Hi folks

Just a quick one to let you know when we’re going to be closed over the festive period:

Closed December 23rd-27th
Closed December 30th-January 3rd

So lots of relaxing time for the Uncommon Knowledge and Hypnosis Downloads staff, and our best wishes to you all for the holidays and a Happy New Year.

All the best

Roger

I used to write this section in our monthly Inspired Minds newsletter, but we figured it would be easier to read online, and all our blog subscribers would enjoy reading it too. At least I hope you do Read November’s Inspired Minds newsletter here.

Downloads Unwrapped – November 2011

What really matters? Get your priorities right

What makes us happy? Actually, it isn’t what a lot of us are brainwashed into thinking.  Money, for instance, beyond a certain level, doesn’t add significantly to the wellbeing of our daily lives.  Adulation has its limits, and sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll can all start to feel like the empty whispers of a long dead ghost which only seemed alive and vital until its true nature became evident – a dead end on the road to real fulfilment.  Researchers into wellbeing have found that it’s people and not getting more ‘stuff’ that makes us happy. Quality relationships, meaningful work or activity, contributing to the community, being stimulated creatively and having fun and laughing a lot. Having goals for the greater good and not just our own gain also produces more happiness. But, like a fly continually bumping against a glass window instead of flying free through the open door on the other side of the room, unless we focus on life’s true priorities rather than worshipping the ‘false gods’ of consumerism we will never feel really happy. With this in mind we’ve created: Life priorities – a session to clarify what we all really need in life. Because if we are going the wrong way we shouldn’t be surprised if we never get to where we wanted to be.

How worrying about others can spoil your time – and theirs

Concern for the people in our life is vital for successful, happy relationships. We need to care for others. But, like anything else in life, we can overdo it. And it can get so excessive that it starts to work against the common good of connection and relationship. Over-worrying, not letting people have the space to explore their own lives, make their own mistakes sometimes, or even take sensible risks, stifles them, spoils your relationship with them and makes your time (that you waste worrying about them) wretched and miserable. Whether it’s an ill partner or friend, a child you love deeply or anyone else that you feel constantly concerned about, the new Worrying about other people download aims to help you put the situation into perspective so you can give the person room to ‘breathe’ and give them the credit for having personal resources and common sense of their own and also the space to develop these capacities themselves. Worry is only good in as far as it helps us do something useful. Once it has served its purpose, it needs to be ‘switched off’ if it is not to become like a dog chasing its own tail. This session helps you do that.

Trust in yourself for greater self confidence

The late great psychiatrist, medical doctor and, of course, hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to urge people to “trust in your unconscious mind”. When we start to worry that we don’t really know stuff that, in reality, we do know, or think that we can’t do things that we really can do, then we leak confidence away faster than sand sliding down an egg timer. Often when you’ve been doing something for a long time it comes to seem effortless. Ironically, this can be just when you start to wonder “Can I really do this?” or “Why do people think this is so great when it’s so easy?” Self doubt creeps in and, of course, disrupts performance and day-to-day enjoyment. The fact is, we don’t know how we do lots of things – from dreaming at night to growing finger nails or fighting off pathogens in the blood stream. Your unconscious mind knows more about how it helps these processes than your conscious mind does. Once you’ve learnt something fully, say how to play a musical piece, then it becomes more of an unconscious than a conscious process. But we need to really trust our own unconscious minds to do what comes naturally. The conscious mind can trip things up with its fretting and over-analysis. We’re very exited about our new Trust yourself download as we feel it gets to the heart of what disrupts so many lives.

If you read that title and are still reading, then you’re probably aware that a QR code is a cool little gizmo that you can scan with your smartphone, and looks like this:

When you scan a QR code, it can do all sorts of things; the above one will open your phone’s browser at Wikipedia.

Send your Hypnosis Download straight to your phone
When you scan the QR code for the entry in your purchase history (which you get by opening a free account), your purchase will be downloaded directly to your phone. At least, it will with most phones, although iPhones and other iDevices will try to stream the file instead. We’re sorting out a workaround for this, but if anyone has any ideas, please let me know in comments.

While I’m here, I should probably let you know that opening a free account will also list all your purchases you’ve ever made with the email address you use to sign up. It will also give you wish list functionality on the site. And other stuff that we’re developing still, and I can’t tell you about yet.

Do you love this as much as I do? (OK, I’m a geek, it’s true). Or do you think it’s just unnecessary over-technologicalization. Let me know below.

If you read that title and are still reading, then you’re probably aware that a QR code is a cool little gizmo that you can scan with your smartphone, and looks like this:

When you scan a QR code, it can do all sorts of things; the above one will open your phone’s browser at Wikipedia.

Send your Hypnosis Download straight to your phone
When you scan the QR code for the entry in your purchase history (which you get by opening a free account), your purchase will be downloaded directly to your phone. At least, it will with most phones, although iPhones and other iDevices will try to stream the file instead. We’re sorting out a workaround for this, but if anyone has any ideas, please let me know in comments.

