Stoptober challenges smokers to stay smoke-free for 28 days, because the evidence behind the campaign shows that’s the single biggest predictor of being able to quit smoking for good. This article looks at how hypnotherapy can help you get there and what a session involves.

Every October, the same question lands in my inbox more than any other time of year: does hypnotherapy actually work for quitting smoking?

Smoking is one of the hardest habits to break, precisely because it isn’t just physical. Nicotine withdrawal fades within days. The habit, the association, the hand-to-mouth ritual built into a hundred small moments of your day, that’s what tends to outlast the...

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The start of the new year often invites reflection. We become more aware of habits we may want to change, whether around food, alcohol, screen use, work or other compulsive behaviours. With that awareness comes hope and intention, and the promise that this year, we might approach things differently. 

Initial motivation can carry us  forward at first. Overtime, however, familiar urges and habits resurface, and resolutions that felt compelling on January 1 can become increasingly difficult to sustain. When this happens,  it is common to experience  frustration or disappointment within oneself. 

When resol...

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As Christmas approaches, many of us begin to feel the familiar pull of old patterns resurfacing. Even when we have spent months or years building healthier rhythms, the festive season can stir emotions and memories that make us feel more vulnerable. Christmas often brings a mix of joy, pressure, nostalgia and expectation and this combination can quietly open the door to behaviours we have worked hard to move beyond.  

In this article, we will explore how hypnotherapy can support steadiness during the festive season by enhancing emotional regulation and offering practical tools for managing cravings and triggers. We will look at why relapse vulnerability tends to increase at this time of year,  as a response to heightened emoti...

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Over the last few days, former Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell has suggested that George Michael may have been tortured by a childhood secret that proved to be both the singer’s inspiration and his curse.

Michael was, of course, a global superstar, recognised as one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation. A string of bubblegum hits in the Eighties with Wham! made him the bedroom-wall-pin-up for teen girls – and some teen boys – around the world.

And as he outgrew the sockless deck shoes and coiffured highlights and forged a more contemporary image rendered in brooding charcoal and black and punctuated by goatees and designer shades, his songwriting became similarly substantial...

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“Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

Princess Diana, speaking to Martin Bashir for Panorama, November 1995

It was the interview she was never supposed to give. A candid airing of the Royal Family’s dirty laundry that the establishment had tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress and which effectively sealed Diana’s permanent exile from royal life.

The third person in her marriage to the Prince of Wales was, of course, the woman he would later marry, Camilla Parker-Bowles, the current Duchess of Cornwall.

Of course, Diana was by no means the first or last person ...

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Whether your view of human history is founded on Darwinism or doctrine, a common factor of man’s existence on Earth has been his almost obsessive need to fit in with his environment.

As social animals designed to co-exist in group, we are defined by elements that are as diverse as they are disparate. Blood, money, breeding, interest, appearance, education, profession and more are all part of our individual social DNA and determine our physical and mental behaviours.

And when we can’t fit in, two things generally happen. Either we modify our own behaviours to become more like the group we want to belong to; or we seek to mask our social discomfort by finding a different focus.

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I have a question for you, but before I ask it, I want you to picture the scene.

Imagine that every evening at 7pm you leave your house and take a 30-minute walk into town to the same bar. You sit in the same chair at the same table and you order the same drink, because it’s your favourite and it’s the only place for miles where you can buy it.

But the problem is that every night, at 9pm, a well-dressed and apparently normal guy walks into the bar, comes over to your table and punches you in the face.

This happens every night, every week, every month. Without fail.

My question is, would you stop going to th...

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“But the root of all these evils is the love of money, and there are some who have desired it and have erred from the faith and have brought themselves many miseries.” – First epistle of the Apostle Paul to Timothy

I find that quote from the New Testament intriguing; not because it is a religious text – each to their own on that score – but because it seems to me to be a metaphor for the power that material wealth can have on our emotional wellbeing.

The words the faith, for example, could easily be interpreted as a sense of morality or of right and wrong. And the notion that the desire for, and acquisition of, wealth can bring misery seems to me to have more tha...

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Life, it seems, has become an endless pursuit of perfection. The perfect partner, the perfect job, the perfect body, the perfect house, the perfect car, the perfect face. 

Except, of course, it’s never enough. No matter what we achieve, we keep redefining what we mean by perfection. Yet I’d argue that when we define perfection, we’re instead allowing ourselves to be defined by how we want to be seen by others.

This is certainly true of celebrities. The rock stars, film icons and sporting heroes who occupy the unrelenting attention of the world’s media live in a strange and terrifying alternate reality in which they are presented with an image of themselves and experience the suffocating ...

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In the late 1970s Bruce Alexander, a psychologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, developed a contentious hypothesis. In a global society which focused entirely on the role drugs played in addiction, Alexander looked instead at a different enemy: the environment.

At the risk of over-simplifying things, he believed drug use – and therefore addiction – was much less likely to be prevalent if people were given alternative choices to make. Unsurprisingly, the science community all but laughed at him.

But Alexander believed he was onto something and to prove it, he developed the Seduction Experiment based in something that came to be known as Rat Park.

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