The Turn of the Century? A bit of a pain…

Unless WordPress is very much mistaken, this is my 100th post so maybe it’s time to begin to accept that blogging has become more than just a passing fancy.

If all is indeed as it seems then on average, every time I post, twenty people make the decision to follow this blog, so by the time you get to read this one, there should be over 2000 followers. Check out the stats to see if I’m right – I know I will. After a comment like that, I have to make sure, really.

It all started off for me with a couple of long term marketing objectives in mind, prompted by the training I was undertaking and in particular, the use of looped metaphors, which as time has gone on you might find I’ve woven into the fabric of one or two posts you might have read previously. Check them out, they can be quite powerful because you lose track of what’s on the surface and hidden meanings somehow emerge without you really even thinking about them.

Given that pain management has turned up a few times in these one hundred posts, I figured it was about time I put some of the pain management techniques to a proper test and volunteer myself to myself as it were, as a guinea pig. As if on cue a great opportunity presented itself when one of my molars broke on New Year’s Eve.

We went out for a meal and the very first bite came with an unexpected crunch, as it does sometimes. So, to ensure that the rest of the evening wasn’t spoilt in any way by sensitive teeth, I quickly went through a couple of rounds of dissociation, and Escudero, as you do and duly spent the remainder of the evening eating, drinking and generally making merry.

As is always the case, my dentist couldn’t see me for three weeks, unless it was an emergency and as I was happily controlling cold and pressure sensitivity, I booked in and waited. Of course, by now, my cynical inner voice was telling me that the pain control techniques I was using were only being effective because the tooth didn’t actually hurt anyway. A bit of a Catch 22 seeing I wasn’t going to stop using them because I really didn’t want to risk proper tooth-ache either. So I carried on and periodically argued with myself about whether I was being effectively skillful or plainly self-delusional.

Anyway, off I went to dentist, practising pain relief techniques so that I could truly test them out and found myself following habit and protocol and quietly going along with the dentist’s “OK, let’s numb it up then shall we?”. I felt a bit of a fraud.

Mind you, being no stranger to fillings, I can honestly say that every single filling I have ever had, ever, has been pretty painful even with injections. There have always been those moments when I find myself groaning as drill bites harder and wishing it would all finish ten minutes ago please.

This time, I genuinely felt nothing at all. It was almost pleasant. I’ve never had that before. But then again, as Gill said afterwards, maybe this dentist is particularly good.

Obviously this left me with no option but to test it out for real. So I did.

As is appropriate with these things, I started with the easier option, stole a pin from the sewing basket, sterilised it and, yes, pushed it slowly through the back of my hand.

I have to say it was odd. Three things stick in my mind.

1. It didn’t hurt. Really. Not at all.

2. Watching the point of the pin reappear was fascinating.

3. It was surprisingly hard to pull it out again. And it didn’t bleed. Not one drop.

Now in the scheme of things, especially in the era of YouTube videos of well known people pushing skewers through their arms, this is small time stuff. But it’s my small time stuff. And when I can figure out the best way to do it, I think it might make a really good video convincer about the power of the mind. Maybe even help potential clients make up their minds about just how powerful hypnotherapy really is and perhaps help persuade them to get in touch.

On the other hand it might put them off. I’d love to know what you think.

Oh, and I took a picture of it on my phone. I didn’t post it with this as I’m not sure this is the right forum. Good call? Or would you like to see it?

Anyways, the longer this ride goes on, the more pleased I am that I made the decision to get on the Cognitive Hypnotherapy train and follow the tracks on the slightly weirder side of life.

I have no idea how far it might take me but I keep meeting fantastic people, helping a few others along the way and more and more folks seem to want to talk to me about it.

Long may it continue.

Somewhat Zen
© Tony Burkinshaw 2014

Related:

Pain relief mp3: Click Here

Resolving to change. Better?

Its appears that all the work I’ve been doing these last many months in order to create an effective background awareness is beginning to bear fruit. The balance is shifting.

New clients are finding out about me and more importantly, getting in touch. Training is beginning to shift towards Learning: Who you are affects how you Learn. It seems obvious when you think about it but until you think about it isn’t. People are beginning to think. I’m even coaching and therapising (made up word) via Skype as I have long hoped to do. It really is coming together.

There have been some really tricky issues to help client find their solution to. It’s challenging and very rewarding.

And sometimes amusing. The capacity of the human brain to find sideways metaphors to communicate with itself is astounding. Imagine sitting in the therapist chair as a client opens their eyes and smiling hugely, declares:

‘You will NEVER guess where I’ve just been! I’ve just been in a wheel-barrow, being pushed across a high-wire strung perilously above Niagara Falls by a world-famous hire-wire dare-devil!’ [With kind permission of the client]

Why? To learn trust, apparently.

And who was the world-famous hire-wire chappie? Jesus! Well why not? After all, He’s probably got a great sense of balance and a head for heights. And not a bad teacher, by all accounts.

