Anyone who has read the articles which I write will know that I am ever grateful for the fact that we human beings have the ability to use the state of hypnosis. Hypnosis helps a person to do so many things. For me it is the foundation from which one should do any type of self-help work. Why so? Because everything you experience in life depends upon the way in which you think about it.

Hypnosis is a state of relaxation which means that you are in a position to think clearly. When you are stressed, angry, anxious or in any way emotionally over-wrought you just cannot think clearly; it is impossible for you to think logically when your emotional mind has taken over. Believe you me, your emotional mind does take over; it goes so far as to bypass the higher cortical regions of your brain - the logical thinking part. You HAVE to be relaxed to enable clarity of thought and a logical decision making process.

With hypnosis you can learn to relax at will and therefore put yourself into a position where you can think clearly and help yourself to do whatever it is you want to do. The relaxation in itself is great for every human being. Being stressed affects one both mentally and physically, to such an extent that it not only has the potential to destroy ones quality of life, but can also knock up to seven years off your life. Hypnosis is a natural and normal state of relaxation in which you can take a break from stress and give your mind and body a mini-holiday.

Do you not agree that this is indeed a great place in which to start your journey into the sphere of self-help? You may have decided that you are going to seek the assistance of CBT or acupuncture, or any of the whole gamut of both complementary therapies and main stream medicine, but all of these benefit from you being relaxed and positive in your outlook. Every GP or surgeon, counselor or therapist of any description, will agree that a relaxed patient or client is a better patient or client. These professionals will also agree that a person who is positive in outlook and expectations will also achieve far better results.

In fact, research shows that the average effect of placebo in treatment is about 35%. Indeed it can vary from 15% to 50%. With hypnosis you can use positive suggestion to ensure that you are positive in your expectancy and therefore far more likely to respond well to your treatment. What you expect to happen does indeed tend to happen. The placebo response is the effect of one's expectations, be they conscious or subconscious. You can choose to use hypnosis to embed in your mind an expectancy of success.

There really is nothing like hypnosis for creating a great foundation for self-help. It is the "great grand-daddy" of self-help. I have only scratched the surface here in the ways in which hypnosis can help you to help yourself.

What's more is that hypnosis is easy to learn and easy to use. You can learn to use hypnosis simply by listening to a hypnosis recording. Like most other things in life, you also get better at it with practice. You can get a hypnosis cd or mp3 download and listen to it again and again and keep on benefitting from the natural relaxation response and the effect of positive suggestions sinking deep within your psyche. This of course is also a very cost effective form of self-help.

Roseanna Leaton, specialist in hypnosis recordings for self-help.