And those who come to me have various reasons for wanting to be hypnotized. Probably 10% want to quit smoking. And these are some of my favorite clients. About seven of my family members died from emphysema and COPD, due to smoking. So anything I can do to help someone quit is well worth the time and effort. And about 95% of those who want to stop usually succeed after one or two sessions.
Others come to me because they want to work on depression, self-esteem, self-confidence, anxiety or other issues. And among these, overcoming anxiety is probably the number one challenge that many of them face.
So, not surprisingly, many clients are puzzled when I explain to them that I don't believe that a certain amount of anxiety is necessarily a bad thing.
I ask them to start thinking differently about anxiety. After all, if our ancestors didn't have a great deal of anxiety while living on the prairies of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, none of us would probably be here today. After all, if they weren't concerned about what predator might be lying in wait around the next rock or tree, they had a good chance of becoming some animals main course. Which meant that we would have died out as a species.
The problem today, though, is that we can still experience that high level of anxiety in our modern life. Are we going to get the job? Am I going to be able to pay the rent? Does my sweetheart still love me? Is that lump in my chest cancer? The fears go on and on, depending on our life experience or our age. Sometimes, our genetic legacy makes us react as if we're still living in the jungle and we overreact to our thoughts. And that overreaction can sometimes be overwhelming, causing us to lose sleep and engage in fantasies about all the dire things that might befall us.
One thing I suggest before and during hypnosis is that we learn to view our thoughts as just thoughts, and not as something so real that we have to act upon them. We need to learn to embrace our thoughts, to view them simply as natural reflections of our fears and concerns about the future. Not some enemy that's going to overwhelm us.
If we can learn to do that we'll find ourselves becoming calmer and more peaceful human beings.
