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.”

Hsiao Yu-ho, a Taiwanese hypnotherapist who went to Guangzhou in 2007 to expand her business, said that hypnotherapy is a form of psychological counseling and there is nothing mysterious about it. Hypnotherapy has gradually come to be accepted by Chinese consumers after the release of Inception, the 2010 Hollywood blockbuster that dealt with both hypnotism and dreams.

Hsiao's clients typically range between the ages of 20 and 40. Most of them are seeking psychological help for problems with work or with their love life.

"Most people have the misconception that hypnotherapy is a cure for insomnia, which is totally incorrect. Hypnotherapy can help a person relax, but it is different from sleeping. People also believe that it can erase memories, but this would be a serious violation of the ethics prescribed by the job. Every master of hypnotism warns their students never to erase people's memories," said Hsiao.

"Many female clients ask to erase their memories of their former boyfriends, which is very dangerous," Hsiao said.

When a hypnotherapist meets with a client, the first thing they have to do is to win their trust. Then they will attempt to discover the easiest way to hypnotize the client. When the client is in a state of hypnosis, the therapist will guide them in certain ways, including telling them to imagine a staircase with 10 steps, then telling them to walk down the steps one by one as the hypnotherapist counts from one to 10. Then when the client gets to the bottom, they are asked to open the door they see before them, open it and look into their subconscious. When the client wakes up, the hypnotherapist will analyze and "restructure" the mind of the clients, making them feel better.

A 20-something sought help from Hsiao because she was afraid of the dark and was too scared to do overtime in her office at night. Hsiao uncovered the memory that she had been locked in a dark room at the age of four. Another woman in her mid-thirties would shake with fear when she laid eyes on her female superiors. Hsiao found out that she had been frequently scolded by her mother from a very young age and associated her female supervisors with the image of her mother.



If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.

HE 27-year-old, who was left contemplating suicide in a bid to escape the attacks, says her life has been transformed thanks to hypnotherapy.

UNTIL recently, Heather McCartney suffered such severe panic attacks she thought she was having a heart attack.

For 10 years she has been plagued by such terrible anxiety that there have been times she hasn’t felt able to leave the house and, at one stage, listening to music made “her skin crawl”.

Self-harming became a release for the 27-year-old and, at her lowest points, she even contemplated suicide.

But Heather’s life has now been transformed thanks to hypnotherapy.

After just a handful of sessions, she is once more learning to lead a normal life – from going out to the cinema with friends to getting back behind the wheel of her car.

She is now even training to become a make-up artist.

These are everyday events for most people but were impossible for Heather just months ago.

She said: “My life has completely changed since I started hypnosis.

“I am still on anti-depressants and seeing a psychologist, both of which I am sure have played a part, but even after just one session of hypnosis I felt so much more relaxed and was even able to go to a restaurant with my parents afterwards.

“It wasn’t easy but I was able to do it and I wouldn’t have been able to do so before.

“It really has been amazing.”

Heather first started experiencing anxiety when sitting her Highers.

Despite being a good student, used to getting top marks, she began to worry uncontrollably about the exams.

She said: “I had never experienced anything like it before. I just found myself getting really stressed, far more so than people usually would about exams. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to be the best.”

Nonetheless, with good grades secured, Heather went to Glasgow University to study Classical Civilization, French and Italian.

Sadly, though, her anxiety got worse.

Going to lectures was a daily endurance test for Heather and, at just 17, she found university life too much to cope with.

She said: “I felt like I was going into an exam every time I had a lecture. I felt really sick and nervous every day.

“Because of the course I had chosen, I also had a much more intense timetable than most first year students and I simply felt unprepared to cope with it.

“Looking back, I think I was quite young to be away from my family too, and, just before I started, I split up with a guy I had been seeing for a few years so I don’t think that helped either.”

It was at this point that Heather started to self-harm.

She said: “I know people think it is about attention-seeking but it really wasn’t for me.

“I did it out of frustration at myself.”

