Exciting news! I have joined a new health and healing centre in Central called The Sanctuary and will now be seeing clients in their purpose-built healing rooms. The Sanctuary can be found at the Universal Trade Centre building in Arbuthnot Road (just above Lan Kwai Fong and Wyndham Street) – the link and full address is below:

www.thesanctuary.com.hk/blog.html

The other good news is that The Sanctuary opens at 9am and  closes at 8pm, making this more convenient for a lot of people who work office hours.

Besides hypnotherapy sessions, I will also be running workshops there (the first is on Managing Stress – 7.15-9.15pm on Tuesday 17th April). Please come along and see us!

Regards,

Fiona

Finding that perfect relationship

I am currently in the UK, but will be back in Hong Kong from 6th January.

All the best,

Fiona

Achieve mastery over your new year’s resolutions

This workshop will provide you with tools to use to help you overcome negative habits like smoking, overeating and nail-biting, and introduce you to the effectiveness of hypnotherapy.

Workshop 2
Looking for someone to love this Valentine’s Day? Someone who truly understands YOU? I can introduce you to someone who will love you and stay with you forever.  February 10th 7-9pm

Workshop 3

Learn to reconnect through hypnosis, which has an extraordinary ability to put you in touch with the resources that will take your relationship from strength to strength. February 13th 7-9pm

Need a boost to help you stick to your resolutions? Come and find out why more and more people are turning to hypnosis to help them lose weight, quit smoking and stop nail-biting. In this session, you will learn about the role the subconscious mind plays in forming and holding on to bad habits and pick up some simple techniques to help re-programme this part of your mind to move you forwards to the success you deserve. Make 2012 the last year you ever need to make resolutions.

Location: The New Age Shop, 7 Old Bailey St, Central, Hong Kong

Date and Time: Friday 20^th January 2012  7-9pm

Price: $250

I can introduce you to someone who will love you and stay with you forever.

People can become dissociated from themselves for a variety of reasons. You may have learned to do this as a result of watching others as a child; it may have become a safety mechanism during a traumatic experience, a way of distracting yourself that became a habit; perhaps it has just seemed the right thing to do to focus more on the needs of others rather than finding out what you need to be healthier and happier.

If, like many others, you have lost touch with yourself, hypnotherapy is an effective and enjoyable way to discover how to nurture that most fundamental of all relationships. When you learn how to connect with your true self, you will find that inner conflicts begin to disappear as you become aware of the source of your thoughts and emotions, and you become more skilled at maintaining a balance between calm self-acceptance and motivating yourself to meet goals.

You thoroughly deserve that relationship. Come along and let me make the introduction.

Learn to reconnect through playful and creative visualisation and rediscover the moments that made you great together. Experience the power of opening your heart and gently removing barriers to allow you and your partner to build a wonderful future.

Hypnotherapy has an extraordinary ability not only to enable you to foster greater self-esteem and to see yourself through the eyes of the one who loves you, but to put you in touch with the resources for creating lasting positive change that will take your relationship from strength to strength.

Sometimes a phobia is really a combination of phobias, as in the article above. A fear of flying can be a combination of claustrophobia and vertigo, for example, and a fear of preparing and making presentations could arise from atychiphobia (fear of failure) and decidophobia (a fear of making decisions). In this case, it would make sense to work on each of the individual components before finally collapsing the entire fear.

Often the subconscious mind knows instinctively when it is appropriate to let go of ‘childish’ phobias and most children eventually move past things like a fear of the dark without much conscious effort. However, some phobias remain because they somehow serve a useful function. I knew a man once who developed an intense fear of lifts when he began working in a tall office block. Through hypnosis we discovered the extent of his loathing for his job and that the phobia had been an effort to get him to listen and realise how much he disliked travelling to his office every day (the subconscious mind can be very literal and persistent if it feels we are not getting our needs met!). We persuaded his subconscious mind that if it let go of this phobia, he would take steps to find a job he enjoyed. A few months later he found a job that he preferred and the phobia disappeared, its job done.

