I was recently seeing a client who had just begun to feel as though everything in the world was going wrong for her. She said she was feeling stressed out, overwhelmed, like she was strapped to a deflating balloon, flying all over the place, directionless and a victim of forces outside her control. All that was left for her, she felt, was the inevitable big crash when the balloon ran out of air.
“Wow!” I thought to myself, she must have some huge things going on her life right now to make her feel this helpless. Then as we started to talk, each thing in itself seemed small, something that many of us are lucky enough to almost be able to ignore, annoying but no more than a mild irritant. This poor lady had so many of them, they were building up, and up, and all those irritants were starting to rub her raw.
The Perceived Stress Scale or PSS as it is known, is a widely used system to measure how people see their own stress. It is used to measure how resilient people are, how able to cope with the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ as Shakespeare might have said. People who score highly might have difficulty letting go of stress, it builds up and makes everything else that much harder. People who have a high PSS also often have associated problems like less resistance to disease, depression, difficulty quitting smoking or controlling blood sugar levels in the case of diabetics. In our modern fast paced, and often high anxiety lifestyle a high PSS score is common and, once it starts to escalate, it can get worse and worse very quickly if we don’t have enough time to regain our equilibrium between stressful events, just as a snowball gets bigger and bigger as it rolls downhill.
One of the things I love about hypnotism is that it gives people a chance to reset or to ‘reboot’ their computer. Hypnosis is a virus clearer. All the things you have on your plate get reset. For some of the people that I see this is the first time in days, weeks or months that they have been able to relax, unwind and get their breath back again. Hypnosis is a deeply relaxing experience and, even ignoring the therapy itself, can give people a chance to reset their systems and get ready for a new day. When you add the suggestions that we have worked on, it can be a total life changer, giving people the resilience to carry on without letting those small annoyances build up again.
That is the emotional resilience that can be helped through hypnosis, and a large part of why I do what I do, something I have seen happen again and again with clients in my practice. People arriving anxious and jittery and leaving, ready to take on the world, as if they have just seen sunshine and tasted fresh air for the first time in years.