Living in a flat with other students, Heather wasn’t able to hide her problems for long.

She said: “I was hardly leaving the flat and wearing scarves tied round my wrists, so they looked quite fashionable but it wasn’t enough to hide what was going on.

“My flatmates eventually said to me that what was happening wasn’t right and I needed to get help.

“I have them to thank for making me tell someone how I was feeling.

“My family were really shocked and upset when they found out how bad I was, even though there had been times when they had come through to Glasgow to take me home because they knew from talking to me that I was having a bad time.”

Halfway through her second year, Heather, from Lanark, left university to return home.

She tried to go back to uni several times but struggled so badly that she finally gave up completely just months before graduation.

After a while, she started work for her dad’s insurance broker business, while DJ-ing at weekends, but this also became too much for her.

Heather said: “I think I was doing too much. It was as if I was trying to lead two lives.

“There was the sensible, responsible me who was working for my dad and then there was the other me who still wanted to go out and enjoy myself.”

Eventually, regular panic attacks – sometimes as many as two a day – forced Heather to stop all work. The attacks could be so severe that she felt as if she was dying.

She said: “I really can’t describe how awful they were, they really were the worst thing ever.

“I began to fear going anywhere or doing anything in case I got one.

“My mum became my comfort blanket because I would only go anywhere when I was with her.

“They came on at any time, even doing something as simple as going to the supermarket.

“I had some on trains, which is terrible because all you want to do is get off and you can’t.

“I also had one while I was driving, which was terrifying and put me off driving again.”

Unable to live a normal life, Heather became so low that she rarely left the house and, at points, she even contemplated suicide.

She said: “It was like there was no relief from feeling that bad and there was no enjoyment to be found in anything in life.

“I had become a shell of the person I had been. I found it hard to understand why I felt the way I did, as well.

“I don’t come from a broken home and we never had money worries – I had a really happy childhood and have good relationships with my parents and my brother.

“I lost both my grans in a space of 13 months when I was in my early 20s, which did set me back at the time, but otherwise I had a really happy, stable life.

“I think it just goes to show that mental health problems really can affect anyone.”

After hitting a really low point this spring, Heather decided to give hypnosis a try.

She had her first session at the end of May. Heather said: “In the first session, all you really do is go into a really deep relaxation but I could feel the difference right away.

“Each session since has helped me a little more and I really do feel now that I am beginning to come out of the other side.

“Don’t get me wrong, I still get bad days when I can feel anxious but I can cope with them so much better.”

While living at home, Heather had begun a blog to review beauty products, but earlier this year she decided to blog about her mental health problems instead, in the hope of helping others.

She said: “The response I had from people was just incredible and it really has been a huge support to me.

“That has given me strength but I also realised how important it is to talk about the problems I have been through so other people talk about them too.

“I feel it is really important to be open and honest about my problems so other people might realise they are not alone.

“And that there is hope.”



If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.

A hospital patient whose day job is being a hypnotist has had his sixth operation without anaesthetic.

Alex Lenkei chose to forgo traditional anaesthetic and instead put himself in a trance for the ankle replacement surgery.

While it was not the 66-year-old's first foray into the world of operations under hypnosis - he has had six operations that way - it was the first time for orthopaedic surgeon Dominic Nielsen.

Mr Nielsen performed the two-hour operation, which involved saw cutting through Mr Lenkei's bone, at Epsom Hospital in Surrey.

"It certainly was a bit nerve-wracking making the first cut, not being sure whether he would be able to feel it, but once we got through that bit it became very much like doing any other ankle replacement," said Mr Nielsen.

The operation took two hours and involved sawing the bone "He did amazingly well with the whole thing.

"To be honest, it was just like doing any other operation.

"Alex went through the process, which took a very short period of time, and he told us he was ready to go ahead ... It sort of went out of my mind that he was awake and able to correspond.

"He made a couple of comments during the operation which obviously reminded us that it was a strange experience.

