Expect the best [3:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (159)

Someone tells you they want to speak to you. You’re quite positive it’s ‘bound to be bad’. When you think about the future, you see an inexorable and inevitable decline. You feel things won’t work out for you, that bad things are fixed and permanent but good things are fragile and likely to be very temporary. Our attitude affects outcomes - as witnessed by the huge power of the placebo response. But aren’t you just being ‘realistic’?

Expecting the best vs naivety

Many people try very hard to be realistic and objective about life, and given the number of scams out there waiting to catch you, this can be a very sensible approach. If you get an email telling you you’ve just won a lottery in Mexico, and you’ve never been to Mexico, far less bought a lottery ticket there, it’s probably safe to assume you can delete that email without even opening it.

But the problem is that being realistic and objective isn’t always so straightforward. Many people who think they are ‘realists’ can actually behave like pessimists. Which means they end up distrusting other people, being cynical about relationships, and ultimately letting opportunities pass them by. Or they manufacture negative self-fulfilling prophesies with the small compensation that they can tell themselves or others: ‘Well, what did I tell you!’

But it seems that teaching yourself to expect the best, or at least to expect the best for more of the time, can actually make you more open to ‘luck’ (and therefore more likely to expect the best, of course). How so?

Getting richer through learning to look

Professor Richard Wiseman carried out an experiment which shows just how much your attitude (expecting the best or worst) can affect your life. Wiseman took two groups of people, one who believed they were lucky - and expected the best - and another group who believed they were unlucky - people who expected the worst. He gave everyone a newspaper, and asked them to count how many pictures appeared in the paper. However, unknown to them, in every paper there was a big message printed on one of the pages saying “Stop counting and tell the experimenter you have seen this, and win £250.” Of the two groups, significantly more of the people who believed they were lucky saw this message.

What?

Luck and positive expectancy

Wiseman suggests that people who expect the best are both more relaxed and more open to opportunities. People who expect the worst tend to be more anxious and tense, which actually interferes with their ability to notice new information, and therefore new possibilities. And sometimes, allowing yourself to dream about utterly unrealistic possibilities, like what you would do if you had unlimited wealth, can produce very creative ideas that you can realistically put to use.

After all, when you think about it, so much of the last one hundred years would have seemed impossible to the skeptics along the way. People scoffed at the idea of television, ridiculed the notion of flying machines, and called the plan to travel to the moon pure science fiction. They were sure such crazy schemes would never work. But the people behind these innovations dared to believe. Thank goodness!

OK, so we are not all visionaries or inventors! However, by learning to expect the best more often we will enjoy life more, keep going, not give up and – as Wiseman demonstrated – literally see more opportunities.

The new hypnosis session for hypnosisdownloads.com seeks to build the capacity for positive expectation.

Here’s to a good future for one and all!

All the best

Mark

 Strengthen your immune system [6:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (244)

Your immune system is amazing. It consists of a wide and complex array of different defense mechanisms, all designed to keep you healthy or get you healthy; to keep you safe from those pesky microscopic invaders commonly known as ‘germs’.

Staying safe and well is a major purpose of all organisms. To do this, you need to be protected.

Your immune system: layers of protection

Firstly, there are many barriers, chemical and physical, which make up what we might call ‘body traps’ to prevent germs getting into the body. These include the skin and the mucous lining of your airways. Other defense mechanisms include coughing, vomiting sneezing and itching. Secondly, there are a whole host of specialist cells that actively attack germs, neutralizing or destroying them in the blood stream.

Microscopic door men

Germs that make into the blood stream may be engulfed by big white blood cells called phagocytes – which literally means ‘cell eaters’. These phagocytes are alerted when areas become infected. When your phagocytes attack germs, they engulf them in a pouch in their membrane. Once engulfed, the invading germ is broken down or digested by enzymes and the threat is neutralized - hence the term ‘cell eater’.

Intelligent, discerning door men

Actually, the story is more involved than this. Many germs are actually rather similar to harmless bacteria and even human body cells. So if your immune system was set up simply to wipe out all germs it might actually end up damaging the body itself. So your immune system has a series of weapons designed to target particular invaders. This is called your ‘adaptive immune system’. It is based on white blood cells, your lymphocytes, which roam through your blood and the lymph system looking for trouble.

There are two kinds – B-lymphocytes and T-lymphocytes. Your B cells use antibodies to target bacteria such as cholera and your T cells are more important in the war against viruses. But your immune system is even cleverer than this!

For example, there are thousands of different B cells circulating in the blood, each armed with antibodies against a particular germ. But there are only a handful of each until a particular enemy is identified. If this ever happens (you might be lucky and never encounter that disease) they multiply dramatically at once and release hordes of the right antibodies. Some of your B cells are called ‘memory cells’, which go on multiplying even after the germ has been vanquished. So if the germ returns, there are antibodies ready and waiting for it. Pretty remarkable.

