‘It’s not the load that breaks you down; it’s the way you carry it’

Do you dread the thought of Monday mornings?

Work-related stress is one of the biggest problems of modern day living. The insecure environment, inadequate income, downsizing and worry about the future are all contributing factors for stress.

‘Layoffs’ and ‘redundancy’ have become common bywords in the workplace. Job insecurity is a nasty product of economic instability. In addition, the pressure to perform all the time, fear of job loss and the nervousness about being left behind can spike stress levels.

Frequent headaches, stomach problems and acidity, increased alcohol consumption, fatigue and lack of concentration can all point to stress.

Worry about paying your mortgage, paying school fees and providing for your retirement can become overwhelming concerns. If you find that the stress is starting to dominate your life and disrupt your happiness, it’s probably time to seek guidance.

While some stress is natural and necessary for productivity, excessive stress impacts our emotional and physical wellbeing. As a result, you may experience low performance and may feel overwhelmed with deadlines and other work-related pressures.

Everyone may not react in the same to the same situations at work. For example, your colleagues may not give a second thought to a looming meeting with a difficult client – it all depends on our individual ability to cope. Your ability to cope with stress may make all the difference between success and failure.

It’s not possible to control everything in your work environment. Certain situations will continue (like a difficult boss or unhelpful colleagues).  But the good news is that you can always focus on controlling the most important thing: You.

Your stressful emotions may become contagious and have an adverse impact on loved ones and others around you. Your family may also feel down and depressed because you are struggling with volatile emotions. Stress often has a damaging effect on relationships.

Tips to Deal with Work-related Stress

• Learn to delegate tasks- you don’t have to do everything yourself
• Control knee-jerk, reactive behaviour
• Learn to say no to overwork

Coping strategies can help you rethink your attitude towards stress and conversely, you will also be less affected by stress around you. Counselling at www.caswillow.com can empower you to feel good about yourself and this in turn helps you make a positive impact on others around you.

Summary

With the wide coverage on the disadvantages and health hazards associated with smoking, one would expect that people would find it relatively easy to quit. However, this is far from the truth. Despite being aware of the various hazards associated with smoking, it can be challenging to quit the habit for good.

In order to be able to wean off the smoking habit, it’s important to understand what motivates you to smoke in the first place. People smoke for different reasons; the habit could start because you are unable to cope with stress (nicotine gives a false feeling of relaxation), or due to peer pressure (again this could be linked to low self-esteem) or even due to boredom (deep down this could indicate loneliness).

Stress often plays a crucial role for habitual smokers. The nicotine induces a feeling of relaxation, and when you try to quit, severe withdrawal symptoms tend to settle in. The fear of withdrawal symptoms often stops smokers from quitting permanently.The brain produces a positive and happy hormone called ‘dopamine’. When we feel stressed or anxious, the brain automatically secretes dopamine which helps us move on from the low mood. Smoking causes the brain to reduce its secretion of dopamine and as a result, the anxiety and stress begins to feel overwhelming.

 Hypnosis and Counselling can help you Quit Forever

Hypnosis at www.caswillow.com helps reprogram your subconscious mind that is responsible for driving our behaviour and thinking patterns. It’s important to realise that during hypnosis sessions, you will be in full control of what you do or say. The therapist guides you to your inner thoughts in order to unveil the reasons behind the addiction to nicotine. Hypnosis is also an effective tool that helps replace negative and addictive patterns with positive, healthy ones. The therapist uses the power of your subconscious mind to help you learn the harmful effects of smoking on your mind and body.

Quit Smoking with Hypnotherapy

It’s a good idea to reinforce your will to quit. Remind yourself (or better still, write it down) of all the positive health benefits of quitting cigarettes forever.Hypnosis can be a valuable tool to help you quit smoking only if it is accompanied by your own innate desire to be free of the habit. It’s not a one-off miracle cure for quitting; it requires dedicated hypnosis sessions at regular intervals. But if you invest sustained efforts to help yourself, you can look forward to not only quitting but also staying off nicotine for the rest of your life.

‘Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are’ Marilyn Monroe

Screaming billboards and billion-dollar companies insist that you are beautiful only if you conform to their cookie-cutter standards and stereotypes. Of course, this helps them make more money off hapless customers by selling more slimming pills and gym equipment. They hit you where it hurts the most – your self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to the opinion that you have of yourself. Our self-esteem begins to form during childhood. Supportive, loving parents often nurture children with a healthy sense of self-esteem.

The truth is, most of us are involved in an abusive relationship with our body. Every binge and every social lunch is followed by hours of regret and guilt. Our entire perception is formulated based on the current obsession with size zero models. Let’s face it; such unhealthy trends and media obsessions are here to stay. But there is no reason for us to fall prey. We should be committed to our own health and wellbeing.

Counselling helps you Love yourself for who you are

Women who crave to meet social expectations of the ‘right’ body image suffer from low self-esteem and usually tend to suffer from eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia. The desperate pursuit of thinness often results in unhealthy weight loss choices such as starvation or consuming harmful pills to stave off hunger.The very first step towards health and wellbeing is to love your body. The process often involves releasing tenacious patterns of inward self-criticism. Once internal guilt is released, you can make the right choices for yourself – and stick to them.

