Hypnosis is an effective way to address stress and anxiety. This statement is supported not only by my clinical judgement, but also through personal experience. And, rather importantly, supported in the scientific literature.

In the work that I do with clients, I help individuals to access deeply calm, deeply focused states of relaxation. This combination of focused-relaxation is particularly helpful for turning down the stress response, and exploring anxiety with a client.

As anxiety has many causes, so it has many solutions. In hypnotherapy, we will together explore what these solutions might be, teach practical tools you can use outside of sessions, make a plan together to move forward, and finally enter hypnosis to facilitate your therapeutic goals.

If you are unsure if hypnosis is right for your circumstance, please get in contact, and we can have a conversation about your best path forward.

I first encountered hypnosis as an anxious young person. It was a great experience, which led to my desire to help other young people who may also be struggling.

Since then, more than ten years ago, I have been fortunate to get psychological training and work therapeutically with children and young people in school, in hospital, and in my private practice. Hypnosis, I’ve found, can be rather helpful. Especially when traditional talk therapies like CBT or counselling haven’t helped.

Children and young people have lots of reasons to be stressed. Neurodivergence. Physical conditions. School anxiety. Sleep. Social Media. Phones. Fitting in. An uncertain and changing world. These are all understandable. I am confident that hypnosis can in each case be helpful.

If you are unsure if hypnosis is right for your circumstance, please get in contact, and we can have a conversation about your best path forward.

Hypnosis has a long history of helping with habits. Nearly 100 years ago, for example, the female traveller Emily Hahn wrote of her addiction to opium when in China, and how hypnosis helped her break the addiction.

More commonly and more reliably, hypnosis is helpful for either forming habits or breaking them. For example, a person might want to stop smoking or vaping. Here, hypnosis is helpful, with modern research suggesting success rates of around 35%. Hypnosis can also help with habit formation, such as thinking through and mentally executing a plan for the future.

As for habits, hypnosis can help with phobias. People often seek help for public speaking anxiety, fears of flying, confidence in life or work, and similar fears. These can all be helped through hypnosis.

If you are unsure if hypnosis is right for your circumstance, please get in contact, and we can have a conversation about your best path forward.

I consider myself a scientific thinker. Empirical evidence matters, as does scepticism, mechanisms, evidence, and, above all, reality.

Training in hypnosis, I was pleasantly surprised to learn of the increasingly robust scientific literature, which I have collated here. The gist is that there a meta-analyses, randomised control trials, imaging studies that all point towards helpful clinical uses.

Further, I have written about how hypnosis works here, the neuroscience of hypnosis here, and of my experiment of doing self-hypnosis for one year here.

Critical thinking and scepticism are always good. But don’t think that hypnosis = pseudoscience. As is so often the case, it’s a bit more complicated than that. In fact, hypnosis is living through a scientific renaissance, at least if we consider the ubiquity of conversations that newspapers, podcasters, and academics are all having. Hypnosis is everywhere at the moment. And for good reason.