Most of the time, when you are going to need surgery, you know that well in advance.

That gives you plenty of time, more than you probably want, to worry about it. It also, however, gives you ample time to prepare for the scary day.

One of the best ways to prepare is to make an appointment with a competent clinical hypnotist, who will be able to help in in three distinct areas.

First, there is hypnotic anaesthesia. There was a time when anesthesia basically amounted to slugging back a bottle of whiskey, which worked about as well as you might think it would—not very well at all. Nowadays, chemical anesthesia is the norm, but there are some people who can’t handle it. That is rare, but when it happens, hypnosis can offer an alternative. It has actually been used for a long time. In the nineteenth century, before modern anaesthesia came along, the surgical mortality rate was much lower for the lucky patients who had surgeons adept at hypnosis.

When you are facing surgery, another common issue is anxiety. There is, after all, no such thing as “minor surgery,” and it is hard not to be anxious about the coming procedure. The thought of lying on a table, unconscious, at the mercy of a stranger with a knife, isn’t thrilling. Neither is wondering how long it will take to recover, and how well you will do down the road. Those worries can make everything harder, even getting up in the morning. Hypnosis helps here, too. When you are in a trance, you cannot feel tense, or anxious. A trained hypnotist will also arm you with powerful post-hypnotic suggestions for positive thought, and probably also give you some training in self-hypnosis, so that the sense of calm and optimism will stay with you.

Last, and best, your hypnotist can help you learn to develop a self-hypnotic trance state that you can take with you, right into the surgery. You can record it, and listen to it while you are being prepped. Some surgeons will even let you listen to it while you are on the table. Either way, the research clearly shows that when you are in a hypnotic trance during surgery you have fewer complications, less post-surgical pain, and a faster recovery.

So when you are facing surgery, think hypnosis.

There is a growing awareness of hypnosis as a tool to take things that have gone wrong and fix them; but not as many people realise that hypnosis is also a great tool for doing good stuff even better.

Take renowned Swiss adventurer Andre Piccard, for example. Piccard—his grandfather was a balloonist and his father an undersea explorer—along with British pilot Brian Jones, made the first round-the-world balloon trip, some forty-six thousand kilometers non-stop, in 1999. Last year he went one better. He and fellow Swiss Andre Borschberg flew the solar-powered airplane Solar Impulse around the world.

Piccard did the piloting on the leg across the Atlantic Ocean—more than three days in the air, no stopping, and almost no sleeping.

How did he do that? How did he get the most out of the little sleep he managed, and stay focused, dealing with winds, staying on course, when he was awake?

He used hypnosis.

Piccard’s day job is being a psychiatrist. He is also a trained hypnotist. He used self-hypnosis to keep himself functioning on that long, long flight.

Piccard’s feat offers a good example of how you can use hypnosis to do the things you do every day, but do them better.

For instance, are you going to school, or studying an acting role, or learning to play an instrument? Learning always requires focus, concentration, and memorisation—all things you will do better if you have the skill of self-hypnosis.

Athletic skills also get a boost from the use of hypnosis. If you are an athlete, you probably already know the value of mental rehearsing. Doing that while you are in a light trance makes it even more effective. Plus, with hypnosis you will be able to work longer and harder, with better results. With some sports, you can even compete in a trance.

So if you have a task to accomplish, or a skill to learn, or a talent to polish, think of making your first step a call to a, trained clinical hypnotist—in Gold Coast think Greg Thompson—to learn the hypnotic skills that will make a difference.

Alcohol abuse is something that develops gradually. It starts small, and then it grows. Think of it as a road. It begins as a gentle footpath, a drink now and then that eases social situations, or offers a way to wind down at the end of a hard day.

Then that footpath widens into a graveled country lane, and before you know it the country lane merges into a paved road, and then the paved road becomes a superhighway littered with beer cans, whiskey bottles, car wrecks, lost family and friends, disease, and ultimately, death.

If you are anywhere along that road, and beginning to realise that you need to get off, there are off ramps. The trick is to know which one to select.

One of those off ramps is AA—Alcoholics Anonymous. It has been around for a long time, and it has helped some people, but not that many compared to the number who need help. The success rate for AA is, at best, ten percent.

Then there are programs based on the AA approach, designed mainly for severe, addicted alcoholics and often based in residential facilities. Their success rate also leaves much to be desired.

Some physicians try to treat alcoholism and alcohol abuse with drugs, but those tend to work even less well than AA.

