Books about hypnosis

Books about hypnosis

Amazon.com has great books about (self-)hypnosis, such as:

A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis

Anxiety Release

Anxiety & StressAnxiety Release

Self Hypnosis CD / MP3 Download Voiced by Barrie St John Uses advanced hypnotherapy Deeply relaxing hypnotic music A digitally mastered recording Your satisfaction guaranteed! With the help of hypnosis you can overcome the feelings of anxiety! Do you suffer from the agonies of anxiety? Can you feel your heart pounding when you walk into a room? Do your hands shake when you're forced to speak to someone you don't know? Do you find it hard to catch your breath when feelings of dread roll over you like a thick, suffocating fog? You are not alone. Millions of people suffer from anxiety and some even resort to taking prescription medications to control the condition. Of course these prescriptions might work for some people, but they don't get to the root of your anxiety - and can often just mask the problem. Instead of fixing the problems causing the anxiety, some prescription medications sweep them under the rug until they work their way back out again. Do you want to control your anxiety naturally? Do you want to put an end to the feelings of unfounded fear and uncontrollable panic you have been experiencing? There is a way that you can control your anxiety quickly, safely and naturally. By using the power of hypnosis and your unconscious mind, you can begin to take control and release yourself from anxiety and the constant fear of being afraid. Change comes from within you - and the anxiety release hypnosis CD / MP3 dowload helps promote your natural ability to adapt and change. Imagine what it would be like to: Go out in public without the fear of having an anxiety attack. Get up in front of a group of people without feeling any fear. Get through a day without a single instance of uncontrollable panic. Let go of your anxiety as easily as releasing a balloon into the wind. The anxiety release hypnotherapy session will safely and comfortably guide you into a state of creative relaxation / hypnosis. Many emotional problems originate in our minds at a deeper level, so it makes sense to direct any change work where the problem lies and where it is presently maintained. Regular creative relaxation opens the ‘door to change’ and can influence the mind at much deeper levels. With regular, repeated listening, the anxiety release hypnosis CD / MP3 download will deliver many positive messages to your mind which can help you live a life free of unfounded fears and anxiety. These messages help you to develop and learn new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. This powerful hypnotherapy session includes visualization, suggestion, metaphor and advanced hypnotherapy and NLP techniques all packaged safely to help support you in your change work. Don't be a prisoner of anxiety - use hypnosis! We're so confident that you'll like this self hypnosis CD / download that we're willing to offer you a 90 day money back guarantee. For more information about our hypnosis CDs and downloads, please see our questions and answers page.

what is hypnosis?

what is hypnosis?

Perhaps the greatest mystery about hypnosis is that it's seen as something mysterious. It's a fundamental human trait, shared by every living person on the planet. Everybody reading this article will experience a hypnotic state at some point today, if they haven't done so already. Hypnosis is so hardwired into us, in fact, that you can't get through the day without experiencing it, any more than you can get through the day without experiencing some form of emotion.
That said, there has certainly been a great deal of debate about the details. This debate has usually revolved around the psychobiological aspects of hypnosis, ie, what's actually going on in the brain when we're in a hypnotic state. Some commentators believe that hypnosis produces an altered state of consciousness, others believe that nothing happens at all. Still others believe that hypnotic subjects just act to please the hypnotist!
Leaving aside the question about what a "normal" state of consciousness is anyway, advances in neuroscience, and the ability to monitor brain activity as it happens, have shown that hypnosis does indeed have a demonstrable effect on the brain. In a famous experiment at Stanford University, students were connected to a brain imaging machine whilst looking at a black and white picture. Under hypnosis, the students were told that the picture was in fact in colour - and the brain scans showed that the areas of the brain which process colour became active when that suggestion was made.
More recently, psychologists Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell have explicitly linked hypnosis to the Rapid Eye Movement or REM state, which is more commonly associated with dreaming sleep. It's also something that all mammals, not just humans, experience before they're even born. Babies in the womb experience enormous amounts of REM, Griffin and Tyrrell arguing that this is nature's way of installing and maintaining instinctive behaviour.
Fascinating as these studies are, concentrating on the psychobiological aspects of hypnosis is a bit of a specialist pastime - like analyzing the particular pigments an artist uses to make a painting. If we step back and look at the painting in its entirety, we can see that hypnosis really is a perfectly natural state of mind. Perhaps the mystery comes from applying an unusual label to something which is essentially normal. It's an inexact label too, meaning both the state of mind itself and the techniques used to create it.
Hypnosis is generally taken mean to the induction of a trance state. Although trance has connotations of glassy-eyed automatism, it simply means a focused state of attention. Attention can be focused externally, or it can be focused internally. You've been in a trance if you've ever been absorbed in a great film, lost in a good book, or swept up in a symphony. You've been in a trance if you've ever stared in fascination at a sunset or a passing cloud. You've also been in a trance if you've ever stared out of the window, daydreaming about something which happened twenty years ago.
Clearly you don't vanish at these times. If something requires your attention, you're aware of it - so if you're enraptured by a great orchestral work and the idiot next to you starts talking loudly into his mobile, you'll probably know all about it, unfortunately. All that happens, for the duration of the trance state, is that your attention locks onto a particular source, and everything else just fades into the background for a while.