And the truly astounding part? The client came up with the imagery entirely unprompted. That’s the fascination with non proscriptive hypnotic language. It frees the client to work with their own imagination. It’s incredibly powerful. All it takes is a carefully crafted and somewhat skilfully applied nudge in the right direction. Nudge theory? Maybe.

You’ll no doubt be aware that a slice of the work to create fertile ground to enable clients to think of me when they need help is my monthly mental-health well-being column in one of our city magazines, ‘Only Peterborough’.

January’s article focussed, a little traditionally perhaps, on that phenomenon of New Year Resolutions and why some work and others don’t, sometimes because the timing is wrong or the resolution is just too big. Sometimes they fail because of a lack of support through the inevitable self-sabotage that goes hand in hand with best intentions.

Here’s what I had to say:

Changing for the Better               

It’s that time of year again. Christmas and New Year have been and gone, the fun and festivities are over and the world is full of opportunity. It’s the traditional time to start afresh with life-changing resolutions, which some go on to achieve with envy-inducing ease.

But for many of us, New Year’s Resolutions fade away into best intentions and we carry on just as we were before. So why are some New Year Resolutions successful whilst others fail?

Perhaps it’s the type of resolution you choose. Adding good habits can succeed more often than stopping bad ones. Maybe this is why the most popular 2013 Resolution was reading more books but stopping smoking was only 26^th.

Another trick is sharing the effort. To change a habit, your free-will has to wrestle your Unconscious mind. Given that your Unconscious controls your habitual decisions, this is a tough fight! Exercising with a friend or taking that lunchtime walk with a colleague can make all the difference, sharing the mental effort as well as the Resolution.

Be precise. If you want to ‘lose weight’, how much do you need to lose? By deciding to ‘lose 10 lbs in 4 weeks’ you can measure your success. If you only manage 7 lbs, that’s success too. Think of it like passing with 70%. All progress is positive.

The key point is this: Your Unconscious uses habits to keep you safe or bring you comfort and it really doesn’t want to change. So if you don’t keep your New Year Resolution, it’s just that your Unconscious stills needs to be convinced that you’re right. If this you, then the support of someone trained to help is invaluable.

And once you look, you might be surprised at the help you can find.

See you soon?

RELATED

Only Peterborough magazine: website

Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy: website

Learning Coaching: What’s it all about?

Hypnotherapy MP3 Downloads: Pain Relief; Migraine Relief; Healing; Relaxation; Mindfulness

If you want to talk to me or ask any questions about what I do, please feel free to email me at: tony@tonyburkinshaw.co.uk

Next Steps?
© Tony Burkinshaw 2014

Effectively Challenging: The Future?

Of course the downside is Cognitive Hypnotherapy is way too effective.

It may sound a little weird coming from a therapist but from a purely business perspective, clients do tend to get well pretty quickly which means that I need to find a constant stream of new clients with new problems.

As a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, I’m delighted that the techniques I use with my clients can make profound differences to their lives in a such short space of time. However, as someone trying to earn a living, there is the occasional pang of jealousy for other therapies where a client may keep coming back to you many months, sometimes even years.

There are a couple of things which have brought this to mind over the Festive Season, which has done its usual trick of disappearing too quickly and returning to normal again? Must be something to do with it being Twelfth night, (depending on which definition of twelfth you plump for).

I’ve started trialling AdWords, which I’ve had in mind for some time but have never quite been prepared to risk actual budget on, so Google came to my aid and offered me a pretty decent voucher to try it out. So I’ve ventured out into the world of AdWords Express, the delightfully easy version which is incredibly easy to set up and which, if you don’t keep a close eye on it, eats into said budget like a ravenously hungry eating thing.

That said, it has delivered a couple of prime client enquiries and many multiples of views of my AdWords ad. It’s definitely been worth it for name awareness and probably for return on investment, especially because so far, there hasn’t been any.

I’ve put it temporarily on hold whilst I explore taking my new-found AdWords Express know-how and see if I can apply it more cost effectively to the grown-up AdWords proper version before my voucher completely runs out. That’s part of next week’s work. With luck it’ll deliver more control of the context that the ad’s words turns up in & so makes the C.P.C., (for those in the know), less costly per click, (which gives away the esoteric knowledge needed for the previous TLA which is a throwback to previous posts).

So there I’ve been, advertising my services alongside the usual possibility that my website might actually turn up in its own right, (not that I’ve noticed it doing so thus far), and the occasional view that it gets from the Hypnotherapy Directory, which has also paid its way, by the way, and beginning to find that I was getting some new clients from other than word of mouth (hooray) only to find that my current clients all went and got better, (double Hooray) except that this means that the boost in client bookings pre-Christmas wasn’t a boost so much as a replacement.

Ah well.

Then I find that my carefully crafted triple-checked ad that I’m trialling in the local villages, (yes, all six of them: villages that is, not magazines), magazine ‘The Village Tribune’, which has its own website, (take a look if you like), didn’t actually say that I’m local which was kind of the whole point. That’ll need updating for the next edition in March, I suppose.

It’s all a learning experience and leads unfortunately for you readers of this blog post, into a rambling discourse on advertising and client flow. Nonetheless, if you’ve got this far, your finding at least some entertainment value, so keep up – here we go again.