Fortunately, there is another way—hypnosis.

Alcohol abuse is a problem with many different parts. A hypnotherapeutic approach works because it operates on multiple levels to deal with those problems.

First of all, you need to deal with cravings. For most problem drinkers, cravings are triggered by particular situations—being around other drinkers, for instance—or by specific feelings—anger, fear, sadness, or sometimes even elation. Hypnosis is a powerful tool to stop cravings. In a trance, you do not feel cravings, period. They simply do not exist.

Sometimes excessive drinking is tied to old trauma, often from childhood. A skilled hypnotherapist can help you go back in time, examine those old traumatic experiences calmly, and resolve them.

Hypnosis can also help you discover your strengths and talents, some of which you may have no idea that you possessed, and use them, not only to get your drinking under control, but to take charge of every part of your life.

So if you are concerned about your drinking, think hypnosis.

Alcohol abuse and alcoholism are not small problems in Australia. Experts estimate the annual cost at somewhere in the vicinity of $36 billion.

Excessive drinking is tied to at least three thousand deaths in the nation every year, with thousands more hospitalised. Auto accidents, fatal and near fatal illnesses, and successful or attempted suicides top the list.

Then, of course, there are the untold thousands of husbands, wives, children, and other family members whose lives are damaged from having to deal with the fallout from living with problem drinkers; so add intense emotional pain to the physical and financial damage.

There is a growing recognition, among both laypersons and health professionals, that hypnosis and hypnotherapy are effective tools for working with alcohol abuse; and the fact that you are taking the time to read this blog probably means that you are at least wondering if you need help with unwise drinking.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Have you had an accident that, if you look at it honestly, you know would not have happened if you hadn’t been drinking?

Have you gotten into physical fights when drinking, but never when sober?

Have you been arrested for driving under the influence?

Even though you are a mellow person when you are sober, do your friends and family stay out of your way when you have had a few, because you are an angry drunk?

Have you lost a job, or been threatened with its loss, because even though you never miss a day of work, your hangovers interfere with your job performance?

Have you gotten up the morning after a big weekend and been unable to remember what you did?

Have your family or friends told you they are concerned about your drinking?

If you answered even a couple of those questions yes, then you need to face the probability that you are drinking unwisely, that you have a drinking problem. That means you have a living problem, and it didn’t start yesterday.

In the next blog we will take a deeper look at the problem, and how hypnosis and hypnotherapy can make a difference. And then, if you live in the Gold Coast area, you may want your next step to be giving a call to clinical hypnotist Greg Thompson.

Even with the powerful help you get from hypnosis, reaching a healthy weight is not an overnight task; when you do it properly, it takes time, especially if you have a lot of kilos to shed. It doesn’t help that your body’s metabolism has a mind of its own. It will speed up at times, and slow down other times. It hits plateaus.

Your mood also has a mind of its own. Some days you may feel like you’ve got the world in a basket. At other times, it may feel like someone took that basket, turned it upside down, and dumped it over your head.

Hypnosis will help smooth those ups and downs out, but there may still be major swings that will make sticking to your weight loss regimen hard. After all, when you are up, everything feels easy. When you slip into one of those inevitable downs, not so much.

There is a technique that will help you keep your self-image and self-esteem positive. It is called the Premack Principle, named after the psychologist, David Premack, who came up with it.

Here is what to do:

First, make a list of the good things you can say about yourself: physical looks, talents, personality traits, or whatever. They don’t have to be big things. They don’t even have to be true all the time—nobody’s perfect, after all.

Next, pick the ten you think are the most important, If your list has fewer than ten items on it, choose them all.

Now, type or print that list in a column. For instance,

I am kind
I am smart
I am fairly good looking
I have a good ear for music
I am honest
I can dance
I am mostly polite

At the end of the list, add:

I am all of these things
I deserve to be healthy
I am losing weight
And nothing will stop me

Next, make several copies of your list. Put one on your bathroom mirror. Put another one on the inside of your bedroom door, and a third on the inside of your front door. If you work in an office, put a copy in your desk drawer. Put others anywhere you can figure to see them frequently.

Now, every time you look at one of those copies, read it. Read it out loud if you are somewhere you can. Read it with feeling, like you really mean it. When time allows, put yourself into a light trance first.

Within a couple of weeks, you will begin to notice a real difference in your attitude. You will feel more confident, more in charge of your life. Other people will see a difference, too.

