Subconscious work for IBS

Early in my health coaching career, I noticed that people’s perceptions, thoughts and beliefs had the biggest impact on how they healed.

Most people don’t like to discuss mindset, psychology or emotions when addressing their digestive crisis. Even when they know that fear or anxiety is taking a toll, they rather focus on dialing in the details of their protocol and getting their treatment exactly right.

But striving for the perfect protocol and trying to control and worry about every detail can backfire by spiking stress and disturbing the nervous system. This leads to over researching and living in doubt. Which makes things worse.

Perfectionism around healing comes from a deep lack of faith, and is one of the most important mindset shifts to work on.

What are personality traits and why are they important?

There’s a common IBS personality. My clients tend to be anxious, perfectionistic and sensitive (on a nervous system level). These personality traits are not a coincidence. The combination of these traits create the perfect conditions for gut troubles.

Personality traits are just strategies that were developed when we were children to survive in an unpredictable and potentially dangerous world. Early on, certain strategies worked for us. For example, being tough, a people pleaser, friendly, shy, closed off, funny, helpless…these strategies created good results when we were children so we kept them as adults. But things change drastically as we mature, so things that protected us back then can harm us now.

These strategy were adopted before the age of 8 and often don’t work for us as adults. They are so ingrained and automatic that we don’t question them.

The good news is that these strategies can be changed with awareness. The fact that they are subconscious makes it a bit challenging, but there are ways to gain awareness of our subconscious childhood strategies so we can consciously change them.

One of the ways to do it (there are many) is hypnosis. This is one of the best ways to connect to the subconscious mind to overcome things like fears, resistance, self sabotage, blind spots and lack of discipline.

Why work with the subconscious?

Hypnosis is one of the best and quickest ways I’ve found to access the subconscious, where personality traits and perceptions are stored and protected.

Even when it’s below our subconscious awareness, these early childhood programs still run our lives. While it determines the actions we take, the thoughts we think or the way we see the world, we are not aware of what is driving this. What is the program or belief underneath?

Hypnosis is a way to get out minds out of autopilot. In hypnosis we slow down the brain waves from beta brain waves to alpha brain waves, and we are better able to connect with our subconscious mind and emotions.

Some of my subconscious programs kept me stuck in a loop of digestive distress years ago, until I slowed downed and changed the way I saw and did life.

I have always used my anxiety as a motivator to get things done, but it was counterproductive when it came to repairing my IBS symptoms and underlying gut health.

By editing your subconscious mind to something that will serve you, the nervous system and immune system will also be strengthened. The mind and the body is closely connected. This is why subconscious work is the best preventative medicine.

How to work with the subconscious

The subconscious mind has one aim. To help us survive with the least harm possible. It is over protective, like a well meaning, but highly confused parent trapped inside of us.

The subconscious mind will prevent us from doing anything that may make us feel vulnerable (physically or emotionally) or humiliated. The subconscious hates change or attempts at self improvement. It want to keep things the same even if it keeps us trapped in misery. Our happiness is not important to the subconscious mind, only our protection and survival matters.

Even new positive changes may be seen as risky to the status quo. That is why changing is so hard.

One example of how this protective mechanism can go wrong is creating a stomach ache to keep us home from work or school when we’re super nervous about a presentation or test. It is safer to be home with a tummy ache than risk being humiliated at school or work. Humiliation carries the risk of being ostracised from the tribe and thousands of years ago that spelled death.

This is not a great strategy and you’re probably not aware that your subconscious came up with it, but you may also begin to associate stomach aches with safety and relief.

When our strategies are unconscious, our choice is taken away. A conscious goal or intention (like healing our body) can be sabotaged by a competing subconscious desire to stay safe, get attention or have control.

To align all of us behind one goal, we need to bring the subconscious and the conscious mind on board. Otherwise we have our feet on the brake and gas at the same time. Not only are we going nowhere but we may do some damage in the process.

To be in full alignment with our goal we have to make the subconscious conscious.

By surfacing subconscious programs, thoughts, perceptions, and emotions, we decide if we want to replace them with better strategies.

While the subconscious resists change, it can be gently coaxed into a new and better strategy with repetition and conscious awareness. The subconscious does not have as much power over us if it is conscious. We finally get to take the blindfold off and see what is really going on.

While safety is very important to most of us, we also want freedom and free choice. We wan to learn, grow and discover. To follow our heart’s desire.

When that’s challenging, subconscious programming is to blame. And it can be gently changed and let go through realization, repletion of new thoughts and the action that comes of it. With new action, we slowly build confidence in a new way of being that feels better.

Here are examples of common subconscious programs that stop my client’s progress.

“What if I am doing it wrong?”

“What if it’s doesn’t work?”

“What if I feel like this forever?”

“What if I am broken and can’t heal?”

These thoughts put the brake on healing progress.

Underneath them are beliefs that nothing works, healing is impossible, I am helpless, suffering never ends….

Your subconscious mind is also your emotional mind. And emotions are just physical reactions or sensations in the body. If you felt any physical reactions/sensations as you read this post, this is your subconscious mind responding to the truth.

The good news is that your darkest fears and beliefs are not true. They are just protective strategies adopted when you were too young to know what life is really like and who you really are. You can pick a different set of beliefs based on your current life experience.

How to work with beliefs to unblock progress

The first step is to surface YOUR unique belief.

An example can be that you believe you are fundamentally flawed and unlovable or that you don’t deserve to be healthy.

Bringing awareness to the belief will weaken it. So it will be less likely to secretly hijack your dreams, goals and intentions.

We connect to the subconscious mind and bring awareness to its beliefs and programs by getting into a very relaxed state. This is what hypnosis does.

Hypnosis slows down brain waves through progressive relaxation techniques.

We go in an out of a hypnotic state daily, as our brainwaves slow down and speed up. Hypnosis is not the magical state that Hollywood movies paint it to be. It’s the natural state of relaxing and speeding up as we move through life activities. Driving on the highway is an activity that can slow the mind into a hypnotic state.

When we are deeply relaxed, the subconscious mind comes to the surface and we can easily connect to it. We become more open to suggestion in this state, but can never be made to do something we don’t want to do.

So, if you can relax, you can be hypnotized.

In this relaxed state we become more aware of our feelings, truth and intuition. We remember things more clearly, and are more open to change when hypnotized.

In hypnosis, we can see the root cause of our more difficult issues and how to heal from them. And this healing happens from within as we understand and learn about ourselves more deeply. This is the best way to deal with our resistance.

When you understand why you do what you do (overeat, overspend, oversleep, worry about money, etc…) you feel less judgement and more compassion for the young you that developed these strategies. There is a really good reason why you do what you do. It is a strategy that is protecting you from pain, failure or disappointment.

And as we remove these old strategies and roadblocks, new ones can come in.

If you are feeling stuck, don’t try harder, try something different. More of a root cause approach to your psychology.

If your subconscious mind is holding you back from having what you want, health, happiness or peace. You can book a hypnosis session here.