Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

I don’t usually repost magazine articles unless there is a viable study exploring some aspect of neurology or psychology or whatever, but I found this article interesting on several counts.  Not necessarily in a good way.  I always irks me a little when reporters who don’t understand their subject make overly broad or vague pronouncements…

I have SO much anxiety.  I’m tense, worried, always thinking about what will go wrong and how I’ll mess up or what I did wrong in the past and how likely I am to do something wrong again.  It’s not anything specific.  It’s just everything. Even the simplest things can seem overwhelming.  My upper back…

We’re all familiar with optical illusions and those “find the hidden faces” puzzles.  They’re fun when you know that you’re being challenged to see things differently.  What if you could live your entire life that way?   Of all the input you’re receiving every moment, the little bit you notice is regulated by just one…

My daughter found her bliss at age 9.  From that day forward, she KNEW what she wanted.  And there I was, slogging my way through parenthood and jobs, supposedly leading her along a path that didn’t even exist for me.  When people asked me what I would do if there absolutely no restrictions on me, I…

Do you want to know the single most important thing you can do to create magic in your life?  Well, okay.  Two.  Two things.  1.) Meditate for 10 minutes every morning.  2.) Do the next right thing.  That’s it.  That’s the formula.  So here’s what it looks like in practical reality: You get up, have…

It’s really not much of a secret, sorry.  It’s just plain, old-fashioned discipline.   I know, I know.  That’s such an ICKY word.  We are frankly conditioned to equate “discipline” with boredom, drudgery, pain, and pretty much everything we don’t like.  The real secret is in learning how to make discipline easy, enjoyable, and even…

Did you know that you can turn pain signals OFF without chemical analgesics or anesthetics?   It’s true.  Surgeons around the world have been demonstrating this fact for centuries.  Here in the west, hypnotic anesthesia has been studied and documented by the medical profession since at least the 1850’s.  As chemical anesthetics were developed they were…

It seems that 66% of Americans are reporting high levels of stress over the “future of our country,” with only slightly smaller groups reporting unusual stress over other, more specific political issues. [1]  That’s 2/3 of Americans feeling the effects of stress specific to an election.  Keep in mind that the effects of stress are…

What two simple things can you do to boost learning, recall, attention, and overall cognitive performance?  1.) Get more sleep.  2.) Develop a daily self-hypnosis routine. The neuroscience is clear on the sleep issue.  But we’re only just beginning to understand what is happening in the brain when we sleep.  Studies have shown that we…

Did you know that your body is responding to every single thought that you have?  A 1992 study published in the Journal of Neurophysics showed that people who simply thought about exercising a finger on their left hand every day showed a 22% increase in strength using ONLY mental imagery.  The group that actually exercised…

I recently saw a sign that said “NO Negative Thoughts Allowed” and was instantly irked.  First off, that’s an incredibly negative message.  Whose face are you slamming the door on?  What’s up with all the NO/NOT/NONE stuff?  And let’s just stop right there because there is no need to dwell on all of the negativity…

So here’s the post I promised you yesterday, and it’s a practice that will CHANGE YOUR LIFE.  But you can’t just read about it and call it done.  You have to actually DO it.  WEEK ONE: Make a daily practice of just writing out the gratitude list every day for a week, looking for things…

HAPPY NEW YEAR!  If you’re like most people, you do have a list of resolutions.  You may mentally throw your hands up in defeat just thinking about it, but you’ve got a few things you’d like to see happen.  And we’ve got a few easy mind tricks to help you get past the past and…

You actually have two blind spots in your visual field; the places where the optic nerve attaches to the retina produce two black spots in your vision.  But you don’t notice them because your brain very kindly “fills in” the missing information with whatever it expects to see.  In the same way, even as you…

There’s been a lot of controversy over the years about the value of hypnosis in “recovering” lost memories, so let’s have a look at what we actually know about memory. While it’s certain that you DO retain memories that didn’t make it all the way to conscious awareness, it’s also certain that the unconscious mind…

“Some people tell us the motivation doesn’t last.  Neither does bathing, that’s why we recommend it daily.”   Zig Ziglar  There’s actually an easy way to maintain your motivation, and to keep it active your whole life long.  Just as the opening bars of a favorite song can evoke feelings of romance or nostalgia, anchors…

I wish I could remember who published the study that I read some years back about the body language of successful people.  At the time, it was a mere curiosity to me, a little blip on the radar that I filed away for my personal use.  But the gist of it was this:  There was…