Oftentimes, this is easier said than done. There are several complex layers to unwrap before one can get at the real cause of low self-esteem. Causes could range from disapproving or demanding parents to bullying incidents. Professional counselling and hypnotherapy are effective healing tools that help you understand the reasons behind inner motivations. Wanting to lose weight is an excellent decision for your fitness and health. Obesity can lead to a host of health-related issues. But in order to do it the right way, you have to first reshape your expectations regarding your body image. Loving yourself and enjoying a healthy self-esteem will go a long way in helping you lose weight without compromising on your overall wellbeing.

‘Your body hears everything that your mind says’ Naomi Judd

Our mind has an all-encompassing influence over our physical health. According to a popular article published in the New York Times, Kirsten Ritchie recovered much faster from a brain tumour than his surgeon anticipated – all due to the fact that he underwent hypnotherapy before surgery. If you want to shed weight the healthy way, the first place you have to induce change is in your mind. Some people have the willpower to do it. They can say no to chocolate ice-cream and stick to their fitness regimen day in and day out. Such people have a positive and strong mindset.

Unfortunately, not all of us are endowed with the same mental makeup. We may find it difficult to resist fatty, sugary food and may not be able to summon up the motivation to stick to exercise schedules. Our subconscious is firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to creating our reality. So, if the subconscious mind tells you that you lack self-confidence or have a poor body image, these distorted perceptions will come in the way of successful and healthy weight loss. The truth is that although we receive sensory inputs from the external world in terms of sights, sounds etc, ultimately, it’s how the mind interprets those signals.

For example, the feeling of stress or anxiety may be perceived as the signal to eat. Hypnotherapy can help you recreate your relationship with food and eating. It’s only when you change your thoughts at the inner level that your body follows suit and starts to obey the mind. Thus, it’s crucial that your mind is equipped with positive, empowering thoughts. So, ‘whatever I do, I will always look fat’ can morph to ‘When I eat right, my body stays healthy’. How we think of ourselves and how we perceive the whole idea of eating plays a critical role in Hypnotherapy weight loss management.

Changing deeply ingrained thought processes can prove to be an uphill task. Try as we might, sometimes tenacious patterns can be extremely challenging to replace. This is where professional therapy comes in useful. Hypnotherapy at www.caswillow.com can help you understand your inner motivations and beliefs.

Most importantly, you will understand the negative perceptions that are holding you back from losing weight.

‘Self acceptance is the refusal to be in an adversarial relationship with myself’ Nathaniel Brand

Do you find that you often criticise yourself? Is self-hate driving down confidence and motivation?

We are all guilty of sometimes being critical of ourselves. You may find yourself often being nice and kind to your family and friends and very hard upon yourself. This inward self-hate has detrimental effects on your self-confidence and internal motivation. Self-loathing can be created out of several circumstances. You may have suffered through an abusive childhood or you have had a judgemental peer group in your teens. For some of us, there may be no tangible reason why we dislike ourselves.

As a result of self-hate (many times unperceived by us), one begins to derive esteem and love from other people. As therapists at www.caswillow.com will tell you, this negative thoughts process becomes a deeply entrenched and tenacious pattern. Eventually, all your behaviour will be dictated by social approval. In the entire process, we end up sacrificing our identities and who we are.

Here are some common examples of self-hate that most of us may have experienced at some point:

• ‘However hard I try, I am never going to be good enough’
• ‘I am fat and ugly and nobody cares about me. I don’t get invited to parties’
• ‘I am not worthy of love; that’s why my partners leave me’

Self-hate is an insidious pattern and will play itself out in reality in various ways that confirm your low opinion of yourself. This internally programmed response is so subtle that we rarely have any perception of it. Deeply ingrained and hidden behaviour patterns and beliefs have far-reaching complications that reflect in our lives. We may find ourselves becoming overly critical of others and may it challenging to forge loving relationships.

Counselling can help you transform self-hate into self-love by helping you change your relationship with yourself. For example, ‘I am fat and ugly and no one loves me’ gets rephrased into ‘I love the way I look and I will seek friends who are truly interested in my welfare’.

A trained counsellor helps you replace negative, self-hating phrases into positive affirmative thoughts. You will be amazed at the healing transformation that takes place over a few weeks. Self-respect and self-esteem help you create the life that you want and lead to a more joyous and fulfilling experience.

Are you under the impression that smoking helps you calm down in a stressful situation?

Research indicates that smoking can inflate stress levels instead of calming you down. Regular smokers who have tried to quit often report that they feel tense, moody and irritable. But this set of negative emotions is referred to as ‘withdrawal symptoms’. Withdrawal symptoms occur because your brain and body is unable to cope without its daily ‘fix’ of nicotine. It’s exactly this property that makes smoking an addiction.

Once you experience withdrawal symptoms, you reach for a cigarette to feel ‘normal’ again. Quitting for good helps you break out of this vicious cycle. Our minds work on internal cues that have been programmed with repeated thought and behaviour patterns. You may have started smoking because you were unable to manage stress so your mind automatically links smoking to stress.

