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In2 minds

Welcome to my blog page, called In2 minds because that's what I was in when I started it!
Snippets that I hope you might find interesting, fun or helpful to do with mental health and well-being, and sometimes not!

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 How can hypnotherapy/mindfulness help you lose weight?

23/1/2015

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This article is based on a series of BBC Horizon programmes "What's the right diet for you?" first shown in January 2015.

Tanya Byron, a clinical psychologist, and Dr. Chris van Tulleken, research scientist and TV presenter, took 75 overweight volunteers on a diet programme lasting for three months, during which many of the participants had life-changing experiences. 

Armed with ‘hidden’ cameras and aided and abetted by various ‘obesity scientists’ from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, they set about testing the theory that if you are trying to lose weight, you need a diet that is tailored to your specific type of eating habits. The type of over-eater the participants were depended on the results of lab tests based on their genes, their hormones, or their psychological profiles. The results saw them grouped into 3 categories:  

1. Feasters – those people who once they started eating just couldn’t stop. These people had a hormone deficiency which meant that once they were physically full the signal to their brain was much weaker and so they wanted to keep on eating. 

2. Emotional Eaters – those people who tended to ‘comfort eat’ in response to stress or depression. 

3. Constant Cravers – those people whose genes disrupted the signals to the brain to say they were full so were constantly thinking about food and craving it all the time.
 

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I was beginning to theorise how I might use hypnotherapy or mindfulness techniques with these three categories of over-eaters.  

The series of three programmes, showing their progress over a period of three months, involved:

The Feasters – being given a non-stop sushi buffet. The normal intake for most people in this situation would be 5 or 6 bowls. The feasters were seen to consume up to 17 bowls.

The Emotional Eaters – these people were put into stressful situations such as retaking a fake driving test and abseiling down a very tall lighthouse. They also underwent brain scans where they were induced into experiencing a low mood and then monitored when they anticipated the ‘comfort food’ of their choice.

The Constant Cravers – were subjected to a grip-force test 2 hours after a main meal, where they were presented with different foods. The force with which they gripped the monitoring equipment showed how much they desired that food at that particular time; they were also taken to a fun-fair where they had to wear glasses fitted up with cameras to show where their attention was drawn.  

The diets they were given for the next three months depended on which group they fell into:

The Feasters were given diets that made them feel full (high protein/low gi) – fish, chicken, pasta, lentils, basmati rice.

The Constant Cravers were told to go on an intermittent fasting diet which required that their calorie intake on just two days a week was no higher than 800. They also had to cut out bread, pasta and fruit but could eat meat, eggs, fish and vegetables.

The Emotional Eaters were told to undergo a course of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy coupled with group support meetings such a diet clubs. 

By the end of the three month study, the group of 75 people had lost a total of 103 stone, and the one who’d lost the most had lost a massive 3st 4lb. 

Having watched the programmes, I concluded that hypnotherapy and mindfulness, or a combination of both, could help all three categories of over-eaters: 

The most obvious one was the Emotional Eaters – hypnotherapy employs techniques based on Cognitive Behaviour – in other words, understanding why we do things and recognising when we do them so we may have more control over what we actually do. Hypnotherapy can also work successfully with helping people to increase their motivation to do something. The relaxation employed in hypnotherapy also helps to overcome the stress response. 

Mindfulness could easily help with the Feasters. At one point, they were advised to eat their food more slowly. This enables the level of their gut hormone to increase to a level that makes them feel full. Mindfulness encourages us to relish every single mouthful of food (or drink) and to really take our time to enjoy it. I regularly take mindfulness meditation sessions which involve people making a single raisin last for over twenty minutes! 

The Constant Cravers could also be helped with hypnotherapy. It was suggested that the Constant Cravers tried to see the world of food in a very different way. In other words, instead of looking at fast food outlets and snack bars as friendly things, they were encouraged to see them more as ‘the enemy’ trying to get them to stay overweight. Hypnotherapy often involves getting people to ‘reframe’ the world, or parts of it, into a more helpful one just as the participants were trying to do here. 

So, by the end of the series, it was really interesting to see how well these people had got on with their weight-loss programmes.

More interestingly for me, it was good to know that each type of over-eater could be helped using techniques from both hypnotherapy and mindfulness.


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Helping children - from mainstream to mindful teacher.

23/1/2015

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This article was originally published in 'Hypnoversity' Winter/Spring 2015.


I had used general relaxation techniques informally a few times during my time as a primary school teacher (especially when the children came in from a long, hot, sticky dinnertime with short fuses and 100 different stories relating to their social time outside). I found that a just a few minutes spent in this way was hugely beneficial and had a knock-on effect for the rest of the day.