If I recall the story correctly, it was in the late 1950’s that a famous hypnotist named Dave Elman had an unusual experience with a chronic pain patient.  Dave became a hypnotist because his own father’s pain from terminal cancer was alleviated by a travelling hypnotist, and so he built his own career around medical…

Here’s a thing we talk about a LOT in business and abundance coaching:  Your Money or Your Life?  It’s one or the other.  I know a guy who spent WEEKS doing his own taxes because he didn’t want to pay $300 for something he could do himself.  He *hates* doing his taxes.  He’s not good…

I once had a client who told me that she suffered from an anxiety disorder that was disrupting her entire life.  I told her that anxiety disorders  are medical diagnoses  I’m not qualified to make or treat, but I’d happy to chat with her.  So I asked about the times and places where she seemed…

The quickest way to help a conversational partner feel understood is to just give their words back to them exactly as they stated them. Do NOT paraphrase. Just use the words they used, in the sequence they used them.  We are often advised to respond by paraphrasing the speaker’s statement in order to make people…

Who would you BE without that chronic, nagging pain?  It’s a legitimate question and you SHOULD answer it.   The truth is that there is not simply a “connection between” mind and body.  The body and mind are continually informing one another; creating a dialogue.  The mind sends out the neurotransmitters and hormones that CREATE…

We’ve done it!  We’ve isolated the strategies that made the biggest difference for our most successful quitters, and optimized them for an at-home program that anyone can use!    The Smoke-Free for LIFE! program uses the same hypnotic techniques we use in our in-office sessions.  Plus, we include 6 tapes you can use independently to…

When a relationship becomes toxic, we often feel helpless to detach from that person and move on with our lives in a healthy and self-loving way.  We say “But I still love him/her,” and that is a powerful motivation to maintain and attempt to “fix” the relationship.  We have a major investment.  That’s what keeps…

In a nutshell, Neurolinguistic Programming is a system of behavioral tools that you can use to make practical changes in your life.  Right now.   NLP is a set of tools aimed at discovering – not WHY you came to use certain strategies to manage conflict and stress – but WHAT those strategies actually are…

This is an actual conversation I recently had with a young friend: Me: “So… just ‘being happy’ is not really a goal.  A goal has a measurable outcome.  And no one is happy all the time.  So how will you know when you’re successful?”  J: “I don’t even know what success looks like for me. …

There’s a popular belief floating around that we should not have “negative” emotions.  It’s patently untrue, and I can prove it.   Do you HAVE negative thoughts and emotions?  Of course you do.  If they are there, then they SHOULD be there. Simple. They’re not bad.  They are a part of your experience, and they…

When you were a baby, there were only two things you feared: loud noises and falling.   That’s it.   Every other fear is LEARNED.  Therefore, every other fear can be UNLEARNED.   The truth is that our neurology is set up to recognize patterns, generalize, predict, and protect us from harm. We’d be in…

Quitting smoking is a major life change.  Like getting married or starting a new job, it deserves the same thought, care, and preparation.   The truth is that smokers have inadvertently anchored themselves to many, many signals to smoke over the years. Smell is a powerful sense that is located in the primitive brain.  The same…

There are no failures.  There are only results.   I know that sounds horribly condescending when you’ve suffered a blow to the ego and all that self-doubt has come flooding in like a tidal wave.  But the fact is that the most successful people you’ll ever meet have known failure on an epic scale.   So…

I know I’ve said it before, but it really can’t  be overstated:  Successful people don’t wait until everything is perfect. They know that their product, service, or teaching will NEVER be perfect, so they course-correct as they go along.  When they’ve got a good idea, they RUN with it.   That’s not to say that…

Don’t believe everything you hear.  Even if it’s inside your own head.  Studies have shown that we engage in self-talk roughly 50,000 times a day.  Unfortunately, 80% of that chatter is devastatingly negative.  It consists of self-deprecating statements that we don’t really question.  They just play in the background all day long; a nearly endless…

We’ve all heard that one before, right?  If I tell you not to think of an elephant, you HAVE TO think of an elephant.   You can’t make any sense of my statement otherwise.  I’d just be making mouth noises at you.  So an image of an elephant emerges in your mind and you understand…

Let’s face it – we ALL know that person who has an objection to EVERYTHING.  No matter what positive suggestions or observations you make, they’ve got a reason why it isn’t so great.  That LBG (Little Big Word) “but” negates whatever precedes it, and seems to absolve the speaker of criticism – at least in…

