Think Happy!

If I told you that Mike Reeves-McMillan’s Changing Health Behaviours was a collection of his blog posts, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s just another sub-rate, self-published, collection of unconnected rants.

But you’d be completely wrong.

Mike, a hypnotherapist and health coach from New Zealand, has come up with a book that possesses a rare quality nowadays: it is actually worth reading! At the very least, the book presents tested, simple techniques of personal change as well as easy-to-follow information about how to become healthier and happier people. Much of the information here is nothing new. A lot of it is simple common sense. Yet, there is so much good information here, collected together in one place, accessibly written, than this is a book I will be recommending far and wide.

Although much of the content is based on material from Mike’s blog, Living Skillfully, the blog posts have been re-ordered, edited and made to flow as more of a whole. The book is accompanied by an MP3 CD of 20 hypnotherapy tracks, which include all of Mike’s Healthy Lifestyle and Transformation Skills recordings. The book and CD actually work surprisingly well together, with a section at the end of each chapter demonstrating which tracks to listen to in order to ‘help you make the shifts of thinking, feeling and behaviour’ that have been discussed in that chapter.

Initially, I thought that I wouldn’t get on with the CD, as I had expected Whale music and all of the other stereotypes associated with hypnosis/relaxation tracks, not just Mike’s voice. However, it is actually very effective, with my favourite track being the simple relaxation one. (Check out the Blue Sky induction and Blue Sea deepener. Excellent stuff!)

The sheer scope of this book is impressive. The first section deals with ‘Health Behaviours’ and starts with what Mike calls ‘the Big three’ : Being Smokefree, Eating Well, and Being Active. The material on smoking is some of the best that I have read in one place. He then moves on to ‘The Supporting Cast’ and discusses dealing with stress, getting good sleep, alcohol in moderation, and Positive Relationships. As someone who has suffered with insomnia, I can enthusiastically recommend the material on getting good sleep, along with the accompanying hypnotherapy track.

Section two discusses ‘Change Techniques’ and looks at Habit Change, Emotional Management, Change Planning and Execution and Self-Hypnosis. This section provides simple techniques to change your health behaviours for the better. A couple of my favourite techniques demonstrate both the simplicity and effectiveness of Mike’s writing:

1. One Simple Step Towards Managing Emotions

…What’s happening when we put our feelings into words? Matthew D. Lieberman and colleagues did a brain imaging study, reported in Psychological Science. They found that when participants in the study labeled the emotions they were feeling, it disrupted the activity of the amygdala (which isn’t a Star Wars princess but a part of the brain involved in emotion). The use of words activates a different part of the brain, and appears to shift the mental activity there, away from feeling the emotion.

The way that I show my clients to exploit this effect is based on Mary Mrozowski’s “welcoming prayer”, which isn’t actually a prayer at all. It’s simply a practice to use when you notice yourself feeling an emotion: saying “Welcome” and giving it a name – “Welcome, fear,” “Welcome, anger” or whatever the emotion might be.

In doing so, you are paying attention to the emotion – so it won’t go behind your back and manipulate you into doing something you may regret. You are accepting the emotion as being part of your conscious experience, which then enables you to let it go more easily. And you are naming the emotion, which brings into play the mechanism identified by Lieberman and his team.

I practice in the shower most mornings, when I’m relaxed, just welcoming the four main negative emotions – fear, anger, sadness and guilt. That way, when one of them comes along during the day, I’m in the habit of the welcoming practice and can immediately discharge a lot of the energy of the emotion.

2. A Simple Mood Control Technique and How it Works

One of the simplest and most powerful techniques in my hypnotherapy repertoire is anchoring, in which you associate a touch with a mental state or mood. Anyone can use this; it doesn’t even require hypnosis, though it will certainly be more powerful with hypnosis…

The easiest form of the technique is this: Imagine yourself as vividly as possible into the mental state or mood you want – calm, confidence or whatever you like. Start with a memory of being in that state, and make the memory big and bright, loud and clear, firm and strong; see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt, if there are smells or tastes include them too, and turn up the power on the memory as if you were adjusting the controls on a TV or radio.

You could use Michael Breen’s “nested images” technique to build it up even more strongly. Imagine yourself in the state as if you were looking at yourself from outside, and notice what you look like. Then mentally “step into” the image of yourself in that state so that it’s you who’s experiencing it. Once you’ve done this, imagine yourself from outside again experiencing the state even more strongly, and repeat until you are as deeply in the state as you can manage.

When you have the state or mood as clear as possible, and are experiencing it very strongly, touch your thumb to one of your fingers – it can be any one, though most people pick the forefinger – and press firmly for a few seconds.

You need to practice this a few times, but once you have done so, that mood or state is available to you at any time simply by using the thumb-and-finger press. Try it.

I’m sure that the first idea could sound a little wacky, if it’s the first time you’ve encountered this. However, it has a lot in common with practices like The Sedona Method, that many people find helpful for releasing negative emotions. (At this point, I’m tempted to use an analogy from Aikido, but I’ll save that for another time!)

As for the second, all I can say is that it really does work, as a number of people I’ve used this with can verify.

So, now I’ve got all of my gushing out of the way, are there any downsides to the book? Not many, actually! All I would say is that the editing and internal design could have done with a little more work. The Contents Page, for example, reeked of self-publishing and the sections within the chapters could have been spaced-out a bit better. But, hey, if that’s as bad as it gets then you know you’ve got a good book on your hands.

The Verdict

For anyone who wants to improve their health and lifestyle, but is cynical of much of the esoteric ‘fluff’ that passes for personal development these days, this book should be warmly welcommed. It does exactly what it says on the tin, offering practical advice on what a healthy lifestyle consists of and effective personal change techniques that enable you to begin to enjoy that lifestyle.

Would I recommend it? Well, the CD was great and surprisingly effective, for something so simple. The book is immensely useful and unceasingly practical. It includes a basic practical introduction to self-hypnosis…

I would more than recommend it! Trust me, you’re going to want to buy spare copies, some to give away and one to ensure that you’ve always got one for yourself.