In short (not really) this is where I find myself at the beginning of 2014’s adventure.

I’ve been able to significantly help my most challenging clients and, again significantly, they fell within the expected 3 – 7 therapy session range. They’ve involved anxieties, migraines & pain, depression, PTSD, stress triggered epilepsy amongst other interesting conditions. It’s kept me on my toes and 2014 is shaping up to continue in this vein.

My dalliances with advertising, (more toe dipping than anything else, really), will almost certainly turn into something more ongoing. Allied with my mental-health well-being column, this should provide pretty reasonable background awareness with the intention that when a prospective new client finds themselves prospecting, so-to-speak, about who to approach, Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy should have passed the number-of-times convincer test.

In essence, if they’ve seen my name around, consciously or unconsciously, more than 3 times in different environments, this lends a level of validity that wouldn’t exist if they had only come across me for the first time. That’s the theory.

I’m also about to run the very first Unlock Your Learning Potential course for the Chartered Insurance Institute. It’s a course I’ve designed from scratch specifically for them, following a series of conversations with them last year. I’m pretty damned excited about it too, which is probably why it has the least space in this post.

Odd.

On top of this I’m seeking to do a revamp of my website, possibly moving it over to WordPress.org so I can SEO the hell out of it, to borrow a phrase from Victoria, (another excellent Cognitive Hypnotherapist of my close acquaintance). I might also rework the Facebook page associated with this blog and change its name & purpose so it links more cleanly between blogging and the business of actually providing therapy. This all needs some proper thinking through and whatever suggestions you might have would be welcome.

There are, as with any future, potentially good outcomes and quite a few potentially challenging ones. The point is in my line of work, an important skill I teach to others is how to focus on the potentially good outcomes. It makes the future much brighter, (although perhaps no longer Orange, following their multiple mergers). After all, challenges are simply what they say they are. Challenges. They’ll either be met and over-come, met but not over-come or completely ignored in the hope they’ll go away.

Whatever the outcome, challenges eventually disappear into the past, leaving the bright future to get even brighter whilst you enjoy now. Mindfulness.

All in all it’s shaping up to be a good year.

Even though we’re only a few days in, I have a good feeling about what lies ahead.

See you there?

Related

Random Acts of Kindness: a new slant on Twitter… follow me here

Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy: click here

Out of the past & into the future
© Tony Burkinshaw 2014

The space between. A time of promise.

There’s a lull between Christmas and the New Year, when you’ve sufficed sufficiently but can’t yet relax your guard because there’s one more day of celebration ahead and depending on your heritage this could be a really big day.

Whilst I’m partly descended from those lads north of the border, the bloodline is thin enough for me not to feel the compulsion of first-footing and all that downing of multiple not-so-wee drams. That’s not to say I’m planning to abstain nor that I won’t partake of another drop or two from that freshly opened bottle of Talisker, more that I’m hopeful that I’ll surface sometime before mid-day on Wednesday with a more or less intact inner constitution.

Given that I’m booked in to the local pub New Year’s bash from 7.30, that could be a bit of a tall order.

Then again, 2013 has been a year of expanding horizons and honing new talents so you never know. As this will be my first New Year’s Eve as a published columnist and hypnotherapist, anything is possible. I’ll be starting the New Year with clients booked in for exam-anxiety & learning coaching, stress and anxiety management, pain & illness hyper-sensitivity,  PTSD, and weight loss.

I’m advertising through Adwords & our local village magazine and the next column is out in early January. Although website views are increasing, it’s time to begin the first proper website overhaul and maybe transfer it over to WordPress.org so I can SEO the hell out it. Time will tell.

On top of that, my Financial Services consulting career has taken a turn for the complicated and is bearing fruit with high-level competence assessments and some learning coaching courses booked in already. It’ll be an interesting first quarter. Not only that. I find myself in a better place than I’ve been personally for some while.

This is in part because as my Cognitive Hypnotherapy career progresses, I’ve become adept at identifying and dealing with issues that I’ve either long-ignored or taken for granted. It’s also in no small measure because a beneficial side effect of a career in Cognitive Hypnotherapy, is that you spend your working life eliciting trance phenomena in others in a calm and gentle manner which you have no choice but to listen to as well. I find that I leave most sessions having received therapy by proxy. In some measure, the all hypnosis is self-hypnosis philosophy applies even for the therapist.

Whatever the reason, I find the end of 2013 to be a pretty chilled affair.

People are even downloading and benefiting from my mp3 recordings. I spent some considerable time deciding how long these should be. If you search out there in Google & Bing land, you’ll find a whole host of hypnotherapy mp3s & CDs.

I wanted mine to be long enough to provide serious help but short enough to be something you can pick up and put down when you find yourself in whatever form your own ‘bit-of-a-pickle’ might be. It is a strange truth but if you are for example, extremely stressed, it is nigh on impossible to find 20 minutes to listen to something which will relax you. People in pain quite simply hurt too much to be able to spend time listening for half an hour to something which may relieve that pain.

