It’s a podcast! Or … whatever we want to call it.
Some of you remember I had an AM radio show for years and when it got picked up by a couple of syndication networks they required weekly content and in 2017 I just got burned out and put the whole thing on hiatus for awhile. You can still find many of my old radio show episodes here, with all their glorious production quality, LOL!
This is something a bit different. Something from me to you. Answering questions I get asked by clients and in consultations in a shorter format that I want to be both informative and useful for you.
Now, this is episode 1 if you will. I don’t even have a name for this “podcast” yet. No great production values, no intro music. Right now it’s just me talking to you.
In this episode I talk about how many issues can you work with in hypnosis at a time? Last month I received a lovely video testimonial from April after she successfully resolved her lifelong sleep issues, stopped smoking and lost 10 pounds all in the space of 5 hypnosis sessions. It raises questions, so let’s dig in and get ’em answered!
(P.S., you can either listen to this podcast, it’s about 14 minutes long, or read the transcript below.)
Studies on the relationship between sleep and learning:
New Insights on Sleep and Learning
How Sleep After Learning Enhances Memory
How the Mind Learns During Sleep
My email (contact me with ideas for this show!) cindylocher AT minnesotahypnosis.com
Prior program about sleep mentioned in the podcast can be found here: https://redcircle.com/shows/cindylocher6643
Podcast Episode Transcript
Hello! This is Cindy Locher of ChangeWorks Hypnosis and HypnosisFirst.com. Welcome to my little show-slash-podcast!
Last week I posted a nice video with a testimonial from April. April came in looking for help with a lifelong issue with sleep, and ended up resolving that super quickly and then going on to stop smoking and lose 10 pounds — all within 5 hypnosis sessions.
April got a 3-fer, what’s up with that?
How come you told me in our consultation I should only work on one issue at a time unless they’re related? April did sleep, smoking and weight loss in the same program successfully – how are those related?
GREAT questions!
First yes, the “rule” is not to overwhelm the SCM by working on multiple unrelated goals at the same time. Work on one goal, until you have traction on that goal and feel like you’ve made good progress before starting to work on another, unrelated goal.
The example I usually give in a consultation when this comes up is we don’t want to work on your smoking cessation, and becoming a master gardener, and improving your bowling scores all at once. You’ll overwhelm your SCM and dilute your results and end up getting pretty much nowhere.
However, that’s not what happened with April. Two things in play and I’m going to talk about each of them.
First, those goals were not unrelated in her mind. They came under the umbrella of “take better care of myself and get healthy.” Etc….
Second, the fact that sleep was her first goal is very important. In fact if April had come to me and said I want to work on these three things and I want to work on smoking first, or weight loss first, I would have worked with her to re-prioritize things and put sleep first.
Why? Because sleep is sooooooo important. So let’s talk about sleep baby!…..
— Sleep gives you the energy you need to make changes. It’s hard to do something different when you feel like crap. The SCM loves routine and same-ness, so if you want to start doing something differently you need to be sleeping well, both to support the neurology of new learning and to have the energy to make new choices.
As an example let me tell you about Nick. Nick was a client of mine way back in 2008. ….
NICK’s STORY Nick came to see me in the summer of 2008. His parents actually contacted me from Pennsylvania. Nick was 34 years old and morbidly obese and depressed as you might imagine. They told me they’d tried everything and hypnosis was their last hope. Nick drove to the Twin Cities from Mankato to see me, so a couple hours drive. When he arrived for his first appointment I could tell there was something wrong but I wasn’t sure what. He was a bit gray and glassy eyed. I had him come in and we started on our consultation, and I asked a lot of questions like I always do. He had gained weight as a result of having a double hip replacement surgery. He had been a minor league hockey player and the pain in his hips and then recovery from the surgery had left him unable to be active like he always had been, which led to both depression and weight gain. Nick needed to lose about 150 pounds. When I asked him about his sleep, he said he only slept 2.5 hours a night. And nothing he’d done had helped, not prescriptions or anything. I said in order to get you losing weight we have to get you sleeping, and he said his doctor had said the same thing but nothing had helped. So we focused that first session on sleep. Nick went into hypnosis like a champ, and I did some direct questioning techniques to reveal why Nick’s subconscious mind wasn’t letting him get more than 2.5 hours of sleep every night. Nick lifted his finger to indicate he had received an answer and I asked him to speak out loud and he said he had an answer but didn’t understand it. His answer was “because I’m afraid I might die.” Turns out Nick also had a CPAP machine because of the weight, and his subconscious knew that he stopped breathing in his sleep. It didn’t trust or understand the CPAP machine so basically it was letting him get just enough sleep to not die from lack of sleep, but not to sleep any more than that to minimize the risk of dying in his sleep from not breathing. We did some further work to help his mind accept and understand the CPAp and that it was safe to sleep. This is, at least 80% of the time, the issue with adult insomnia — that in some way the subconscious feels it isn’t safe to sleep, or that it’s safer not to. There is a little bit of a difference there. Anyway, if you’re interested in learning more about that I’ll leave a link below to a program I did specifically on that a couple years ago.
