first talking about. The feeling associated with it gets stronger and stronger over time.

The mental process leading to the feeling gets quicker and quicker, until we reach a point where just turning our mind in the direction of that thought is enough to throw us into that old emotional response - with all those uncomfortable physical side effects.

 

So what has this got to do with relaxation?

• Relaxation is a learned response.
• Relaxation is achieved in the same way.
• Relaxation is an imagined state of well being which causes us to let go of all the tension in our bodies.
• It causes our muscles to relax.
• It focuses our attention on pleasant things.
• It allows our body's self-healing processes to work.

Relaxing Thoughts

In exactly the same way, imagining relaxing thoughts, at the same time as allowing your body to rest gently, can cause your body to become more and more relaxed, and your mind to stop its usual chatter for a few moments and be peaceful.

When we relax like this, all our internal systems move more slowly. This causes our breathing to become more regular, and our heartbeat and digestion to slow down.

It causes us to stop the automatic thought processes that wind us up. It causes us to feel re-energised. It also enables us to access our inner thoughts and feelings more easily and so begin to make changes in our lives.

 

WHAT IS POSSIBLE

Many successful men and women have applied positive mental attitude to their lives to great effect, causing change to occur through repeated repetition of positive phrases, and through 'faking it until they make it'.

Their success has largely been due to their ability to reprogram their minds, their ability to 'act as if' they were already successful, until they are.

Relaxation works in the same way.

The more you practice it, the easier it becomes to relax. Over time it becomes an automatic integrated part of your every day experience.

Repeatedly imagining this state of relaxation and well being allows us to achieve it. Just like repeatedly imagining the things we most dislike or fear causes us to feel stressed and physically unwell. And just like repeatedly imagining ourselves as successful causes us to become successful.

The best way to learn to imagine this state of well being is with a trained Hypnotherapist or Stress Management Consultant.

 

Choosing to learn to relax in this way is one of the best decisions you'll ever make.

 

It will lead to a greater sense of well being, more energy and better focus.

It can alleviate the physical response you have to stress and stop you feeling stressed.

It can cause you to feel more balanced emotionally.

It can enable you to sleep more soundly.

It can enable you to cope better with all of life's ups and downs.

 

WHAT NEXT

To find out how Relaxation could benefit you personally, telephone me or come to see me for a free 15 minute consultation at Vitality Health Food Store, Wote Street, Basingstoke (Mondays and Wednesdays).

We can talk through your particular situation, and see whether learning to relax would help.

You can also ask me any questions you like about relaxation, hypnosis or any of the other ways in which I help people.

If you'd like to speak to me, please telephone on one of the numbers below, or pop into Vitality Health Food Store and book a consultation

 

Any conversations we would have will be in the strictest confidence.

 

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