Sometimes, all the logic in the world can’t make you book that flight, give that presentation or pick up that phone. You try and talk yourself into it or tell yourself not to be stupid but that fear stays within you, it makes you feel hot, nauseous or stops you from thinking clearly.

The reason that logic and lateral thinking won’t help you is because the problem lies within your unconscious. The source of the fear or phobia can be accessed by hypnosis and the attached emotion that bubbles up can be released.

Your unconscious will see a pattern between the trigger for the fear or phobia and a threat to you of some kind. Take fear of flying for an example. If someone with a fear of flying obsesses about plane crashes and flights that go wrong, they begin to associate seeing a plane with the horrific consequences they have read about. When they arrive at the airport, they see a plane and their heart starts beating faster, they enter the fight or flight mode and their thoughts are focussed on the what-ifs and catastrophic events. They associate the plane and everything associated with it to their own anxiety so when they enter an airport or board a plane their unconscious matches the environment to their what-if thinking and their anxiety increases.

Hypnotherapy can help build strong pattern matches between an upcoming event and calm, confident feelings. When that event arrives, whether it be a flight, an interview or a speech, the associated feelings of being in control and feeling good will be dispersed by the subconscious allowing everything to go the way you want it to.

Hypnosis works really well with all types of external phobias as well as social phobias like blushing.