Sharon Corbridge Cognitive Hypnotherapy

Have you ever noticed how we ‘wear’ what we’re feeling on our body?  Often you can take a pretty accurate guess at how someone is feeling, just by their body posture; sad, nervous, confident, angry.  This is embodiment, expressing a feeling physically, and has a significant effect on state of mind.

We now know that this link between state of mind and body posture is two-way thanks to the work of researchers such as Paul Ekman who is a leading expert in facial expressions.  So if we feel a certain way, our body posture is likely to reflect it, but the really useful thing is that if we deliberately adopt a particular body posture, our mood will then follow.  This means you can ‘fake it ‘til you make it’. 

Many of my clients have found this really useful.  For example, are there situations where you feel anxious or nervous and you would like to feel more confident?  Notice how your posture is when you feel anxious, and also how it is when you feel confident.  Adopt the confident posture, regardless of what you might be feeling inside and notice what happens to how you then feel.  You might also notice how others around you might respond differently to you too!

I’ve even used this when out running and finding the going a bit tough – relaxing my face instead of grimacing, loosening shoulders and relaxing my stride, everything I would be doing when enjoying the run and feeling good.  It really can make all the difference.  Best of all, it puts you in complete control of choosing how you would like to be feeling!

Revising for exams or learning something new – whichever it is there are lots of opinions and advice around about how to go about it.  Whatever strategies you use, I would urge you to learn a few things about yourself first so you can favour the strategies that are likely to work the best for you as an individual.  Lots of the advice I’m hearing at the moment, aimed at young people revising for forthcoming exams, seems to be a ‘one size fits all’ approach to learning.  But just as we are all different, we have different ways of learning too, and often, when we struggle to learn or retain something, it can be because the information wasn’t presented in a way that favours our preference.

 As described by Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), there are 4 key systems we use for taking in information and most people will have a preference for one over the others.  

• Visual
• Audio (sound)
• Kinaesthetic (touch, feeling or doing)
• Audio Digital (not a very useful name but is about thinking and looking for meaning)

 As we are bombarded with so much information from our environment every second, we have to filter it in some way and we each tend to pay more attention initially to the information from our preferred system.

 When it comes to learning, we will take in most information through our preferred system (worth mentioning that our secondary preference will also be important), so an environment that doesn’t support our preference will leave us confused and without understanding.  For example, a student I worked with recently had a preference for auditory information and visual was last in her list.  Where information was presented in diagrams she found this particularly difficult to understand.  Where the diagram came with a verbal explanation it became clear as a bell for her!  For revision, she developed a style of describing a diagram out loud to give her the auditory component she needed.  In the exams, she could ‘hear’ what the diagram looked like.

However, it is possible to develop skills, just like anything else that you can strengthen with practice.  Using tasks or exercises, you can develop your skills in any of the systems mentioned.

As a Master Practitioner of NLP, this is an area of work that I love – helping people learn more about themselves which means they can use so much more of the potential they have available to them.  If you would like to discuss any specific difficulties you have with learning or revision, feel free to contact me.

It really is!  There is little else that can enhance physical health, mental wellbeing and social relationships in quite the same way – and it’s free, unlimited and easy to use!

Laughter is wonderfully contagious; ever found yourself laughing along with someone even when you don’t know what they’re laughing at?  Even neuroscientists have studied how our brains react to the sound of laughter (for example the work of Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at the University College London), finding we are more likely to respond to, and join in with laughter than with other sounds.

So this would seem to support the idea that laughter is meant to be shared; and when shared, it can bind people together and strengthen relationships by fostering positive feelings and emotional connections.

And there’s more!  Laughter can lead to healthy physical changes in the body.  Humour and laughter strengthen your immune system, boost your energy, diminish pain, and protect you from the damaging effects of stress.  And all this from something that’s free and you already have an unlimited life quota of!

Laughter is a powerful, natural antidote to stress, anxiety and pain.  The chemical changes in the body brought about by laughter are measurable and have been extensively studied by the scientific community.  Among the benefits of laughing are increases in blood flow from dilation of blood vessels (good for your heart), reductions in the stress hormones (for example cortisol and epinephrine) and the release of endorphins which enhance wellbeing and act as the body’s natural painkiller.  Laughter has also been found to boost the immune system, increasing the number of antibody-producing T cells. Furthermore, laughter relaxes the whole body, relieving physical tension and stress, leaving your muscles relaxed for a long period after; this is fantastic news for anyone struggling with sleep issues, it could be that a good dose of your favorite comedian in the hour or so before bed could be beneficial.

It’s hard to imagine anything else that could work as quickly or dependably to bring your mind and body back into balance than a good laugh.  It lifts your mood, inspires hope, connects you with others and promotes a positive outlook.

With so much power to heal and renew, the ability to laugh easily and frequently is a tremendous resource not only for resolving problems but in preventing them too – both physically and emotionally.

So what are you waiting for?  Commit now to a daily dose of laughter.  I hope the clip below will get you on your way!

Did you know that high blood pressure, or hypertension, is thought to account for 20-25% of all deaths worldwide and affects one in three people worldwide (over 16 million people in the UK and 50 million people in the USA)?

There are as many as 5 million people in the UK who have high blood pressure without realising it (according to the British Heart Foundation), as high blood pressure doesn’t tend to produce symptoms. Yet having high blood pressure is an important risk factor for developing stroke or heart attack in later life. The treatment of hypertension saves lives. Continue reading →

Did you know that today, 2^nd November, is National Stress Awareness Day, run by the International Stress Management Association (ISMA)?  The aim is to raise awareness of our rising stress levels, which, according to AXA insurance, have doubled in the last 4 years. Continue reading →

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are

- Theodore Roosevelt

A sense of control over our lives is a something we all need.  It’s one of those innate needs humans have, just like the need for connection with other people and for safety and security.  Where a person begins to feel a lack of control over the things going on in their lives, or how they might be feeling or behaving, this can often lead to problems. Continue reading →

Decision is the spark that ignites action. Until a decision is made nothing happens.  Wilfred A Peterson

People often tell me motivation doesn’t last, and I tell them that bathing doesn’t either. That’s why I recommend it daily.    Zig Ziglar

When you have a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself is a choice.  William James

Time flies.  It’s up to you to be the navigator.   Robert Orben

How to Lift Depression […fast] is a fantastic book by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, founders of The Human Givens Approach to therapy, the principles of which share much common ground with Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

It is a book I would highly recommend to those suffering depression and is also particularly helpful for the family and loved ones of sufferers, for whom the condition can often be difficult to understand. Continue reading →

I love reading about the amazing advances in medicine that we see from time to time.  The Telegraph reported on the recent findings of a US study into how stem cell therapy could help patients with angina.

You can read the report here, about how these patients were helped using stem cells from their own bone marrow, which were used to help make blood vessels.

This is a great reminder that we all have everything we need in so many ways – even when we don’t realise it. Continue reading →

From a bizarre conversation came ideas about the lengths we will go to in order to support our beliefs!