If women are more hypnotizable, why do men find it easier to use hypnosis to stop smoking? Everyone is different, so when people come to my London clinic for hypnosis to stop smoking, I always conduct a detailed exploration of their habit. As well as things like when the client first started smoking and their current triggers to smoking, I need to ask them a few extra questions, depending on whether the client is male or female. Why do I do this? Let me explain.

About a third of men experience difficulty in getting or maintaining an erection, and this percentage increases in older men. Around 85% of men find that sildenifal (Viagra) improves their erections. This is a good success rate, but it doesn’t address any underlying psychological issues the man might have in relation to sex or relationships.

The relationship between stress and fertility is a complex and fascinating topic. Hypnotherapy for anxiety might be one way to help. My PhD explored psychological aspects of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), a condition in which fertility problems are relatively common. I have researched and developed a Stress Management programme specifically for PCOS (Barry et al, 2017), which significantly reduced anxiety, depression, and stress hormones.

Depression is relatively common in PCOS. Christmas can often feel like a time when we should be happy, so any sources of unhappiness – such as the troubling symptoms of PCOS - can seem especially hurtful at this time of year. I hope everyone has a fantastic Christmas, but you don’t have to be a psychologist to realise that this time of year can have stressful for people with medical conditions, or other stressful things to deal with. For women with PCOS, some typical Christmas stressors are:

The word ‘hypnos’ is the name of the Greek god of sleep. This in itself would suggest that hypnotherapy will help with sleep problems, and indeed there is research evidence for this (see meta-analysis by Lam et al, 2015). Although people under hypnosis are not literally asleep it is a relatively fast, safe and effective way to improve insomnia. Another benefit is that hypnotherapy helps without the use of medications, which is a especially useful to people who would otherwise take medications that can be addictive or have unpleasant side effects.

As a Chartered Psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society (BPS), I was very interested to stumble across a review of hypnosis by the BPS. The review was led by the renowned psychologist Professor Michael Heap and other experts. It was published in 2001, shortly after I started practicing hypnotherapy in London. The findings of the report are very interesting and I quote in full below the section on the effectiveness of hypnotherapy for anxiety and many other conditions:

Many people start using e-cigarettes as a way to stop smoking but then end up addicted to vaping. A survey of 12,000 British adults found that 40% of people use e-cigarettes to help them stop smoking cigarettes

Hypnotherapy for weight loss is one of the most popular requests for therapists. For people who find they don’t have the time or motivation to stick to a diet & exercise regime or find medication has too many side effects, hypnotherapy is often the answer. But how does hypnotherapy compare to other methods of weight loss?

If you are like me and became a new dad in the past year or so, you may well have found yourself with unprecedented amounts of time at home with a baby. For most people this will be a challenge and even trigger depression (see helpline details below), but in fact there can be a silver lining, or even golden opportunity, in being locked down with baby.

A recent meta-synthesis of 13 studies looked at the experiences of new dads of babies up to 12 months old (Shorey & Ang, 2019). Three themes emerged:

“In PCOS, obesity typically starts in adolescence and weight loss can be difficult. Bazarganipour et al. (2013) assessed 300 adult women with PCOS in Iran and found that higher BMI was associated with poorer body satisfaction.

Dr John Barry, Honorary Lecturer at UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, has developed the first ever scale to measure the impact of colour blindness on quality of life.

Working in collaboration with the University of Birmingham Academic Unit of Ophthalmology, Dr Barry conducted a survey of 419 people with congenital colour

Like 8% of men and 0.5% of women, I am colour blind. Being colour blind has a significant impact on Quality of Life (Barry et al, 2017), creating problems in everyday activities such as understanding coloured graphs (in lectures and textbooks) and maps (e.g. the London Underground map).

Research shows that one of the key predictors of psychological well-being is job satisfaction. When people are stressed at work, this not only impacts their productivity but can make the other areas of their life miserable too.

Some people have made an incredible contribution to hypnosis and hypnotherapy over the years. There is a rich and long history behind hypnotherapy, and I am going to mention just a few of the people who have, for various reasons, made an impact on my interest in hypnosis.

There are many stress management programmes in London, but only one has been developed especially for PCOS.

1/ Tailor therapy to the client’s personality: Most therapists will agree that therapy should meet the needs and capabilities of the client. An extension of this principal was created by US psychiatrist Dr Milton Erikson, who is sometimes called ‘the father of modern hypnosis’.

Taking an evidence-based approach, Dr Barry (UCL’s Division of Psychology and Language Sciences), explores the ways in which PCOS causes anxiety and depression, impacts quality of life, and is associated with other psychological phenomena.

People generally prefer to feel in control of their lives, and although we voluntarily give up control in many aspects of our lives (e.g. when we go under general anaesthetic, or when we are a passenger in a plane) there can be something a bit sinister about the idea of our minds being under the control of another person.