In the end I settled on 10 minutes. This seems to be long enough to make a difference and short enough, in most cases, to allow the listener to find the mental effort needed to sit down and listen. I wrote and recorded them through they year to cover areas I found clients needed most:

Relief from Chronic Pain Conditions

Pre & Post Surgery Healing

Relief from Breakthrough Pain

Migraine Relief

Mindfulness Meditation

and just for Christmas,

Deep Relaxation

And they’re all designed so that the effect builds with each listen, achieving best results after about 4 weeks according to feedback so far. If you could benefit too, why not try them. They work. And if you’d like to know more or if you want book in to see me, (face to face or through Skype), I’m always pleased to talk and offer advice. Keep in touch. 2014 is full of untapped promise.

The colouring bin
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

‘Relax’ – It’s my Xmas Present to you!

Read on : there’s a free gift for you inside!

[…and feel free to re-blog or share this post so that others can benefit too…]

Xmas is getting very close indeed and whilst many are looking forward to the celebrations, the preparations can feel frenetic and overwhelming. This was the topic of my latest article in Only Peterborough magazine in my mental health well-being column.

Rather than just giving advice, I included a Christmas Gift – a specially written and recorded Deep Relaxation mp3. It’s only 10 minutes long but can make all the difference and joins up well with the Mindfulness Meditation mp3 from earlier in the year. The link for the free Deep Relaxation mp3 is at the end of this post. Much as I’d rather you read the whole thing (of course), if you just want to skip to the end and grab your free copy, please hep yourself. You might find you come back to read it all anyway!

Here’s the article, I hope you like it.

Relax. It’s Only Christmas!

It’s Christmas-time again with fun and festivities taking centre stage. Relaxing with family and friends, for many this really is a magical time.

Despite this, relentless pressure and expectation comes hand-in-hand with the Festive Season. So if the thought of Christmas brings anxiety and stress, here are 5 practical steps you can take:

1. Split your Christmas tasks into three:

• Must-do – give these priority
• Nice-to-do –do these once you’ve organised your must-do tasks
• Unimportant –If these don’t get done everything will be just fine!

2. You’ll probably be spending time with family and friends that you don’t normally see. Their ways may not be your ways and this can be difficult. Remember they’re probably feeling just the same so give them some leeway. Pat yourself on the back for being so understanding.

3. No matter how carefully you plan, thing do go wrong. Each evening counteract the day’s challenges by thinking about three things that were special for you; a smile, a song on the radio, frost on a leaf. They can be anything. Your brain loves positive things, big or small. If your brain’s happy, you sleep better.

4. Be good to yourself, especially if you’re playing an important role in Christmas. Whether it’s a walk, a good book or a trip to the pub, always keep yourself on your ‘Must-do’ list.

5. Find a good relaxation mp3/CD. There are many of them around and they’re really beneficial. Listen to it every day so you practice being relaxed. As a Christmas gift, there’s a free Relaxation mp3 on my website at tony.burkinshaw.co.uk/shop.

Follow these tips and you can look forward to a very Merry Christmas. And remember, some of the best Christmas memories are when things didn’t quite go according to plan…

IMPORTANT LINKS

As promised, this is the link to your free ‘Deep Relaxation’ mp3: Click Here

Other Only Peterborough articles: click here or here

The Only Peterborough website: click here

Relaxation is the key
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

Learning to Reduce Stress

You know how I write a monthly column for ‘Only Peterborough’ magazine? It’s the Understanding You, mental-health well-being column. Well, this is the article I wrote for the November edition. I thought you might like it.

It’s about my other interest in life, helping people learn how to learn.

These days, qualification never ceases and people have to take  professional qualifications for much of their career.

All of a sudden, you find yourself trying to use the same study methods you used at school or University except this time you’re also trying to hold down a career, keep a family happy, not to mention earn a living and desperately search for that mythical work-life balance.

Strangely enough, almost no-one gets taught how to learn.

How to use the way you, as an individual, relate to the world and other people. Take the way you do the things you love. You just do them. It just happens. It flows. And all the effort is worthwhile.

What I do is uncover these aspects of you and show you how to use them to learn everything in that same way. Learning becomes fun again – no matter what the subject matter.

Anyway. Here’s a high-level version of that other side of what I do.

Learning to Reduce Stress

Have you ever seen a toddler achieve some mighty task such as saying a new word, taking their first steps, kicking a ball. Notice that immense concentration followed by the pure joy and delight at learning something new. The human brain is designed for learning and not just in early childhood. Constant challenge can keep it functioning at is best.

So why as we settle into the new academic year or undertake professional qualifications can learning become such a challenge, filling so many of us with anxiety and self-doubt?

Given the choice we’d rather find something that grabs our attention and feeds our preference for mastering things we enjoy. Think about the huge variation in what people choose to learn. Some learn a sport, others become XBox experts, yet more will learn to cook, surf, speak another language, make clothes, take photos, design apps for iPads (other good tablets are available); the list is endless.