Try it. You have nothing to lose—except for all those unwanted kilos, of course.

If you are looking for reasons to use hypnosis to break your nicotine addiction, here are a few:

Start with the cost factor. Sure, hypnosis and hypnotherapy represent a financial investment, but compared to the cost of smoking? Face it, if you are a pack-a-day smoker in Australia, where cigarettes are more expensive than any other country in the world, you are putting out around $700 a month to satisfy your habit.

Some smokers turn to nicotine replacement gums and patches, or to prescription drugs, to combat their smoking habit. Beyond the fact that these approaches don’t work very well, you also have to deal with side-effects. One often-prescribed drug, Champix, can cause nausea, headaches, vomiting, lack of energy and sleep disturbances. Another, Zyban, offers all those wonderful things, plus weight gain and weakened sex drive. Replacement gums and patches keep you loaded up with nicotine, which is of course a toxic substance that raises the risk of heart attack and stroke. Side effects of hypnosis? Feeling calm and relaxed.

Here’s another plus for hypnosis—it connects you with your unconscious, the creative part of your mind. This is where your inner wisdom lives. By connecting with that part of you through hypnosis, you are forming a powerful alliance that won’t let you do harmful things to yourself.

Then there are cravings. As a smoker you certainly know about those. In a hypnotic state, you simply cannot feel cravings. They don’t exist when you are in a trance, and one of the things you will learn working with a competent hypnotist—in Gold Coast, think Greg Thompson—is how to slip into a comfortable trance whenever you need to. All cravings go away if they are not immediately satisfied, and you will be able to simply go into a light trance and wait the craving out. Even better, every time you do that, the craving will be weaker next time, and will eventually disappear.

Last, hypnosis gets you beyond the physical addiction to examine other aspects of your smoking habit. Maybe you smoke when you are angry, or depressed, or stressed and needing a break, or even just bored. A hypnotist can help you examine the triggers that make your habit so stubborn, and develop hypnotic tools that will allow you to take charge. Even better, you will discover that those tools will also help you in many other parts of your life.

If you are ready to step away from your smoking habit, hypnosis is the way to do it.

Some cases of depression have primarily biological roots. Some are strictly psychological. Most are a mix of the two.

Serious mood disturbances such as bipolar disorder have genetic causes and tend to be treated with drugs. Mood swings, however, that are not severe enough to justify a bipolar diagnosis, can still create problems for people. When those mood swings are rare, and not too intense, you can usually just ride them out, because you know they will end, and life will get back to normal.

On the other hand, if those swings are severe, and last long enough, they can interfere with life. They make it hard to get up in the morning. They get in the way of work. They may trigger excessive drinking, or abuse of other drugs. Then you need help.

In these cases, although the problem may have a biological basis, a skilled hypnotherapist can make a difference. For instance, you can be taught how to use self-hypnosis, and the trance state itself is a mood-altering tool, one that is more powerful than a drug. You simply cannot feel bad when you are in a trance. In addition, hypnosis can be used to instill positive, ego-boosting suggestions that will stay with you permanently.

More important for most people, the primary triggers of depression are not biological but emotional and psychological—tied to such things as life history, family learning, and social isolation. People get depressed because life has knocked them down repeatedly, and sooner or later they can’t get up again. Even with things like depression during or after pregnancy, while hormones may play a part, the big problem is usually psychological. The mom-to-be is afraid of failure, and the new mother is overwhelmed by the added responsibilities, and often has no support.

In other cases, people are depressed because they were taught to be. They may have grown up, for instance, with abusive parents whose constant message was, “You’re a loser.” Little kids can’t tell what’s true from what’s not true. What they are told is what they believe, and that can become a destructive reality later in life. Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool for creating a new, positive self-image.

Depressed people are frequently socially isolated. They avoid people because they don’t think people like them. Isolation leads to depression, which leads to more withdrawal and traps them in a vicious circle of loneliness, social avoidance and depression. Hypnosis is a potent tool for breaking out of that trap.

Depression is often tied to unresolved past trauma. Hypnotherapy offers a way of going back into the past and resolving the injury.

Hypnotherapists have been working for decades to develop strategies for dealing with depression. Hypnotherapy helps strengthen ego and self-esteem. It can break through social isolation and fear of contact. It can be used to resolve old trauma.

Best of all, the only side-effect is feeling good about yourself.