"He commented at one point on the noise of the saws and was just asking how it was going. It was very strange."

An anaesthetist was on hand in case anything went wrong during the July 8 operation, but he was not needed.

Mr Lenkei, from Worthing, West Sussex, said: "I'm not averse to anaesthetic - it's just that my pain control is a hell of a lot better than the medical profession's and I heal a lot quicker because my body doesn't have to get rid of all of the chemicals.

"Most doctors are scared because obviously it is not something that they come across in the medical profession, as such.

"The brain is a very sophisticated computer and if you press the right buttons it will do amazing things - if you press the right buttons it will switch certain things off."

Mr Lenkei, who suffers from osteoarthritis, six operations without general anaesthesia include surgery on his hand, a hernia removal and freeing a trapped nerve near his elbow.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.

Giuliana Rancic's hoarding was a central theme on the latest episode of "Giuiana & Bill." It had become a huge issue of concern for virtually everyone in her life. Her husband, Bill, saw her stockpile unused strollers at home in their garage. Their nanny saw Giuliana refuse to donate any clothes that baby Duke had grown out of. And her office at work was filled with cardboard boxes full of stuff.

So, Giuliana's friend Robbie organized a rather unique sort of pseudo-intervention. Rather than surround Giuliana with loved ones who could voice their concern and get her to face her problem, he brought in a hypnotist named Tom to "cure" her.

“The more you can remove the clutter, the more freedom you have to lead a simpler life," Tom said during her session.

Giuliana certainly seemed to feel that the hypnosis netted a positive result. "Oh my gosh. I am so excited right now. This whole hypnosis thing was amazing," she said. "I feel like I can go in there and get rid of some stuff.”

If she did clean things up, that would be a great relief to Bill. He told Larry King earlier this summer that Giuliana's hoarding was his biggest pet peeve. "“She’s messy as hell ... I call her car the dirty diaper. It’s not normal, Larry. She collects things. She has 12 strollers. She’s on the borderline of being a hoarder."

Giuliana repeated on Twitter that she thinks the hypnosis did work. She also denied having a problem, saying that she was a "collector" and not a "hoarder."

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic. 

A new review of the scientific literature studying hypnosis, in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, by Oakley and Halligan, discusses the potential for hypnosis to provide insights into brain mechanisms involved in attention, motor control, pain perception, beliefs and volition and also to produce informative analogues of clinical conditions. This is a critical discussion as hypnosis is used as a psychological treatments and, recently, as an investigative tool in cognitive neuroscience.

An iconic vision of the menacing magician involves placing a hapless person from the audience into a hypnotic trance. Svengali. You are getting sleeeepy. A scam, right? Not so fast. According to to this new review, as well as our colleagues who study the brains of people who are prone to trancelike states, hypnosis is not necessarily hocus-pocus. The age-old practice profoundly alters neural circuits involved in perception and decision making, changing what people see, hear, feel, and believe to be true. Recent experiments led people who were hypnotized to “see” colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought they were gibberish.

Some of the critical experiments were led by Amir Raz, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, who is an amateur magician. Raz wanted to do something really impressive that other neuroscientists could not ignore. So he hypnotized people and gave them the Stroop test. In this classic paradigm, you are shown words in block letters that are colored red, blue, green, or yellow. But here’s the rub. Sometimes the word “red” is colored green. Or the word “yellow” is shown in blue. You have to press a button stating the correct color. Reading is so deeply engrained in our brains that it will take you a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like “red” and press a button that says “green.”*

Sixteen people, half of them highly hypnotizable and half of them resistant, came into Raz’s lab. (The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance.) After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Raz gave them these instructions:

Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them. This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green, or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self.

Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion—an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized. Days later, they entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when the instruction came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, Raz said. They saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But those who were resistant to hypnosis could not override the conflict, he said. The Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors. When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. In the hypnotizables, Raz found, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened. Top-down processes overrode circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict. Most of the time people see what they expect to see and believe what they already believe—unless hypnosis trips up their brain circuitry. Most of the time, bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, but hypnosis creates a mismatch. You imagine something different, so it is different.