But when we’re required to learn, we revert back to our early days of homework and find ourselves trying to learn in that same way again. Without meaning to, we end up recreating a classroom every time we have to ‘study’ whether it suits our learning style or not.  Add in the expectation of having to pass and it’s no wonder that taking exams becomes one of the most stressful things you can do.

So what is the alternative? Uncover what you do when you’re learning something you enjoy and then learn everything else in that same way. If you delight in being with others, then learn in groups or with friends; if you love to sing or play guitar, put it to music. Colours, movement, sounds or shapes, even textures and smells can all be built in to help you learn the way your brain prefers to learn.

It can take a little time and may need some guidance. But once you’ve found your way, learning ceases to be a chore and you just might feel that burst of pure delight at achieving something new once more.

Related:

Only Peterborough Magazine: website

Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy: Learning & Memory Coach

…and if it’s all too much: Mindfulness Meditation mp3

Mindful of the Stress

Fibromyalgia. It won’t hurt to take a look.

Let’s face it. It’s about time I wrote specifically about Fibromyalgia.

Its been hovering around the edges of my posts for some time and there are quite a few people following this blog who suffer.

According to NHS Choices in UK;

Fibromyalgia, also called fibromyalgia syndrome, is a long-term condition which causes pain all over the body. Fibromyalgia causes widespread pain and extreme tiredness.

Depending on who you talk to and which research you read, the debate is wide open about whether Fibromyalgia is a condition which causes pain or whether it is a syndrome which describes the pain but the cause is unknown. There is apparently no definitively accepted test for it. It is often a diagnosis of last resort when all others have been eliminated.

Needless to say being diagnosed with this condition can be pretty traumatic. Because Fibro is defined as a long term chronic pain condition affecting the whole body the diagnosis can feel like a life sentence. With no remission or time off for good behaviour. Not even the itself pain is consistent. As a neuropathic condition, the sensations can turn up as anything from uncomfortable tingles to serious aches, cramping muscles, burning or stabbing pains; You know, pretty much anything that’s unpleasant.

From a hypnotherapy point of view, Fibromyalgia is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Because of the way Fibromyalgia is defined, by accepting the diagnosis, you also implicitly have to accept that the pain will not go away. So in essence, if you have Fibromyalgia, then you expect it to last for a long time, that it will be painful, that it will affect the whole body and that nobody knows what it is or how to fix it. You are also tacitly accepting that the medical and pharmaceutical profession/industry have nothing which can relieve it. If they did, then you wouldn’t be told you’re going to face long term pain, you’d be given the treatment to cure it.

In asking you to accept a Fibromyalgia diagnosis, the medical community are asking you to accept their unpleasant truth. It won’t get better, it won’t go away and nothing can cure it. That’s a big ask.

So, if you do have Fibromyalgia, what can you do about it? This is where Cognitive Hypnotherapy can step up to the mark.

If pain is an alarm (which it is) and that alarm can misfire (which it can) then being put in a position where you expect continuing pain, the alarm cannot reset itself because there is nothing to reset it to. All pain you feel is expected, and all you expect to feel is pain. It is an exceptionally vicious circle.

For my part, I seek to re-open that door between the mind and body. A door which in many philosophies doesn’t even exist. It is a western invention. It is perhaps time to re-engage the connections. At least allow for the possibility that the mind has substantial influence over the body and vice versa.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy carries with it some amazingly powerful techniques.

Hypnotherapy can be and is used as anaesthesia, removing acute pain completely or reducing it to easily tolerated levels. Patients have been operated on with only hypnosis as the anaesthetic. click here for just one example…

Anaesthetic hypnosis is sometimes used for chronic pain but in my opinion is not ideal. As pain is an absolutely vital protection alarm, it is essential it isn’t switched off except in controlled circumstances when that safety function is taken on by someone else (the surgical team, for example).

Treating conditions like Fibromyalgia with hypnotherapy requires more subtlety and takes a little longer. In essence the techniques, gradually educate your unconscious mind, (that part of ‘you’ which drives almost 90% of what you do), to recognise that you are increasingly safe. In turn this leads to less and less need to be warned of potential damage (the function of pain) which in turn leads to less and less pain.

Often these techniques have beneficial side-effects. For example, many users of my hypnotherapy mp3 report that they also get immediate pain relief or that the recording is extremely relaxing even though this is not what is primarily going on.

So as a final point, I would encourage anyone who is diagnosed with a long term pain condition: by all means, accept the diagnosis but you don’t have to accept the prognosis as well. The condition you experience can progress differently for you than it does for others. Your doctor’s expectations might be wrong. Search out and find your own path.

And if you’d like me to join you for part of your journey, you only have to ask.

Related:

Hypnosurgery Live : Live TV broadcast in the UK (YouTube video)

Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy website: tonyburkinshaw.co.uk

To purchase a Pain Management mp3 click here

It looks cluttered, but it’s very restful
© Tony Burkinshaw 2103

Espresso Pain Relief?

I know it’s trivial but on a harmless everyday level this illustrates one of the fundamental drivers of pain. All pain.

We have a coffee pot. One of those old fashioned / retro metal espresso makers that you sit on the hob. You know, where you put the water in the bottom, the coffee in the middle and then when it boils, the steam forces the water under pressure through the coffee and into the pourer-jug thing at the top.