After that session and Nick’s mind’s acceptance that it was OK for him to sleep, he slept 7 or 8 hours a night from then on, starting THAT night. With the extra energy he had he was able to start eating right and riding his bike every day (something that didn’t hurt his hips) and he started to lose 5 pounds a week, every week. After we wrapped up our work together he got hired by the Colorado parks department and moved to take his new job, which he had been on disability when we started working together, so that was great!
A real success story for a number of reasons but all the success Nick had with losing weight, lifting his depression and seeing his waking blood sugar numbers go down from 315 on the morning of our first session to 135 on the morning of our last — all of those benefits could not have happened without good sleep.
So, that’s one reason why sleep needs to come first when there are multiple related goals, or even unrelated goals is that you need the energy that only sleep can provide to feel up to doing things differently.
I work a lot with h.s. and college athletes, usually a nerve thing, a balk, etc. and I always find out how are they sleeping? And if they aren’t sleeping well we talk about prioritizing their sleep and why that’s important to making the change they want to make and often with kids that age we have to make some conscious changes to what is called sleep hygiene — don’t take that cell phone to bed with you, go to bed at the same time each night, have a routine, etc. Tough stuff when you’re that age, apparently!
Another reason why getting good sleep is critical to making ANY change, related or not, is that while you sleep is when your brain and mind make the changes, both psychologically and neurologically, to bring your goal into reality. It’s while you sleep that you code in learning. Just google it if you don’t believe me.
There have been loads of studies done on the importance of sleep to learning, and that means any kind of learning, whether it’s algebra or grooving in a change in your golf swing. Essentially it boils down to the fact that the new neurological connections that support learning —whether it’s book learning or physical learning — are created while you’re sleeping. I could go into more detail on this but for today I’ll just link to a couple of studies about sleep and learning beneath this podcast.
So getting good sleep, while always important, is especially important while you’re actively trying to learn something, and making a change IS a learning process.
What happens then is that your sleep spindle (stage 2 ) sleep increases — that means you have more dreams. Dreams are your minds way of processing things. Of closing down programs, if you will, that no longer apply due to the changes, and starting up and building up programs that support the new learning. Whether or not you remember your dreams, you’re having them. You rarely remember dreams from the middle of the night because there is not a brainwave bridge into consciousness. But those are really the most important dreams in locking in learning and change. I’ll post links to a few studies below.
So by working on getting good quality sleep first, April gave herself what she needed to make those other changes. It felt seamless to her, because she’s already been doing what’s called “pre-conscious processing” on those additional changes for some time. She was READY for them, she just needed to be getting good sleep to have the energy and the facility to code the change into her neurology which happens when you sleep.
So there you have it. If you’ve been trying to make a change but it’s just not sticking, hey, how’s your sleep? If it’s not good, get that squared away first, then making that change will be more successful. We have such good success with sleep issues that Fairview Sleep Center actually invited us out to talk with them a couple years ago, and they refer their patients to us when they can’t resolve the issue. Because really if a sleep issues doesn’t respond well to either prescriptions or a CPAP or BiPap machine they’re kind of stuck, that’s what they do.
I work with all types of sleep issues and you can find other testimonials and case histories around the website that give you an idea of what’s possible to resolve with hypnotherapy.
That’s it for today, except for this — I had an AM radio show for 7 years, broadcast out of KDWA in Hastings, MN and then for a couple of years it was syndicated in 165 countries on 3 different syndication networks, which required me to produce a 1 hour show every week which was ….ugh. Seriously, that burned me out and so I’ve been off the air for a couple of years now.
I am rebooting and reimagining my show as a podcast. That way if I have 15 minutes worth of info to share, I can do that. If it’s a half hour, fine. If I want to throw in a full-blown hypnosis session I can, which I couldn’t do when I was going over FCC airwaves.
SOOO…I need your help. What should I call this podcast? The old show was Hypnosis Today with Cindy Locher, then when it went into syndication it was the Hypnotic Radio Hour.
But what do you think? I’m open to new creative names and ALSO to what do you want me to talk about?
I will not promise a frequency at this point. To start out it might be a bit sporadic, we’ll see. I’m thinking something every couple of weeks, and about this length, about 15 minutes or so. Let me know if that’s a good length for you guys!
Please shoot me an email at cindylocher AT minnesotahypnosis.com, I’ll put that in the text below. I would put up a contact form but I’m having to take those down off of all my websites, they are just getting spammed like crazy, so anymore they’re just worthless. I wish all these spammers and scammers would do something productive for the world with their energy!!!
Anyhoooo… I wish you all the best in the coming days and weeks and I’ll be talking to you again real soon! Blessings!