The top-down nature of human cognition goes far to explain not only hypnosis but also the extraordinary powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor can make you ill), talk therapy, meditation, and magical stagecraft. We are not saying that hypnosis can cure your cancer, but these effects all demonstrate that suggestion can physically alter brain function.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.

A woman in Italy was successfully anaesthetised via hypnosis ahead of undergoing skin cancer surgery, in an operation hailed Thursday as a landmark by local media.

The procedure was performed in Padua by Enrico Ferro, Professor of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at the northern Italian town's university. It took 10 minutes to hypnotize the 42-year-old patient, while the surgery lasted 20 minutes.

"When the patient was de-hypnotised, she reported no pain and was discharged immediately," Ferro wrote in an article on Anaesthesia, a scientific journal.

"Our case confirms the efficacy of hypnosis and demonstrates that it may be valuable as a sole anaesthetic method in selected cases," the professor added.

Speaking on RAI radio, Ferro explained his method. "You concentrate (the patient's) attention on a single thing," so as to distract them from everything else, including pain, he said.

Hypnosis is unlikely to work on 10 to 15 per cent of the population, he indicated. A further 10 to 15 per cent is "highly" sensitive to it, while the rest of the population has "average" sensitivity.

The woman who was operated in Padua fell into the "average" category, Ferro said.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic. 

For well over a century, hypnosis has been used to treat a wide range of conditions including irritable bowel syndrome, post-traumatic stress and eating disorders. But now neuroscientists are using hypnosis to gain insight into medically unexplained paralysis such as hysteria, hallucinations and schizophrenia.


By Peter Halligan, Cardiff University

Despite long standing associations with mysticism and stage hypnotism, hypnosis has also been used for medical and scientific purposes. For well over a century, hypnosis has been used to treat a wide range of conditions. These have included pain, irritable bowel syndrome, post-traumatic stress, phobias and eating disorders.

More recently, hypnosis has began to attract notice from cognitive neuroscientists. They have become interested in understanding hypnosis, and using it to simulate unusual states of consciousness in the lab.

Hypnotic suggestion allows one to harness the effect of attention in the brain. This allows the enhancement, and even production, of a wide range of experiences. In many people, hypnotic suggestion can producecompelling changes in perception and cognition, including temporary paralysis, anaesthesia and blindness.

Hypnosis produces a highly focused state which allows “suggestions” – simple statements communicating changes in a person’s experience or behaviour – to take place, such as “your leg is becoming so stiff that you cannot move it”. It has also been long recognised that suggestions can be effective without a hypnotic induction procedure, but this is rare, only occuring in highly suggestible individuals.

In the labThe ability to experimentally manipulate subjective awareness in the laboratory could have major potential, as I describe in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience Review.

Current interest in the area can be divided into two types of research. Some are looking to acquire a better understanding of the nature of hypnosis. Others are interested in using hypnotic suggestion to investigate certain aspects of normal and abnormal psychological functioning.

Employing a range of brain imaging technologies, both approaches are using hypnosis to explore the nature of consciousness. They are also gaining insight into the brain mechanisms underlying visual perception, pain, and the putative origins of some clinical symptoms. These include medically unexplained paralysis as seen in hysteria, hallucinations, delusions and alterations in control over thought and actions in schizophrenia.

Understandably, scepticism remains regarding the credibility of reports involving hypnotic suggestion. Participants, however, typically describe the perceptual and behavioural changes experienced as “real”, and beyond voluntary control.

Recent experimental studies support the case for hypnosis being a physiologically credible experience. This is particularly seen where suggestions disrupt well-established automatic, unconscious processes, such as reading.

The findingsThere is a now a growing literature which shows how hypnotic suggestion can be used to create temporary functional changes in a range of ways.

