I always enjoy watching Derren Brown at work, and last night’s Miracles For Sale was certainly enjoyable. It took a simple premise – could Derren show that faith healers are fake by taking an ordinary person and teaching them to perform ‘healing miracles’ on a group of unsuspecting Americans? The straightforward, and inevitable, answer was [...]

The what? The non-deceptive mega placebo! Yes, today it’s the joy of  ’stuff that makes you better just because you think it will.’ Placebos are fascinating things. A placebo is officially “a substance or procedure… that is objectively without specific activity for the condition being treated”. In other words, a substance that doesn’t do anything. [...]

One of the unfortunate things about being a hypnotherapist is that many people have a rather negative perception of what you do. As I’ve said many times before, the public perception of hypnosis is rooted in the mid-90s when Paul McKenna’s shows were on TV. The result is that hypnosis is generally associated with hilarious [...]

I often find studies into workplace behaviour, like this one into workplace anger, both interesting and rather sad. Essentially, the research describes how simply punishing employees for getting angry at work isn’t very effective. Apparently, if management takes ”an active interest in addressing underlying issues that prompted employee anger” then  ”perceptions of improved situations increase significantly.” [...]

This week is Depression Awareness Week, a valuable campaign run every year by the charity Depression Alliance. One of the aims is simply to make people more aware of depression and its symptoms. According to the charity: “As a general rule, if you have experienced four or more of these symptoms, for most of the day [...]

I find it fascinating how pain always seems like one of the most immediate and real sensations once can experience. When you stub your toe, it hurts, and what could be more real and immediate than that? Yet the more research takes place, the more it seems that pain is actually a very subjective and [...]

Hypnotherapy is always concerned with how people are thinking. As I often explain to people I work with, there are really four elements to your daily experience of life. Things happen to you, you think about them, that thinking causes you to feel a certain way, your feelings influence how you behave and your behaviour [...]