While I’m here, I should probably let you know that opening a free account will also list all your purchases you’ve ever made with the email address you use to sign up. It will also give you wish list functionality on the site. And other stuff that we’re developing still, and I can’t tell you about yet.

Do you love this as much as I do? (OK, I’m a geek, it’s true). Or do you think it’s just unnecessary over-technologicalization. Let me know below.

I used to write this section in our monthly Inspired Minds newsletter, but we figured it would be easier to read online, and all our blog subscribers would enjoy reading it too. At least I hope you do Read October’s Inspired Minds newsletter here.

Downloads Unwrapped – October 2011

Fear of sex – or how to love loving

We’re genetically programmed to enjoy sex. Not an overly romantic statement, but true.

We need to find pleasure in behaviours that connect us emotionally to others (so increasing our chances of surviving) or that enable us to produce kids to carry on the species. But sometimes things go wrong. Pleasure drives us to go toward the activity which produces the good feelings, but fear drives us to avoid what makes us afraid. Sometimes we come to fear what we should enjoy, and find pleasure in stuff that we should (or at least normally would) fear (ever seen that guy who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers?!). The wires get crossed.

Fear of sex can get started for all kinds of reasons. Some people fear intimacy – getting that close to another human being – perhaps because they fear emotional rejection or fear making themselves that ‘vulnerable’. Others dread sex because they feel they may be doing it ‘wrong’, or because it feels like an overwhelming pressure to ‘perform’. Or perhaps they have yet to have sex for the first time and feel frightened of the unknown.

One of my clients told me how he had been made fun of by a woman during an early sexual experience, and had feared sex ever since. Another cause might be previous sexual abuse, or even sex with an inconsiderate lover. Sex in such cases can feel like something violent and aggressive rather than something to be deliciously enjoyed and savoured. Sex has come to feel like threat.

What’s more, fear of sex can ripple out to undermine confidence in other areas of life and to block the development of deeper emotional intimacy with potential lovers. The new hypnosisdownloads.com session Fear of sex focuses on changing unhelpful patterns of response to both the expectation and actual experience of this potentially most wonderful of human activities.

Cocaine usage and shrunken testicles

Okay… maybe cocaine abuse doesn’t shrink testicles, but anabolic steroid abuse certainly can do so. Why? Because testosterone is produced naturally in the testes and if a man’s balls get the message they’re not needed to produce this muscle-building hormone (because there is now an ‘external’ supply of testosterone available) then they will shrink. Just as your leg muscles will shrink if you fail to use them enough. Ouch!

And what’s that got to do with cocaine abuse? Well, cocaine is a strong central nervous system stimulant that has a powerful effect on the reabsorption of dopamine, the brain’s ‘pleasure chemical’. Just as with the shrunken testicles example, if we continually artificially stimulate the pleasure centres in the brain, those centres may weaken and atrophy, and become incapable of carrying out their function without that artificial stimulation.

The old adage ‘the coarse drives out the fine’ indicates that the capacity to appreciate and gain pleasure from more subtle stimuli (such as a beautiful sunset) without the aid of coke may be damaged. The brain may lose the capacity, at least for a while, to generate its own pleasure response. This might not seem on the face of it as serious as some of the oft quoted side effects of cocaine usage (such as paranoid hallucinations, hyper irritability, heart attack and so on), but we are talking about a drug that can potentially strip a human being of the capacity to find life meaningful. Like any addiction, cocaine usage can be an ultimately ineffective attempt to meet missing life needs but it can also make it much less likely that a person can solve their own emotional problems. However, I’ve seen even chronic users comfortably grow beyond the habit, find genuine meaning in their lives without polluting their brains and live with the real ‘balls’ (whether male or female) they were meant to have. The Cocaine addiction treatment session uses a blend of the approaches I’ve found most useful over the years in helping people free themselves from the white stuff.

On choosing to live right

“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” I’d like to lay claim to these words, but Aristotle beat me to it over 2,000 years ago. That we are, or become, what we do may seem kind of obvious, but it is an important and even profound truth. When working to help someone quit a 60-a-day smoking habit, for example, I will visualize their future or possible futures – the different selves they may become as a result of choices they make right now, today. If they continue their enslavement to the nicotine, they will be physiologically older, frailer and more decayed in a year’s time than if they stop today. One possible self may live a lot longer, choose to start projects that the more enfeebled self wouldn’t have been able to dream of. We become what we repeatedly do – or don’t do. Sometimes the unhealthy choices we make literally help turn us to dust – become something utterly different. The new Make healthy choices session isn’t about preaching clean living, it’s about helping people become profoundly aware in the moment how the habits of now can shape the you of the future -and sometimes that future is much nearer than suspected.