A Network dedicated to Healthy Living
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Mind-Body HealingI mentioned in my post on gaining control by integrating your mind that I’m reading Ernest Rossi’s The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing at the moment. What it does is provide for mind-body healing the two things that are needed for any idea to be [...]
Just an interim progress report and some more information about my Life Leverage book and CD project.
As I mentioned before, although it’s based on this blog it’s far from being just recycled blog posts in printed form. I’d say at least 40% of it, if not more, will be material that hasn’t appeared on the [...]
I’m reading Ernest L. Rossi’s classic book The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New concepts of therapeutic hypnosis at the moment. I’ll probably do several posts on it. This one is on an insight he gives which relates to the “switchboard” technique I wrote about in Pain management part 2: Imagination techniques. I already knew that [...]
I’ve bought a new and better microphone, a Rode Podcaster, and I’m going through re-recording my hypnotherapy scripts - they should now sound a lot crisper and less muddy. I’m also making small changes to some of them, adding in things that I’ve learned or come up with since I first recorded them.
The first is [...]
I’ve started editing together some of my most popular blog posts with other material I’ve written to form the basis of a book. The working title is Life Leverage: Simple techniques to improve your health and wellbeing. It definitely won’t just be recycled material, I’ll be rewriting and expanding as I go, so it will [...]
A long and slightly technical post this time. Bear with me.
For the National Heart Foundation smoking cessation practitioner training course I went to last week, they sent me some pre-reading, namely the NZ Ministry of Health’s Smoking Cessation Guidelines. Of course, I was interested in what they have to say about hypnotherapy.
Here it is, the [...]
Part of my persona, if you like, in this blog so far has been to be anti-drug. Not just anti-recreational-drug or anti-illegal-drug, but at least somewhat anti-medical-drug as well.
In practice, I’m not really like that. I’ll take headache remedies if I think I need to, and antibiotics if my doctor prescribes them. My wife, [...]
I’ve just had two days of training from the National Heart Foundation to be a smoking cessation practitioner.
It’s an excellent course and I now feel much better equipped to help clients who come to me to stop smoking.
As a result of what I learned on the course I’ve re-thought some of what I’ve [...]
Thanks to Bronwyn Thompson at Health Skills, not only for linking to my site but also for drawing to my attention a study published in the European Journal of Pain: Fibromyalgia pain and its modulation by hypnotic and non-hypnotic suggestion: An fMRI analysis by Stuart W.G. Derbyshire, Matthew G. Whalley and David A. Oakley. Functional [...]
This is the 101st post on this blog - and it’s a guest post. Enjoy!
In the mad scramble to lose weight and get fit, people are reduced to trying any method to get those excess pounds off their waists and hips; they don’t care if it’s by hook or crook, all they want to do [...]
Sorry, I made the beginner’s mistake of upgrading my WordPress plugins and then going away for four days, so the blog portion of the site has been down. Should be fixed now.
I need to learn that WordPress plugins often break when you upgrade them.
Here’s an interesting study in the Journal of Neuroscience. That link is to the highly technical abstract; physorg.com has a much more digestible version which tells you what the experiment actually was.
They got some rats addicted to cocaine, and got them to associate the turning on of a light with the drug. They also [...]
This is a follow-up to Pain management part 1: Attention techniques.
Attention is not the only drug-free way to manage pain. Imagination is also very powerful. I know of at least five imagination techniques which can all be highly effective in managing both acute (sudden, severe) and chronic (long-term) pain.
First is direct imagery of the pain. [...]
(I originally added this as an edit to the end of my previous post on the Close Up feature on hypnotherapy for smoking cessation, but I’m moving it to its own post for the benefit of my subscribers.)
As a follow-up, I see that ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) have come out expressing “concerns” about [...]
I was out last night, so I couldn’t watch it when it was broadcast, but I’ve just caught up with the Close Up current affairs programme feature on hypnotherapy for smoking cessation. (TVNZ very nicely makes it available on the net - I’m not sure for how long.)
It’s a good, positive story featuring a Wellington [...]
Many people live with unnecessary pain which can be relieved naturally, without drugs, using simple mental techniques. This is the first of two posts about some of those techniques.
Pain is, of course, a warning. It’s the body’s alarm system, and before you decide to switch it off or reduce its volume you should consider whether [...]
Thomas Edison famously gave the formula for genius as “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. You might argue with those proportions, but it’s certainly true that very few people have succeeded at anything on their first try. Read about any really famous author. Almost certainly, they faced multiple rounds of rejections before their book was finally [...]
We may be able to add HIV to the list of health conditions positively affected by mindfulness meditation.
A small, randomly controlled, single-blind study run by David Creswell and colleagues at UCLA is about to be published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity. It measured the decline of CD4+ T lymphocytes, immune system cells [...]
This entry is part 15 of 15 in the series Health BehaviorsThis is the second of two posts on improving your interpersonal life. There’ll be more in the future, so if this is an interest of yours, please subscribe.
This little practice is short enough that you can do it in the shower, while waiting [...]
In the news: Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg have pledged $375 million USD to a program which will fight smoking in the developing world, particularly India and China.
As smoking declines in the West, tobacco companies are turning their attention to Africa, Asia and South America, where laws on public smoking [...]