It’s absolutely not a percolator. Despite the cleverness of some of the ads in the ’70s and ’80s (yes, I am that old), it is my considered opinion that percolators murder good coffee. This is not one of them. Coffee is too important to treat badly.

Anyway, with this one, the espresso maker, the top and bottom screw together so it’s pressure-sealed and doesn’t leak steam and boiling water all over the place. I know they’re a bit low-tech compared to the modern electric capsule-coffee machines that look like futuristic robots and Mr Clooney advertises them all over the place but it has one big advantage. It makes great coffee. That is, if you like espresso-based coffee. Which as you might have guessed, I do.

So here’s the interesting thing I noticed about pain.

To save time, I boil the kettle and use boiling water in it instead of heating it up from cold on the hob. I’m usually making other drinks at the same time, so it makes sense to use the water that’s already hot, don’t you think?

What that means of course, is that when you screw the top onto the bottom, the bottom is literally boiling-hot and being metal, it has a high heat-transfer coefficient. (I’m pretty sure this is the first time that heat-transfer coefficients have made it into this blog, going back to my chemical engineering heritage).

Now whilst this is very sensible from a water-heating point of view, it also means that it’s bloody hot when you grab it to tighten the top onto the base. Hot enough to be too painful to hold. I use a tea-towel to hold it so that I don’t burn my fingers.

Now this is the thing. On occasion, when there was no tea-towel to hand, I’d tighten it bare fingered. Carefully, a bit at a time, blowing my fingers in between turns as you do. There’s a small steam safety valve you can use so you don’t have to hold it fully and still get a good grip with just two fingers. Even so, it was still too hot to hold and I’m too lazy to go get another tea towel…

Just recently, I’ve noticed that I’ve stopped using the tea-towel technique altogether and no longer burn my hand. I seem to have developed ‘asbestos fingers’ as my mother calls it whenever someone can hold something hot, with echoes of ‘you’re-just-like-your-Dad’ in the air. The traditional explanation about being able to do things that other people find painful is that because you’ve done it so often, your nerve-ends have become desensitised to the temperature/chemical/pressure stimulus. You just don’t feel the heat.

It’s wrong. That’s not how it works.

If I pick up other hot things, boiling hot things that are obviously just as hot because water always boils at the same temperature, (that recently resurrected chemical engineer is now shouting what-about-pressure-effects?), it hurts just as much as before.

It’s only the coffee pot that no longer hurts me. Weird?

Not really. It does make sense. In essence, what’s happened is that over time, my unconscious mind has discovered that when I screw the coffee pot together, even though it is boiling hot, I never get injured. It simply doesn’t take long enough for my fingers to actually burn. There’s not enough time for tissue damage.

This means that at a very deep level, I know that making coffee this way is not going to damage my fingers, so I don’t need pain to warn me about the danger because there isn’t any danger.

My unconscious has turned off the pain alarm. Not for heat, because other hot things still hurt. Just whilst I make coffee. Interestingly, if the base slips when I’m screwing it together the pain flicks back on instantly. Which hurts. Damn.

One of the keys to not feeling pain, depends on your unconscious mind believing that you are not threatened with tissue damaging danger. So if your environment is perceived as safe and no further tissue damage is likely, (as in normal coffee pot dynamics), a pain alarm is not needed. But if the environment is perceived as being threatening, (the coffee pot slips), then the pain alarm is flicked back on again.

As I said at the beginning, this may be trivial but it’s a real-life everyday example of a correctly functioning, complex pain alarm. It explains how something that used to hurt, doesn’t. It’s isn’t that practice teaches you how to ignore it, it’s that practice teaches your unconscious mind that this particular activity is not going to damage you.

As it turns out, it’s also a fundamental principle behind hypnotic pain management. At their core, most hypnotic pain management techniques tell you that you are safe.

Some help you to perceive that you are in an increasingly safe state both physically and emotionally and that your tissues are not undergoing increasing damage (useful to combat chronic conditions).

Some help you to feel distance or disconnection from the tissue damage itself, (sensory distortions or dissociations). If the unconscious perceives that the damage is not happening to its body, then pain alarm is not needed and isn’t fired.

Still others modulate the sensory input so that the unconscious is convinced that the nerve messages are wrong. For example experiencing numbness means that the nerves which send messages of damage are countermanded, (after all if the area is numb, there can’t be any nerve messages can there?), so the actual tissue damage goes unreported. No danger. No pain.

So, coffee pots aside, if you find yourself with pain management issues, I’d urge you to seriously consider the benefits of hypnotherapy as part of your strategy, especially if you have long term pain or a chronic pain condition (fibro, lupus, CRPS, migraines and so on). And if you do consider it – I’d be happy to help and advise.

As always, if you ask I’ll answer your questions. If you like, I can offer direct therapeutic help either face to face (if you’re local to Peterborough) or via Skype if you’re not. And if you can only afford 10 minutes at a time, there I’ve created some carefully crafted pain management mp3s which are waiting just for you on my website.