One of the best things about an Excellent Question is that you don’t have to answer it.  You only have to ask it.   Here are some examples of Excellent Questions:  How else can I _________________? Who do I know who might be able to help me with ________________?  What else can I do to…

Forgiveness is not something you do for someone else. It’s how you release yourself from the energy of your own unwelcome emotions.  Oftentimes, we manage anger, hurt, fear, and resentment by shunting it off to the side.  We put it in the “Later” file and promise ourselves we’ll just “get over it” and “move on.”…

The secret to success is simply to take action EVERY DAY. Do you want to know why people get “stuck”? They think it has to be a BIG action. It doesn’t. It just has to be an action. One thing.  Those small, daily actions turn into massive payoffs over time. Here’s a list of actions…

If you’re not getting the answers you want, you’re asking the wrong questions.   I wish I could remember where I first heard of The Excellent Questions, but it was back in the days of index cards and post-it notes as daily reminders of affirmations.   I had already learned that posting affirmations all over…

So often I hear self-talk that boils down to “I can’t do it,” whatever “it” might be.   Most of us experience a nearly reflexive desire to move right into a cheerleader role whenever we hear someone express their futility and hopelessness with “I can’t,” and some of us even BAN the statement and chastise…

Richard Bandler, co-creator of NeuroLinguistic Programming, once said that he was often asked if he ever had difficulty getting people into trance, and his answer was that he did not, but he DID sometimes have trouble getting people OUT of the trances they were already in.   The truth of the matter is that we…

How often have you walked away from a disagreement thinking “Just believe whatever you want, I’m done!” and wondering how anyone could be so stubbornly wrong?  The truth is that beliefs have nothing to do with facts.  So you were right.  People believe what they want.  And often believe what they don’t want as well.…

Psychology wants to know WHY a person becomes the way they are.  The idea is that insight produces change.  Unfortunately, in most cases it doesn’t produce anything but insight. I don’t really need to know HOW you became the way you are.  There’s nothing wrong with the way you are.  You are not broken.  In…

What if you could alter a memory?  In fact, you can.  This fascinating TED talk provides a glimpse into the cutting edge neuroscience that supports what we in NLP have known for decades: memory is quite malleable.  Every thought has a LOCATION in the brain.  Every thought has a biochemical signature that causes a chain…

There’s NO reason to wait.  Hypnosis for smoking cessation is easily THE most cost-effective choice you can make, AND IT WORKS!    Why?  Because each smoker has a REASON for smoking, and there is always a positive intention behind the behavior.  Getting to the subconscious reason for the behavior allows us to literally reprogram the conscious…

If you doubt the benefits of meditation, here’s your proof:  Harvard University researchers conducted a 2011 study that finally proved that the structural changes in the brain that were believed to be the result of meditation were in fact the result of meditation and not merely random occurrences.  Short version:Significant increases in gray matter in…

Let’s face it – EVERYONE wants to feel better, but few of us know how to do that right NOW.  And the truth is counter-intuitive, to be sure.  We all know the value of “positive thinking” and it’s true – happy, uplifting thoughts do GREAT things for your body, relationships, productivity, and general health and…

FULL DISCLOSURE NOTICE:  I am NOT a psychologist.  Nor do I wish to be a clinical psychologist or psychotherapist.  And I’ll tell you why:  Therapists, by definition, have a stated goal of restoring people to health.  In other words, they “fix” people who aren’t “healthy”.  That’s not what I do.  I don’t approach my work…

Before something happens, something always happens.  Tony Robbins just PERFECTLY demonstrates what hypnotists have always known about stuttering:  There was a time when that person did NOT stutter.  And then something happened.  Whatever happened, there was a moment when that person felt a need to speak and an equal and opposing need to be silent. …

Okay, so that’s NOT what we’d tell a friend who is suffering the pain of romantic or social rejection.  But it DOES have a solid scientific basis.  Researchers at UCLA did a study in 2011 that showed that when people were subjected to physical pain OR recalled emotionally painful events  under fMRI, the same pain-processing…

What’s the  *real* secret to happiness?  Acceptance.  Remembering that “acceptance” does not mean you have to LIKE something is the first key to developing a healthy acceptance muscle.   Make that distinction.   There are many things will happen, have happened, and ARE happening that are not to your liking.  Some of them are merely annoying or…