Downloads Unwrapped – June 2011

How to exercise restraint

Exercise addiction can lead to chronic ill health and can, ironically, lead to loss of fitness as well as loss of health. (1) As with any ‘fix’, the addict might feel irritable and restless when they miss a workout or haven’t managed to get out for that run. The problem with addiction (any addiction) is that it comes to dominate one’s life. Do we exercise to live? Or live to exercise? We all need to exercise to some extent. As we age we start, through a combination of inactivity and natural processes, to lose muscle mass, leaving us more open to injury and illness. And muscle mass burns fat extremely efficiently, so when we lose muscle we get saggy. But there are dangers to over exercising, particularly of ‘chronic cardio’ (as Mark Sissons of marksdailyapple.com describes it). Too much exercise with too little rest can overload the repair systems of the body, meaning loss of vital muscle, the onset of mood disorder and the impairment of the immune system. The ‘some is good so more must be better’ attitude can lead to an overdose of exercise which can be very damaging. (2)

Overcome exercise addiction instils a sense of proportion about exercise so that it becomes a part of life rather than the sole purpose of living.

Have we got news for you!

Talking of compulsive activities I, for one, have to consciously regulate my intake of news. Constantly feeling we have to know about every single update on national or international news starts to feel like addiction. What’s more, when, for whatever reason, we are denied our news fix, it can come to feel as if we are having a withdrawal. Why is this? It’s because the ‘expectation and reward’ neural pathways in the brain operate the same way regardless whether it’s nicotine or news coming down the wire. But apart from not wanting to be enslaved by an activity – any activity – too much news can actually be bad for you.

An awful lot of news is negative, scary, horrific and downright depressing. But how much of it is really ‘news’? How many stories you see or hear or read are just the same ‘news’ you saw or heard or read half an hour earlier? Seeing, reading, hearing about the same things over and over – especially if they are emotionally arousing – has a conditioning effect on the brain. Before we know it we can start to feel dispirited or even traumatised by the unremitting negative cast of news bulletins. News can be ‘hypnotic’ in the worst sense. Now I’m all for being well informed and knowing about stuff. But I’m also for balance and dosage. News once a day should be enough for anyone and if it’s that important to you then you will hear about it. The Overcome news addiction addresses news addiction to free up time and widen perspective.

Excuses: A lie by any other name

“Excuses are the tools with which people with no purpose in view build for themselves great monuments of nothing.” Steven Grayhm

Using excuses in an attempt to cover up personal laziness, fear or habit is like trying to hide an elephant with confetti. No one is really fooled. Not for long, anyway. But the worst use of excuse is when we try to deceive ourselves with it. At this point we’ve travelled some considerable distance from integrity. The new No excuses download is here to help people start to honestly see when ‘reasons’ are nothing more that ‘excuses’ and, of course, to help listeners start to ditch their own excuses so that they can actually get on and take action in life.

Once excuses are gone life becomes more honest, full and successful. We suddenly know where we are really ‘at’ – and the feeling is of profound relief. But we can also be too ready to make excuses for other people’s bad behaviour and this tendency means we conspire to keep other people from fulfilling some of their potential for decency and personal progress. Down with excuses!

Notes

(1) For example see: D.R. Swanson “Arterial Fibrillation in Athletes” which suggests that over training and the inflammation it causes or at least contributes to a whole host of physical disorders (Medical Hypotheses 66, no 6 (2006): 1085-92

(2) See Doug McGuff MD and John Little’s excellent and thoroughly researched book: Body By Science: A research based program for strength training, body building and complete fitness in 12 minutes a week

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Anyone might be unlucky enough to get mugged, but it’s also been found that people who feel like victims, who give out a ‘vibe’ of weakness and supplication, are more likely to be targeted. It’s not so much how big you look as how much of a fight you look as if you’d put up.

I love watching sports and you often see it. One person can be losing but they still look like a winner. Because they feel like one. If they have done the training and practice and worked on their game as much as their opponent, no matter what the sport, then the one remaining differential is attitude.

Feeling as if winning is a natural part of who you are and what you do will have an effect on outcome. We have just upgraded the Be a winner download and we’re sure that its going to be even more powerful in helping sports people (whether pro or weekend participants) sense that winning edge.

All the very best

Mark

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‘All or nothing thinking’ or ‘black or white thinking’ is both a symptom of emotional distress and problems but also a cause of such problems. Take perfectionism. To the perfectionist, something or someone must be completely perfect or else it/they are completely worthless. This ‘strategy’ contributes to relationship problems and can lead to the onset of depression because it creates a constant stream of bad feelings and also stops people trying new things that might benefit them because perfection might not be reached.

