One holiday maker found out the hard way that not tackling your phobias can have a serious impact on your love life and your pocket.

National newspapers reported this week that a 32 year dog groomer was whisked away for a romantic holiday by her fiancé to Tunisia.  She suffered a panic attack on the flight over and then could not bring herself to take the return flight.

She spent 3 weeks in her hotel room and had to spend £5,000 to travel back home by sea and rail.

Phobias are often based on irrational fears stoked by an over-active imagination but can clearly cause the sufferer a great deal of crippling anxiety and dramatic physical symptoms.

The important thing is not to let the feeling of impending catastrophe get to the point of no return and one of the best forms of early intervention is hypnotherapy.

Using relaxation and breathing techniques, hypnotherapy provides a sympathetic and gentle approach to learning how to fly in the face of fear.

Contact the Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic for an informal discussion today 0121 241 8227.

Last week in an office, one colleague asked another colleague to remove a small spider from the wall by their desk.  They had always said that they didn’t like spiders, but to an outsider, a phobia is often incomprehensible. Transfixed with fear as the request was made, the arachnophobic reasoned aloud that although it was very tiny, it was still ‘freaking them out’.

This example illustrates the problem with phobias which is that the idea of the spider and what the outcome of a spider encounter is likely to be, is much bigger than the reality of the spider itself.

Of course with spiders, you can work round the problem.  Someone else can use the broom to shoo it out of the bath or if you are on your own, you can simply keep out of the bathroom.  But what would happen if you were about to realise a dream by moving to a converted barn in the countryside and the only thing stopping you is an encounter with a veritable Spider City?

Phobias are just like a fight going on in our heads with the rational mind versus the imagination where the latter is winning.  We may be fully aware of this tug of war going on and even that our phobia doesn’t make sense but we believe that it is beyond our control.

The good news is, it isn’t beyond our control but the bad news is it may take some convincing before help is sought.

Even though phobias are so disruptive to our lives and take away our freedom to live a normal life, we would do anything to avoid confronting them.  We would rather adapt our behaviour to work around it i.e. wake hours earlier and take B roads to a destination instead of waking at a sensible time and taking the dreaded motorway.

Fortunately for a problem which is rooted in the mind, the fear that has been programmed into us to the point of exaggeration can be re-programmed, by way of hypnotherapy.

But first we must understand what is going on inside the phobic mind.

Recently we had te pleaseure of working with a client who has a severe anxiety when swimming in open water whcih was causing panic attacks. The client was stuck at this stage and could not get over it.

During our session we establish that the client was making huge pictures of them swiming whilst feeling panic and swimming in a gigantic lake which was making it very scary.

Fortunately this client was extremele repsonsive to our techniques and had resolved the problem from the very first session and we were both ever so happy.

Even more the client emailed us a couple of weeks later them swimming in open water and with a huge smile.

Just after her mum passed away Bryony began suffering panic attacks.  Although she had experienced an episode in the past, these new attacks began to occur more regularly and were more severe.

Eventually they became an ‘everyday state of mind’ and Bryony realised she had no control over her life so needed to take action.

Consulting her GP her only options were medication or counselling.  Not wishing to take pills, Bryony attended counselling but came to conclusion talking while someone passively listened was not the answer, especially when she had friends she could share with.

After some research Bryony decided hypnotherapy could offer a more dynamic solution.

“I am a pragmatic person so I wanted something straight-forward which I would be actively involved in to get the feelings of panic under control.

“When I first met Georgios he was very direct with me and it took me a while to be less guarded and more honest about how I felt when usually I would say I felt fine even though I wasn’t.

“He is quite a unique character and told me outright that I was responsible for making myself feel so anxious.  While this seemed quite harsh, he had read me well because I soon understood I also had the power to stop myself from feeling so bad.”

It took three sessions to work through the issues and pick up some self-help techniques to enable Bryony to stop her anxious feelings from getting hold of her and disrupting her life.  The effect on her life was transformative.

“It is such a relief to be free of the fear.  While I am not cured of panic attacks I am now able to manage them better.  This is because I haven’t changed my nature, just the way I think about things.

“The first test of my new state of mind was when I went flying off on holiday.  Usually this can be an ordeal for me but I didn’t even register any of the typical fears.  I was more able to focus on the good things such as the fact I was going on holiday, rather than the bad things which could happen, but in reality, were unlikely.

“I even confronted a panic attack by deliberately bringing on the feeling.  At that stage, because I knew what it would feel like and that it would pass, it really wasn’t that bad. I was so pleased that I had genuinely got my life back.

“I would advise anyone who wants to take positive action and get on top of anxiety that hypnotherapy is for you.”

Sleeping pills are effective in getting you off to sleep but as we know, it isn’t always the quantity of sleep that is important, but the quality.  The state of relaxation you can achieve during hypnosis enables a more natural sleep pattern to establish itself and for the body to experience the deep restorative phase of sleep which is vital to a good night’s sleep.  Because pills simply ‘knock you out’ and may produce other side effects, hypnotherapy can be the best long-term solution for sleep problems.