Hypnosis has also been used instrumentally to develop and test models for a number of specific psycho-pathologies including delusions, auditory hallucinations, functional paralysis and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

It can also be used to suggest subjective experiences that are similar to symptoms observed in neurological and psychiatric disturbances. These have included chronic pain conditions, and disorders of volition and motor control.

Hypnotic suggestions have been used to induce “synaesthetic” experiences – where one sense triggers the involuntary use of another. In colour-number synaesthesia, people experience colours associated with specific numbers. The reliable effects reported in naturally occurring synaesthesia are commonly considered to be outside a subject’s control. However, one study showed that hypnotic suggestion could be effective in abolishing the apparently automatic experience of synaesthesia.

There is clearly great future potential in this growing field. In addition to scientific advances, the ability to produce neurological symptoms of “virtual patients” in normal volunteers also provides a potential training value. Practitioners could have the possibility of experiencing these symptoms for themselves: through hypnotic suggestion.

Over the past 25 years Peter Halligan has received funding from MRC and other UK research councils and charities, although none specifically for research on hypnosis.

A multidisciplinary group of researchers from Finland (University of Turku and University of Helsinki) and Sweden (University of Skövde) has now found evidence that hypnotic suggestion can modify processing of a targeted stimulus before it reaches consciousness. The experiments show that it is possible to hypnotically modulate even highly automatic features of perception, such as color experience. The results are presented in two articles published in PLoS ONE and International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. The nature of hypnotically suggested changes in perception has been one of the main topics of controversy during the history of hypnosis. The major current theories of hypnosis hold that we always actively use our own imagination to bring about the effects of a suggestion. For example the occurrence of visual hallucinations always requires active use of goal directed imagery and can be experienced both with and without hypnosis.

The study published in PLoS ONE was done with two very highly hypnotizable participants who can be hypnotized and dehypnotized by just using a one-word cue. The researchers measured brains oscillatory activity from the EEG in response to briefly displayed series of red or blue shapes (squares, triangles or circles). The participants were hypnotized and given a suggestion that certain shapes always have a certain color (e.g. all squares are always red). Participant TS-H reported constantly experiencing a change in color immediately when a suggested shape appeared on the screen (e.g. seeing a red square when the real color was blue). The researchers found that this experience was accompanied with enhanced high-frequency brain activity already 1/10 second after the stimulus appeared and it was only seen in response to the shapes mentioned in the suggestion. The second participant did not experience the color change or the enhanced activity. However, she reported a peculiar feeling when a suggestion-relevant shape was presented: "sometimes I saw a shape that was red but my brain told me it had a different color."

This enhanced oscillatory brain activity is proposed to reflect automatic comparison of input to memory representations. In this case the hypnotic suggestion "all squares are red" led to a memory trace that was automatically activated when a square was presented. Furthermore, for the participant TS-H the effect was strong enough to override the real color of the square. The matching must have occurred preconsciously because of the early timing of the effect and the immediacy of the color change. Also, both participants reported having performed under posthypnotic amnesia without conscious memory of the suggestions.

In the article published in International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis TS-H was tested in a similar type of setting, however, only behavioral data, including accuracy and response times in color recognition, were collected. These results further support that a hypnotic suggestion affects her color perception of targeted objects before she becomes conscious of them. Furthermore, TS-H was not capable of changing her experience of visually presented stable images without the use of hypnotic suggestions i.e. by using mere mental imagery.

Importantly, both of these experiments were done by using a posthypnotic suggestion. The effect was suggested during hypnosis but the experience was suggested to occur after hypnosis. Thus all the experiments were carried out while participants were in their normal state of consciousness.

This result indicates that all hypnotic responding can no longer be regarded merely as goal directed mental imagery. It shows that in hypnosis it is possible to create a memory trace that influences early and preconscious stages of visual processing already about 1/10 second after the appearance of a visual target. This result has important implications in psychology and cognitive neuroscience especially when studying visual perception, memory and consciousness.

The Finnish part of the research is funded by the Academy of Finland.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.