Even if nothing happened in our lives to fix our attention, we would still experience a hypnotic trance state, because our brains are naturally designed to go into trance every 90 minutes or so. You may have noticed this yourself - there are times during the day when you feel energetic and able to concentrate, interspersed with periods of feeling a bit fuzzy and daydreamy. This is known as the ultradian rhythm.
What's literally happening is that every ninety minutes, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. As a result, our focus shifts internally, as the more metaphorical and pattern matching areas of the brain process everything that's been absorbed in the previous hour and a half. This seems to act as a housekeeping mechanism, like a computer backing up its files, or as a form of stress control. This lasts for about fifteen minutes.
Despite all the mystery, then, hypnosis is simply a method for focusing the attention and turning it inwards. It is nothing more - and nothing less - than a way of working with and taking control of something which is happening already. (source: http://www.abouthypnosis.com/)

hypnosis for positive thinking relaxation and low self esteem

 

Self-esteem is a term used in psychology to reflect a person's overall emotional evaluation of his or her own worth. It is a judgement of oneself as well as an attitude toward the self. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs (for example, "I am competent", "I am worthy") and emotions such as triumph, despair, pride and shame. Smith and Mackie define it by saying "The self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, is the positive or negative evaluations of the self, as in how we feel about it." Self-esteem is also known as the evaluative dimension of the self that includes feelings of worthiness, prides and discouragement. One's self esteem is also closely associated with self-consciousness.
Self-esteem is a disposition that a person has which represents their judgements of their own worthiness. In the mid 1960s, Morris Rosenberg and social-learning theorists defined self-esteem as a personal worth or worthiness. Nathaniel Branden in 1969 defined self-esteem as "the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness." According to Branden, self-esteem is the sum of self-confidence a feeling of personal capacity and self-respect a feeling of personal worth. It exists as a consequence of the implicit judgement that every person has of their ability to face life's challenges, to understand and solve problems, and their right to achieve happiness, and be given respect.
As a social psychological construct, self-esteem is attractive because researchers have conceptualized it as an influential predictor of relevant outcomes, such as academic achievement (Marsh 1990) or exercise behavior (Hagger et al. 1998). In addition, self-esteem has also been treated as an important outcome due to its close relation with psychological well-being (Marsh 1989). Self-esteem can apply specifically to a particular dimension (for example, "I believe I am a good writer and I feel happy about that") or a global extent (for example, "I believe I am a bad person, and feel bad about myself in general"). Psychologists usually regard self-esteem as an enduring personality characteristic ("trait" self-esteem), though normal, short-term variations ("state" self-esteem) also exist. Synonyms or near-synonyms of self-esteem include: self-worth, self-regard, self-respect, and self-integrity.

What is Hypnosis?

What is Hypnosis?

Hypnosis, according to wikipedia, is "a special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state." According to "state theory", it is a mental state, while, according to "non-state theory", it is imaginative role-enactment. While under this state of mind, one's focus and concentration is heightened. The individual is able to concentrate intensely on a specific thought or memory, while blocking out all possible sources of distraction. Hypnosis is usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a long series of preliminary instructions and suggestions. Hypnotic suggestions may be delivered by a hypnotist in the presence of the subject, or may be self-administered ("self-suggestion" or "autosuggestion"). The use of hypnotism for therapeutic purposes is referred to as "hypnotherapy", while its use as a form of entertainment for an audience is known as "stage hypnosis". The term “hypnosis” comes from the Greek word hypnos which means sleep. The words hypnosis and hypnotism both derive from the term neuro-hypnotism (nervous sleep) coined by the Scottish surgeon James Braid around 1841. Braid based his practice on that developed by Franz Mesmer and his followers ("Mesmerism" or "animal magnetism"), but differed in his theory as to how the procedure worked. Contrary to a popular misconception—that hypnosis is a form of unconsciousness resembling sleep—contemporary research suggests that hypnotic subjects are fully awake and are focusing attention, with a corresponding decrease in their peripheral awareness. Subjects also show an increased response to suggestions. In the first book on the subject, Neurypnology (1843), Braid described "hypnotism" as a state of physical relaxation accompanied and induced by mental concentration ("abstraction"). In addition, psychiatric nurses in most medical facilities are allowed to administer hypnosis to patients in order to relieve symptoms such as anxiety, arousal, negative behaviors, uncontrollable behavior, and improve self-esteem and confidence only when they have been completely trained about their clinical side effects and while under supervision when administering it.