Act Now Wellness Center

At one time, depression and hypnosis were thought to be incompatible, but recent depression hypnosis techniques have proven highly effective in the treatment of depressive illness.

Depression can creep up on you or hit you suddenly. You may have had a depressed mood that felt as if it would never go and lasted most of the day. You may have lost interest or pleasure in something that previously really important for you.

You probably experience sleep disturbances and feel fatigued much of the time. You might also experience weight changes, agitation, feelings of worthlessness, excessive or inappropriate guilt, poor concentration, even thoughts about death and suicide.

Most of us experience loss, disappointment, rejection, humiliation and many other painful experiences over a lifetime. It is how your mind interprets these events that affects your overall mental health.

If you suffer from depression then your outlook on life may be somewhat different. Typically events are:

• Taken very personally 
• Considered permanent and not temporary 
• Affect all of your life and not just a small part of it. 

The thoughts that go behind these ideas are built deeply into the unconscious mind but they can be changed. You can learn to not take things personally, that it is not your fault. You can realize that events just happen beyond your control and that they pass and are not so important. You can understand that events in life do not affect your whole life just one area of it and only for a short while.

Under hypnosis cognitive, behavioral and psychotherapeutic techniques can be used to teach new skills to interpret life's events in a more empowering way.

The greatest risks to depression are:

• Stressful life 
• Marital conflict 
• Physical or sexual abuse (past or present) 
• Economic deprivation 
• Inadequate social skills 
• Inadequate problem solving skills 
• Inadequate self management skills 
• Dysfunctional ways of thinking 
• Other coexisting conditions (anxiety, drug dependence, alcoholism etc.) 

It is one of those days when the mind turns inwards and a black cloud descends. The more you fight it the more you sink. Any conscious fight just reinforces this by focusing your attention on it. This is the time when you need to turn your focus of attention to something positive and uplifting. You can prepare your mind in a number of ways, so that it does not get caught in this downward spiral. This is very difficult to do consciously.

The idea with hypnotherapy is to build in a number of new unconscious habits and ways of thinking. You then just leave it to your unconscious mind and focus your conscious thoughts elsewhere. 

Depression and Hypnosis

Modern Hypnotherapy techniques have proven to be very effective in helping to treat depressive illness. 

You need to remember and focus on the good events in your past, not the bad ones. If you can't remember any particularly good moments then manufacture some. For example, take a scene from a film and turn it into a personal memory as if you were daydreaming. Recalling a manufactured daydream is as powerful as recalling an actual memory. You must focus your mind on what you can look forward to in life. Anything that you hold predominantly in your mind will begin to direct your mind to fulfill it (The Law of Concentrated Attention). Maintaining your focus on the future and certainly not the past 

You can push a negative, unhappy thought out of your mind and pull in a more positive one. This works on the Principle of Substitution. Your conscious mind can only really focus on one thing at a time. So, by having a number of good positive pre-prepared thoughts or images, you can concentrate on these and prevent negative thoughts taking control. It may sound strange but basically you are installing a happy switch that you can imagine and use when you need it.

You have to break out of the old ritual pattern of behavior. You need to create a new habitual way of thinking so that every time the circumstances occur that would normally trigger a deepening depression, you behave differently. You can learn to relax your whole body and switch off that busy inner voice that loops round and round and keeps you fixed on the one thing you are trying to escape. 

Banish anything depressing or upsetting from your life. Hypnosis can help you develop ways to integrate this new behavior into your unconscious, so that you are not continually struggling to escape the depression. Many clients don't realize that hypnotherapy has made any changes, until they look back . This is the way it should be, well away from your conscious mind. The key point is that escaping depressive thoughts are difficult for your conscious mind to do, but, easy for your unconscious. It is a matter of preparing your unconscious and then releasing control. Let us help you today.