Wellness Institute Blog

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized by unbidden obsessive thoughts and/or compulsory physical activities that are experienced as dysfunctional. Some OCD conditions are clearly genetic; research has demonstrated the significant role played by heredity. Some OCD conditions can be explained by certain information-processing deficits and/or biases; neuroimaging studies have revealed neural pathway disturbances. But the majority of OCD conditions are attributable to emotional and developmental causes.

“We don't deal well with death and dying in this culture," says Roland Griffiths, PhD, a professor of behavioral biology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Being diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease often leads to a kind of chronic syndrome of anxiety, depression and emotional distress. 

What is chronic grief and how do I know if I am suffering with it?

Here are some of the symptoms:

This is part 1 of a four-part series on using hypnotherapy to help you reduce your performance anxiety. Want to read more? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Most of us want to achieve the highest possible level of performance at what we do, whether it be in our career, our relationships, our hobbies, or even in our personal development. An imposing impediment to that goal is performance anxiety: “choking up” just when free flowing confidence is most needed. We have discussed some ways of recognizing and overcoming that obstacle in previous posts.

Now we want to address the next step up beyond treating performance anxiety, and that is Performance Enhancement. There is a growing body of research related to this field, and hypnosis is center stage in much of it.

Performance enhancing techniques are both passive and active

How does cognitive therapy compare to hypnotherapy in releasing these negative thoughts?

Many people have spent thousands of hours and dollars going to therapy to try to remove their life-long, self-defeating thought patterns. If you are one of those people, perhaps you are aware of low self esteem, deep down feelings that you are not as good as others, or that you don’t really deserve to be loved or to succeed.  Or perhaps you keep running up against self-destructive patterns in your life such as procrastination, ambivalence (can’t make a decision) or perfectionism. Other people find themselves desperately needing to be in control of others or of situations in order to feel safe.

Facts: one hundred million repeat dieters spend twenty billion dollars on weight loss programs (according to an ABC news report) with limited success rates. Also statistics show that insurance companies paid out over $8 billion for bariatric surgery in 2010 and that cost is now skyrocketing.

Most all diet programs have several components in common:

1. They weigh each person each week
2. They suggest/require daily exercise
3. They encourage certain low calorie food choices or that the dieters buy  the company’s own packaged diet foods
4. They suggest cutting calories sometimes down to very low levels

Now in and of itself, these may or may not all be sound components for weight reduction. And they all seem to work fairly well for a certain amount of time. However there is one huge component that is never addressed or treated in all the popular weight loss programs. And that is the emotional aspect of eating, weight gain, and the feeling of deprivation that is often triggered by adhering to the diet.

Dr. Daniel Neides of the prestigious Cleveland Clinic has written an article about the Trim-Life® weight release program that utilizes hypnotherapy to address the emotional factors in weight release.

Following is that article, published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper on October 30, 2014.