Your immune system - hunting out and neutralizing the threat

Many germs, like viruses and parasites, try to hide inside or take over body cells. It is the task of your T cells to identify and destroy these invading cells. There are two types of T cells in your body: so called ‘killer cells’ and ‘helper cells’. Helpers are the cells that find and identify the invaded cells and send out the alarm. Killer T cells are the special forces, the ones which move in and destroy the invaders.

Stress and immunity

Stress has been found to weaken the immune system, so deep relaxation -even without the hypnotic element of the new Strengthen your immune system hypnosis download for hypnosisdownloads.com – will itself still have major benefits if enjoyed regularly.

More specifically, hypnosis can actually strengthen the disease fighting capability of these two types of immune cells I’ve been talking about (1). It’s going to be fascinating to see what positive impacts listening to this session is going to have for people.

All the best

Mark

Note

(1) Hypnosis strengthens the disease-fighting capacity of two types of immune cells, reports Patricia Ruzyla-Smith and her co-workers at Washington State University in Pullman. Thirty-three college students who achieved a hypnotic trance easily and 32 who had great difficulty doing so were recruited for the study. Students who underwent hypnosis displayed larger jumps in two important classes of white blood cells than participants who received relaxation or no method.

Ruzyla-Smith, Patricia et al. (1993). As reported at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.

 Enjoy paperwork sample [2:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (363)

OK, I admit it. Shock! Horror! Paperwork is not my favorite activity.

And if it were, I’m not sure what that would say about my personality… But leaving that aside, we’d better face it, success partly depends on continually doing things that don’t seem to offer immediate rewards or satisfactions.

Some people find just about everything boring and unappealing. It’s a huge disadvantage in life to only ever be prepared to do stuff that we feel like doing. Imagine if people only exercised or went to work when they felt like it! Sometimes whether we feel like doing something or not is irrelevant – and anyway it is possible to learn to get subtler satisfactions from things we had no idea we could enjoy.

‘Boring’ is in the eye of the beholder

Of course, paperwork can seem dull and it’s all too easy to procrastinate. There are a hundred and one more attractive activities than form filling, for instance, but there are practical as well as emotional rewards for completing chores that need to be done. And the interesting thing is that boring and tedious is ‘in the eye of the beholder’. Having done something you had to do but weren’t particularly excited about can make you feel great later on.

Paperwork - enjoy anything

There are people who are literally thrilled by old coin collections, and people who spend hours poring over antique baseball cards. What’s satisfying and interesting is really just a question of perspective.

People who dislike paperwork often tell themselves how awful and boring it is while they’re doing it – and then – surprise! surprise! – that’s the experience they have. But boring and awful are judgments, opinions, not facts. And just because an activity is quite repetitious doesn’t mean you can’t find very real ways to take pleasure in it. In fact, once you focus and become absorbed, what seems boring to others can become compelling and even fascinating.

Hypnosis and paperwork

So with this in mind we at hypnosisdownloads.com have put together a new hypnotic session Enjoy paperwork because, unlikely as it might seem, when you can become enjoyably absorbed in paperwork your whole life can improve.

Mark

 Overcome indecision [2:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (584)

Should I do this…? Or maybe I should do that? Mmm, but then I will be missing out on this! What shall I do? What if I make the wrong decision…? I just can’t decide. Maybe I just won’t do anything for the time being - that might be ‘safer’. Well, they say: ‘No decision is a decision – but what if you just can’t decide? What if indecision is taking over your life?

Reasons for chronic indecision

Overcoming indecision is about dealing with the stress of an overactive imagination. Why do I say that? Anxiety can make us imagine that there is only one exactly right decision and that all other decisions are potentially disastrous. This is true in some spheres of life, of course. The decision to jump out of the way of a fast approaching car is pretty straight forward. But in many many cases there are ‘degrees of rightness’. If we always feel we must wait for absolute certainty (which anxiety will prevent you from feeling anyway), then decisions just don’t get made. Much of life is not black or white and there are seldom completely ‘right or wrong’ decisions. When we become calmer we begin to see the subtler shades in life. But what else causes indecision?

Indecision: The painful art of putting things off

Sometimes it’s not just about overcoming fear, but also overcoming laziness and procrastination: ‘Why make a decision today when you can make one tomorrow…? Except maybe you don’t!

Of course, there are problems with this approach too. Not only do you often let opportunities pass you by, because you weren’t sure enough to seize them, but you end up draining yourself of energy. Indecision, being stuck, is a very energy consuming state.

Decisions: Problems to cause worry or the mother of opportunity?

Many people experience a constant flow of thoughts and what ifs bubbling up in their minds, because your brain treats a decision as an unsolved problem, and it’s trying its hardest to work towards a solution. But having a decision to make is also an opportunity for creativity and positive change. The new hypnosis download for hypnosisdownloads.com is called Overcome indecision. There is so much information in the world that it’s easy to lose our way amidst a jungle of facts, opinions, ideas and news. When the mind becomes calm it also becomes clearer. The aim of our download is to give people the chance to clear their minds and calm their anxieties so they can relax around making decisions.

All the best

Mark