So, with the intention of using it back in schools at some point, it was with much interest that I set about completing the Mindfulness Now course with Nick Cooke and Aston Colley in May 2014, learning more about various techniques and the 7 elements of mindfulness as outlined by western mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn:
  1. non-striving
  2. non-judgemental
  3. acceptance
  4. letting go
  5. trust
  6. patience
  7. beginner’s mind
It was emphasised throughout the course that we, as prospective mindfulness practitioners, should also try to practise these elements in our everyday lives, both formally and informally. So far, so good.  

It was during the first two sessions back in a mainstream primary school but working as a Teacher of Mindfulness with just six children (all of whom had been targeted specifically as needing mindfulness as a tool) that I realized it wasn’t going to be as simple as I had first envisaged. Their specific behavioural and social needs really tested number 5 on that list - my own trust in what I was doing!

I, personally, was in a transition phase between being a mainstream teacher and being a mindfulness practitioner, and having begun to practise the 7 attitudes in my own life, I was finding it increasingly difficult to enforce rules for behaviour that I had previously been so familiar with. I had read articles saying things along the lines of “Sometimes we have to let go and just allow the children’s energy to find their own balance”  (www.mindbodygreen.com)  and “Although it may be tempting to use mindfulness as a disciplinary tool, mindfulness should not be used to demand a certain behaviour. It inherently includes the quality of acceptance,” (www.greatergood.berkeley.edu).

What many of us may tend to forget is the fact that children are naturally mindful. They perhaps do not have to be still and quiet and calm in order to be practising mindfulness. Most children are naturally excited, inquisitive and on-the-go, experiencing all that life throws at them without too much worry. The children I was working alongside needed acceptance of who they are, what they do, why they behave in certain ways, how they do things and see things sometimes quite differently from the rest of us. Many children, because of their specific needs, find it incredibly difficult to sit still and to be quiet. So should we expect this from them?

Adults tend to conform. And if they do not like mindfulness or think it is not for them, then they have the choice as to whether they come back next time. These children did not have the choice. It was my job, therefore, to achieve a balance between ‘I know what I’m talking about and therefore you need to do it this way’ and ‘Let’s just see how you do this for yourselves because you might actually know better than I do’.

I’m still learning. And I hazard a guess I’ll still be learning in however many years down the line.

Two things seem to be for sure though: 1) The number of children who exhibit behavioural and social issues, and could benefit hugely from mindfulness, seems to continue to rise and 2) The number of teachers and support staff experiencing high levels of stress due to the inherent demands of the job, also continues to grow. As a result, I can see that mindfulness will continue to be an increasingly valuable tool for use in both primary and secondary schools.

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Attention!

22/1/2015

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My first contribution to my blog is called ‘Attention!’ a) because I wanted to get yours and b) because that’s what I find myself saying over and over again, in one way or another in my work as a hypnotherapist and teacher of mindfulness. I hasten to add that I don’t say it as a sergeant major would! I never say it as an instruction but always as part of a sentence: “Simply notice where your attention takes you,” “You might find yourself paying attention more and more to what your body is telling you,” “And when you’re ready, you can bring your attention back to the here and now.”  

We are always attending to something – whether that’s a particular situation, how our body is feeling in any given moment (especially if we’re experiencing pain or discomfort), or our thoughts. In fact, 9 times out of 10 we get ‘caught up’ in our thoughts without acknowledging what’s really going on – judgments, self-criticism, worries, these are often the main contributors to stress.  

Hypnotherapy works with your thought processes in order to make a desired change – it may provide a new and refreshing way of looking at things; it may help someone to revisit past trauma and come back to the present with an altered view of things; it can help to overcome phobias and addictions; it can even help transform pain, or should I say our experience of pain, into something that is more acceptable.  

Mindfulness works in completely the opposite way – it doesn’t aim to ‘do’ anything but in so-doing changes do occur. For relaxation, we don’t aim to stop our thoughts – in fact we may focus on them even more, observing them as the transient things that they are, knowing that they will come and go, as they always have done. We don’t aim, necessarily, to have a quiet environment – we focus even more on any sounds we hear, and just let them be. In so-doing our overall experience can become ‘quieter’. When treating pain or discomfort, we have no specific aim of changing it but rather we acknowledge it fully, observe it, give it our full attention, breathe into it – and rather miraculously changes can occur.  

Our experience of life depends on where our attention goes and, ultimately what we choose to do with it.


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    Author

    Rachel Broomfield
    Clinical Hypnotherapist and Teacher of Mindfulness

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