Life is rarely ‘all this’ or ‘completely that’. There are shades of grey. Depressed, addicted, anxious and angry people are forced through strong emotion to see life in simplified black/white ways. Think who you’ve heard saying things like:

“My life is a disaster!”

“Nothing ever works out for me!”

“These people are evil!”

“If I don’t get my fix my life will be ruined!”

All or nothing thinking is also all around us in the media, because it can make things seem exciting and it sells. “Mother in law ruined my life!” will sell more magazines than “Mother in law sometimes made family gatherings a bit difficult!” Politicians use all or nothing speech to make their appeals more emotional and simplistically gripping. Hitler was (sadly) renowned for making emotionally arousing all or nothing statements, with horrendous effect. But being too all or nothing on a personal level, too much of the time, can also cause us problems.

Much of a therapist’s job is to help people think more calmly – and therefore more subtly. Strong feelings generate this kind of thinking, so rather than just tackling the thinking itself head on (in the hope that changing the thinking will change the feeling), the new All or nothing thinking hypnosisdownloads.com session works to calm down feeling so that it feels more natural to begin to think in new less damaging ways.

All the best

Mark

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‘All or nothing thinking’ or ‘black or white thinking’ is both a symptom of emotional distress and problems but also a cause of such problems. Take perfectionism. To the perfectionist, something or someone must be completely perfect or else it/they are completely worthless. This ‘strategy’ contributes to relationship problems and can lead to the onset of depression because it creates a constant stream of bad feelings and also stops people trying new things that might benefit them because perfection might not be reached.

Life is rarely ‘all this’ or ‘completely that’. There are shades of grey. Depressed, addicted, anxious and angry people are forced through strong emotion to see life in simplified black/white ways. Think who you’ve heard saying things like:

“My life is a disaster!”

“Nothing ever works out for me!”

“These people are evil!”

“If I don’t get my fix my life will be ruined!”

All or nothing thinking is also all around us in the media, because it can make things seem exciting and it sells. “Mother in law ruined my life!” will sell more magazines than “Mother in law sometimes made family gatherings a bit difficult!” Politicians use all or nothing speech to make their appeals more emotional and simplistically gripping. Hitler was (sadly) renowned for making emotionally arousing all or nothing statements, with horrendous effect. But being too all or nothing on a personal level, too much of the time, can also cause us problems.

Much of a therapist’s job is to help people think more calmly – and therefore more subtly. Strong feelings generate this kind of thinking, so rather than just tackling the thinking itself head on (in the hope that changing the thinking will change the feeling), the new All or nothing thinking hypnosisdownloads.com session works to calm down feeling so that it feels more natural to begin to think in new less damaging ways.

All the best

Mark

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It’s easy to forget that exercise, as with all things, requires the right dosage for it to be healthy and increase fitness rather than cause injury and fatigue. Exercise addicts, like anyone addicted to anything, can come to make exercise the sole focus of their life. They may start to neglect their friends, their work and yes, even their health in an obsessive quest to get ever fitter and get their natural exercise high. But good exercise practice always includes periods of rest away from physical activity.

Exercise, especially if it’s intense, breaks down muscle tissue (catabolism). It is during proper rest that we give the body a chance to grow stronger and fitter (anabolism). Too much exercise, such as what’s been called as ‘chronic cardio’, which may amount to running many miles every day, can actually wear away not just bone density but muscle mass. Having good muscle mass (which doesn’t necessarily mean looking like the youthful Arnie) ensures we burn fat efficiently. So too much exercise can make us seem slimmer because we’ve lost muscle mass – but actually makes us fatter because we’re no longer burning fat efficiently. In the new session Overcome exercise addiction we really focus on helping people feel in control of their exercise patterns so that they can exercise to live rather than the other way about.

All the best

Mark

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It used to be that you had to wait for the TV news to come on, and even back in those far distant days we could get saturated with doom and gloom if we insisted on seeing the lunch time, 6 o’clock and 9’oclock bulletins while also listening to the radio news. But now we can keep updated 24/7 and the need to constantly ‘check what’s going on’ can become quite obsessive.

And how much of the news you see and read is really news at all if you have just seen it half an hour ago? So much of it is depressing and even horrific that constantly exposing ourselves to it can and does have depressing effects. The fact is, you really could live without any news because if something that important happened, you can be sure you would get to hear about it soon enough if you really needed to.

I worked with one client who went from having to catch up with news every hour to just reading it three times a week. He told me he felt much more relaxed and still just as informed.

My hot news for you is that the Overcome news addiction session is now up on hypnosisdownloads.com – because we feel that the ‘hypnotic’ effect of too much news can be personally damaging.