In my experience, phobias often get worse as people get older, unless they get help. This, I believe, is because we generally develop more generalised anxieties and these can attach themselves to an existing phobia, like iron filings to a magnet (if you recall that old physics lab experiment…).

I invariably help clients manage their anxiety levels first and it is a real pleasure to see how that alone can make a significant difference to a phobic response even before work on desensitisation – removing the emotional response to the trigger – and teaching new beneficial responses that can become a habit to replace the old phobic response habit. Hypnotherapy treatment of phobias is fast and effective and has the very pleasant side-effect, through the deep relaxation and self-managment tools, of developing a real ability to relax and enjoy life much more.

Just for fun, I have included a list of phobias here – see if you recognise any of them!

All the best,

Fiona

Earlier this year, Hong Kong Hypnotherapy conducted a small-scale study into the motivation behind smoking and the motivation behind quitting amongst adults and adolescents in Hong Kong. Results closely mirrored a larger UK study carried out in 2006 (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifestyles/smoking-related-behaviour-and-attitudes/2006/index.html).

The majority of smokers surveyed in Hong Kong began the habit between the ages of 12 and 15 (none reported that they had begun before 12 or after 26 years old), compared with age 11 to early 20s in the UK. In both countries, the trend is for young people to begin smoking in early to late adolescence, with far fewer older people taking up the habit.

(http://medweb4.bham.ac.uk/websites/key_health_data/2006/ch_09.htm).

80% of participants in the Hong Kong survey stated their reason for starting as peer pressure, a desire to look cool and mature, or a realisation that everyone smoked so it was clearly the thing to do. Research in the UK suggests the same, stating that children with family and friends who smoke are more likely to take up the habit. It was also found that, in the UK, children with poor academic performance and those from one-parent families are more at risk. It is not clear whether this is the same in Hong Kong.

(http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/lung/smoking/#age)

80% of smokers polled in HK this year want to quit, whilst in the UK the figure was 72%. Here, 100% stated health reasons as the primary motivation, compared to 85% in the UK. This may be due in part to an increased awareness in Hong Kong of the danger and prevalence of air pollution. Whilst some smokers may ask ‘well, if I am breathing in air pollution on a daily basis anyway, I may as well just keep smoking’, the reality is that smoking damages the hair-like projections (cilia) in the airways, making them brittle and more likely to allow pollutants into the lungs. There is, therefore, perhaps an even greater need to stop smoking in Hong Kong where air pollution can be very bad indeed and lead to significant health problems.

Of those successful in quitting, 60% in the Hong Kong survey cited stress as a factor in starting again – compared to 42% in the UK – and 20% blamed occasional social smoking. Obviously, different occupations and lifestyles anywhere in the world result in different levels of stress, but it is generally accepted that the pace of life in Hong Kong is frequently hectic with a culture of long working hours, tight deadlines and often a need to work closely with people in different time zones leading to decreased sleep and heightened anxiety. Certainly, it has been my experience while helping smokers to quit in both Hong Kong and the UK that stress is more frequently an issue here.

Amongst adult respondents in Hong Kong, 80% claimed increasing cost was only partially effective in discouraging smoking; 80% saw the smoking ban as ‘effective’ at most. Overall, the ban was seen as a greater deterrent than the increasing tax. In contrast, studies in the UK have found that a 10% increase in price leads to a 4% drop in cigarette smoking in developed countries (although the lower price and availability of smuggled cigarettes undermines these figures somewhat).

(http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/lung/smoking/#age)

Another study carried out in Hong Kong showed that the smoking ban actually reduced smoking amongst adolescents by over 50% between 2007 and 2010.

(http://www.smokefree.hk/en/content/web.do?page=news20110428) This may be partly due to the shorter duration of their addiction and partly influenced by their participation in ‘stop smoking’ campaigns and education programmes at school.

It seems that, whilst the basic motivations to smoke and to quit are similar in different countries, environmental factors such as stress levels do matter. The good news is that we live in a time where there is a huge wealth of information and support available to quit smoking and the healthier, happier path of being a non-smoker is but one small step away. Take that step today.

Fiona