So if you hurt – let’s talk.

Related

Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy: tonyburkinshaw.co.uk

Pain Management mp3s: tonyburkinshaw.co.uk/shop

Follow me on twitter?: @TBtalks

Random Acts of Kindness: @RAK_UK

The Old Rope Trick?
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

 

Chronic Pain: What a relief?

It still surprises me just how powerfully Cognitive Hypnotherapy can affect the physical symptoms the human body suffers. It is genuinely remarkable.

This of course flies us straight into the face of one of pain’s key conundrums and, as it turns out, one of the keys which allows Cognitive Hypnotherapy to address otherwise intractable symptoms which consistently defy pharmaceutical intervention.

A fundamental driver of evolutionary development is to staying alive to propagate genes and a key components of achieving this is a means of identifying and responding to threats. It is extremely effective and adaptive. We know this because we are (possibly) the dominant species on this planet.

Herein lies the route of our painful downfall.

Pain is one of these absolutely vital alarms which keep us safe. When something is damaging your body, it is imperative that you respond. Right now. Without thought or debate. It is designed to grab your attention and demand, absolutely demand, that you act. In this way, by prioritising damage as the highest of the immediacy alarms, you are forced to deal with something which could either kill you or injure you to the point when your continued survival is compromised. Pain even triggers physical responses to help us heal. Redness, swelling, rashes, increased sensitivity, stiffness, reduced range of movement can all be triggered by pain in order to assist with healing.

Quite simply, our bodies don’t want us or our children to die and will scream at you until you act.

But…

what if responding to the damage could in itself compromise your chance of survival or of propagating your genes in that imperative manner geneticists like to refer to? What if responding to being in pain lets down other defence mechanisms like fight or flight or prevents you from saving your offspring?

Well, as it turns out, the pain alarm is extremely sophisticated. Not only does your brain assess the information from your body (nerve input about pressure, temperature, chemical effects, danger to tissues) but it assesses this against all manner of other inputs it is receiving about your overall situation. It does what it does best, lightening fast projection of what could happen and how to respond in multiple scenarios, so quickly that we quite simply aren’t aware of it. We do it all the time.

The more dangerous the situation your brain believes you to be in, the more sensitively it sets its alarms. You are more likely to jump at a sudden noise or movement when you’re scared than when you’re calm and happy. You’re more likely to feel pain when you expect to sustain tissue damage.

There is an exact opposite to this, though. If your situation is so dangerous that dealing with pain would be yet more dangerous, then the pain alarm does not fire. There are many stories of people who have saved themselves or loved ones from danger even though they have been injured already. The pain didn’t arrive until later. When there was time to hurt.

These are the pre-cursors of chronic pain. 

After tissue damage, the body repairs itself to whatever level it can and the pain alarm returns to its normal sensitivity. Sometimes however, the brain has become so used to firing the pain alarm that it mistakes it’s own sensitivity as further tissue damage. Sometimes it treats its own increased sensitivity as continued indication that your environment is more dangerous than it really is. It enters a spiral of pain sensitivity that it doesn’t recognise and doesn’t try to find a way out of it because it believes you are in too much danger.

In a very real way, your brain has begun to jump at its own shadow.

Modern living causes another twist in the tail. The bulk of the threats we face are social rather than physical. But as a social being we perceive socially threatening situations as dangerous. So if we feel socially vulnerable (anxiety, stress, tiredness, depression), we automatically increase our perceived threat levels. If we are unhappy about where we live, the job we have, the threat of redundancy, worry about money, arguments with our partner, concern about our children, worry about our health, all of these are assessed as indicators that our environment is dangerous.

Given that prolonged pain can lead to anxiety, stress and depression, chronic pain can extend its spiral because eventually the perceived threat is sustained by chronic pain itself.

This is where Cognitive Hypnotherapy becomes extremely effective.

It uses a variety of powerful techniques which are designed to help you perceive increased levels of safety and control within your own environment. These are superbly effective at reducing anxiety, stress and depression; dealing with phobias; social fears such as public speaking and so on. It is these very tools which allow Cognitive Hypnotherapy to have such dramatic effect on chronic pain conditions.

Given that perception of pain is based on the level of tissue damage and the assessed level of immediate threat in your environment, then the most predominant trigger for chronic pain is the perception of threat alone. After all, one of the key definitions of chronic pain is ‘pain which is continuing for more than 12 weeks or after the time at which healing would have been thought to have occurred’. In essence, if the pain you have is ‘chronic’ then, by definition, your tissues are no longer sustaining damage.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy prompts your unconscious mind to recognise the reality of the level of safety you have, both externally and internally, physically and psychologically, then the assessed environmental threat level is reduced and the pain alarm is fired less and less. As the pain alarm is fired less and less, the brain allows the nerve receptors themselves to gently return to their normal sensitivity.

With careful work, your unconscious perception of threat is reduced and perception of safety and control is increased. This sets up a virtuous circle of feedback. Gradually and gently the frequency of pain reduces until it becomes something that used to happen.

Chronic pain can become a thing of the past.