All the best

Mark

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If we are too soft on ourselves, too eager to make allowances and never get tough, too determined to treat ourselves with kid gloves all the time, then we actually deny ourselves the opportunity to fulfil our dreams, goals and personal potential. The habit of making up excuses as a way of not practicing a skill or attempting something new or taking a career change or asking someone we like out on a date is, at heart, a dishonest strategy.

Either we are dishonest with someone else when we make up a reason why we ‘can’t’ or ‘shouldn’t’ do something, or we lie to ourselves. So rather than admitting: “I’m too scared to attend these night school classes!” we might sell ourselves the line that: “These classes weren’t really what I was looking for anyway!”

Excuses are not the same as ‘reasons’ but they pretend to be. When we watch the Paralympics and see disabled men and women compete we are seeing people who could so easily have made up excuses not to train, not to compete, not to bother. But they were bigger than that.

The new hypnosisdownloads.com session No excuses has the potential, I think, to transform lives because once we ditch excuses we can truly stand up and walk out of the waiting room of life and start being what we have it in us to be.

All the best

Mark

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Sleep and the preparation for it – the ‘settling down’ period – is important for everyone, but especially children. Children particularly need quality sleep as they develop. But sometimes bedtime can become fraught with anxieties, from not wanting to be alone at night to just feeling over tired and fraught. TV, computer games or just worries in general all stimulate the brain and make it harder to settle.

What’s more, not settling well at bedtime can itself become habit. Simply because a child has had a number of unhappy bedtimes in the past, it can come to feel natural not to settle.

We are loving our kids hypnosis sessions at hypnosisdownloads.com and we are already getting great feedback from happy parents. The new Kids happy bedtime uses soothing story telling to help children prepare for the sweetest of sleep. We think its going to be a godsend for parents as well as children.

All the best

Mark

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Downloads Unwrapped – May 2011

How to turn the inner tyrant around

It’s amazing how we can all so deeply internalize emotional conditioning that it comes to seemas if it arises spontaneously from within our own hearts. But it doesn’t. For example, one client told me that when he started to picture the negative voice in his head, he was astonished – and illuminated – to discover that it belonged to a particularly sadistic and critical school teacher from his childhood. This teacher would keep him back after lessons exclusively, it seemed, to inject another dose of low self esteem into his youthful mind. A criticism is different from a complaint. A complaint is time limited, specific and refers to behaviour and not identity.

“I am cross you didn’t bother washing up today!” is a complaint.

“You are so lazy and useless, you never do anything right!” is a criticism. It assaults the core identity of the one being criticised.

The new Tame your inner critic download doesn’t simply focus on changing negative self condemnation into positive self encouragement. It also aims to help people afflicted by self defeating ‘self talk’ to constructively use the parts of their self criticism that might actually be useful while discarding the useless self bashing that serves no one.

Why we need to learn from our past

The opposite of not eternally internally beating ourselves up isn’t unconditional self approval, regardless of what we are like and what we do – unless human beings really have reached the end of their potential for improvement, which I somehow doubt.

We have a past and we have the capacity to recall parts of that past, not in order to torment ourselves with it or indulge in regrets or sentimentality, but to learn from it. Making the same mistakes again and again can feel like being stuck in a kind of psychological limbo in which nothing really changes and there is no progress. The first step to learning from mistakes is to admit that you made them. But the more the culture around you encourages the passing on of blame, the harder this can be. Another new session out this month is Learn from mistakes. The idea is that it hypnotically encourages the acknowledgement of mistakes, the avoidance of both denial and self punishment, the ability to recognise when a new situation corresponds to an old situation where mistakes were made and the suggestion that a new more productive and healthy response can happen.

Each and every one of us can and should learn not just from our own mistakes but also from those of others – because “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

Put pride aside and dare to ask

It’s often said (in rather a sexist way, I might add) (that was mock indignation, by the way!) that men don’t like to ask for directions when hopelessly lost in a strange city, town or landscape. I ask you! Is that fair? Well, perhaps there is something in it. I am certainly pretty prone to not asking for help (if I can possibly help it) until I have made absolutely sure that I really am deal-breakingly late for that appointment. Status? Pride? Not wanting to appear vulnerable?

Seriously, being able to ask for help makes us human. And strong enough to be vulnerable (even if in quite small ways). I now make a point of asking for directions because I woke up to how unproductive false pride can be when faced with a new and confusing place. We all need to ask for help sometimes. If we never do it, then we also deny others the potential benefits of helping, and deny ourselves the chance of being helped, of course. Research has also found that when people help others (as long as they don’t feel forced to do so), they actually regard the person they helped more highly. Whether it’s practical help, emotional support or assistance with solving a complex problem, not wanting to ask through fear of being seen as ‘weak’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘needy’ can backfire. Ultimately, communities thrive on mutual support and help. The session Ask for help encourages the capacity to open up a little sometimes and ask for help where it’s needed.

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