 Hypnosis can aid Smoking Cessation

In many workplace environments, workers take a ‘smoke break’ so our mind may automatically link the idea of a ‘break’ with a ‘smoke’. Such powerful subconscious associations are deeply buried and drive our behaviour and emotions. Smokers end up perceiving smoking as a stress coping mechanism while in reality smoking is responsible for aggravating stress levels.

Hypnosis helps you relax and access your innermost beliefs and attitudes. Your therapist is then able to help you understand your basic motivations and she then helps you reinvent your mental associations. For example, ‘Every time I feel stressed, I smoke’ may be replaced by ‘Every time I feel stressed, I meditate’. Hypnosis makes it easy for the therapist to plant positive affirmations and redirect thought patterns.

However, it’s important to mention here that for hypnosis to be effective, you should nurture a sincere desire to quit smoking. This helps maximise the benefits from smoking hypnosis at www.caswillow.com.  Contrary to popular belief, a subject cannot be hypnotised and made to do things against their will. Your inner wishes and thoughts eventually help you heal from addiction. The therapist helps you help yourself.

Hypnosis can not only help you quit smoking but can also help you sustain your abstinence. The most difficult part about quitting is often resisting the impulse during later weeks. Hypnosis helps you reorient your mental associations so you no longer crave for a smoke during stressful life events.

Summary

‘Grief is itself a medicine’ William Cowper

Are you lonely and depressed after the loss of a loved one? Do you need support in moving on with your life?

Death is one event that all of us have to confront at some time or the other. Each of us is different and may react differently to death and grief. Bereavement is an intensely personal emotion and there is no right or wrong way to grieve. Some of us may withdraw into our shells for some time or seek solitude while others may prefer getting back to work or spending time with friends.

Grief Counselling can help you Release your Pain

While our coping mechanisms may vary, the objective is the same: We want to process our emotions, give ourselves to heal and finally move on with our lives. Some people heal faster while others may find it extremely challenging to accept the loss and move forward. If you find that you are unable to pick up the pieces and heal, it may be a good idea to seek professional intervention.

Grief is a powerful emotion and prolonged feelings of loss may lead to depression, anxiety or even suicidal tendencies. Give yourself time and be patient while processing grief. Death is one of the most difficult events to come to terms with and if you are struggling to cope, it’s a good idea to seek support and compassionate guidance from a trained therapist.

Grief counselling at www.caswillow.com not only helps you cope with death but also with other forms of losses. These could include loss of job, finance or even a physical ability. Sudden and unpredictable losses like suicides or accidents can cause traumatic reactions including nightmares, insomnia and guilt. Bereavement counselling helps you express your emotions in a healthy manner and provides useful insights on how you can move on with your life.

If you feel stuck in your grief, it always helps to talk about your emotions to family or friends. Sometimes, grief emotions can be so traumatic, it can be extremely painful to even acknowledge their presence. Speaking about your pain helps put difficult feelings into words and helps you release your pain.

Do you find your dog panting, licking and yawning more often than usual? Your pet could be suffering from stress.

Stress is not restricted only to people. Animals are sensitive to stresses in the environment and often absorb the tension. They tend to then internalize the feeling and may eventually become sick. Just as pets respond positively to love, care and affection, they respond negatively to neglect, fear, conflict and abuse. Excessive panting, licking and wheezing may indicate that your dog is stressed. Similarly, excessive sniffling, avoidance and aggressive behavior may also indicate stress. Animals who have rescued from abusive owners often exhibit signs of stress. Extended periods of stress produce the same effect on animals as they do on humans.

Pets may use all their strength to cope with the tension and finally, their resistance to disease begins to weaken. Dogs, specially, tend to get deeply affected by loneliness and isolation as they are social creatures. Make it a point to spend time playing with your dog; it will make both of you feel better. Research shows that people with pets lead healthier and happier lives. Pets become a part of our families and it becomes our duty to ensure that they are cared for and look after in the best possible manner.

If you happen to be a feline lover, you might want to know that cats also exhibit signs of stress and nervousness. Some indications include excessive shedding of fur, dilated pupils and passive behavior. Stressed pet birds may show listless and sluggish behavior with excessive pecking. Animals and birds are remarkably perceptive when it comes to changes in the environment.

Reasons for pet got stress

Pets may get stressed due to several reasons including:

• Exposure to unfamiliar places and people
• Unsuitable diet/inadequate/excessive feeding
• Inconsistent training or confusing commands
• Rough, abusive handling
• Excessive levels of noise like traffic, lawn mowers, computer printers or machinery

Fortunately, dogs are easily trainable and it’s a good thing to lay down consistent rules for behavior. Avoid coddling your dog when she appears to be stressed as she may accept his as validation for nervous behavior. Dogs are endowed with special auditory senses that allow them to respond positively to soothing music.

Sound therapy is extremely effective at calming down nervous and irritable pets. Modern research indicates that pets respond positively to music and sounds. You can get a soothing music CD to calm your pooch at www.caswillow.com. Animals respond to vibrations and their system calms down with soothing music or sound therapy. Music therapy is also effective in treating separation anxiety and fear in pets.