Using Cognitive Hypnotherapy, both face to face, over Skype and through carefully designed mp3 recordings, many clients have been helped out of the spiral of their chronic pain.

Why not join them?

You’ve only got one thing to lose. Your pain.

Related:

http://tonyburkinshaw.co.uk/shop : Chronic Pain Hypnotherapy mp3

http://www.britishpainsociety.org/ : further information about chronic pain

The Outlook is Sunny
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013

Random Perception: A New Beginning

There can be little doubt that helping others creates an effect that ripples outwards from both the giver and receiver. Often the opportunity turns up unannounced and there is only a split second to decide whether or not to act and allow those ripples the chance to spread….

This is my latest article in Perception Ezine and the first in my new capacity as their Random Acts of Kindness columnist. I highly recommend subscribing, not just because it increases my readership, but because I personally know some of the regular contributors. It is packed full of meaningful and workable insights into the difficulties that we humans face, thrust as we have been into modernity without  giving evolution the courtesy of having time to catch up.

And so, with appetite duly whetted, read on…

Personally, I’m a big fan of Paying It Forward, a concept which has been discussed in previous issues under the Random Acts of Kindness section. To me the key difference between Paying it Forward and Random Acts of Kindness is that Paying It Forward is more deliberate and to some extent acknowledges the benefit to the giver a little more; there’s nothing wrong with a little inner glow.

For me, there’s always been something about a Random Act of Kindness that brings on an expectation of pure altruism whereby the act should be solely for the benefit of the receiver, almost as if feeling good about being a giver of kindness somehow negates its intention: were you performing the act for benefit of the receiver or simply to make yourself feel better? Surely that would be selfish, wouldn’t it?

So there I was, pondering what to write for this issue’s Random Act of Kindness section, not least because in the previous few weeks I hadn’t to my recollection, been particularly altruistic and no wonderful stories of goodness leapt out at me. Surely as a therapist, I ought to be distributing Random Acts of Kindness left, right and centre every day of the week. After all, if a therapist isn’t routinely altruistic, then who will be?

This left me with a dilemma. Do I write about something from my past? Maybe a story about someone else’s Random Act of Kindness? Or do I wait and hope that the opportunity to perform some noteworthy kindness jumps up and bites me so that I can incorporate it here and spread the word? I figured that the latter would be best as oftentimes recent personal experience carries more weight than stories from the dim & distant. As it turned out, it wasn’t that simple.

In the intervening three weeks nothing has cropped up that I would deem worthy of this section. In fact opportunities have been few and far between, so I took to actively seeking them out.

Walking back from the village post office, I dutifully offered to help an elderly lady with her wheelie-bins but was politely refused with a look of mildly confused distrust.

After a full day in London I was boarding the train home and a woman with two young children was lifting two heavy suitcases through the door. My Galahad-esque offer of help was curtly turned down with barely disguised suspicion. I walked on.

It’s as though the Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle is being applied to Random Acts of Kindness. Perhaps the very act of looking takes away the randomness and kindness. It seems that in order to work, spontaneity is key. Perhaps I’m just not especially random.

That said, I often let people through doors ahead of me; I slow down and let cars in at junctions and slip roads; I smile happily at drivers who look as though their progress depends on the ferocity of their glare, (mostly this breaks their state and they grin back); I’m having several blog-related conversations with people who live in constant pain, offering advice and guidance on pain management techniques. I’ve even gifted several of them a copy of my chronic pain relief download to try out. Perhaps they’ll spread the word, you never know. Mind you, they might not like it at all and spread entirely the wrong sort of word. To be honest, I don’t really care. That’s wasn’t the point.

In the past others have helped me and I’m now in a position where I can help in my own way. It’s enough to pass on something that just might turn out to have been of help even though I reckon I’ve long since paid it all back, or is it forwards, if you see what I mean. And I feel good about it. It’s becoming a habit.

Perhaps spontaneity and altruism aren’t key components of Random Acts of Kindness after all. Perhaps that inner glow is there for a reason, encouraging both the giver and receiver of the kindness to seek out more warmth by spreading it further. Perhaps, what I think of as Paying it Forward is someone else’s Random Act of Kindness. Two sides of the same coin?

Think about it, if you’re fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a Random Act of Kindness and if that makes you feel good enough to want to do the same for someone else, then in essence that’s not a Random Act, you’re Paying it Forward. Or perhaps I tend to over complicate things that are really quite simple.

Anyway, here’s my next Random Act of Paying Kindness Forwards. And I feel pretty good about this one, so maybe that altruistic fire is burning after all.

On behalf of Perception I’ve set up a brand new Twitter account called ‘@RAK_UK’ which we’d love you to follow. If you’re not yet on Twitter, you might find it was worth joining in, just for this. Even Tina, our hard-working editor overcame her Twitter-phobia to become the very first follower!

 You’re invited to share anything and everything you come across about Random Acts of Kindness or Paying it Forward.

Why not join in? This really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Related Links:

Perception Ezine link

Perception subscription link

@RAK_UK Twitter Link

Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy link

That’s not random
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013