Hypnotherapy works by inducing a state of heightened suggestibility - a focused, receptive state of mind in which you become more open to accepting and acting on helpful suggestions. This isn't sleep or unconsciousness and you will be aware of everything that happens throughout the session. What changes is your responsiveness…because you’ll be so focused, your mind becomes more able to engage with new ideas and perspectives at a deeper level than is usually possible through conscious thought alone.

If you want to see just how powerful the hypnotic state can be, this video of a tooth extraction performed without anaesthetic, using hypnosis alone, is worth a watch (warning: it includes close ups of a surgical procedure!)

Hypnosis is a skill that requires practice. Research shows that hypnotic responsiveness is enhanced by being motivated to change, thinking positively, and being open-minded and curious. If you are actively seeking change, you will be just fine! The people who tend to find it harder are those who approach it with performance anxiety, worrying whether they're "doing it right." If you're open, patient, and willing to follow the guidance of your therapist, you'll respond well, and this will continue to improve with practice. After a few weeks, you’ll even be able to put yourself into hypnosis and it will be a skill you can use for the rest of your life!

No, on both counts. Research is clear that hypnosis is not a state of mind control. You cannot be made to do or say anything against your will. You remain aware throughout and can bring yourself out of the relaxed state at any point. The stage hypnosis you might have seen on television is a very different thing, performed under very different conditions, and bears no resemblance to therapeutic hypnotherapy. In a clinical setting, you are always in complete control.

Yes. When practiced by a qualified therapist, hypnotherapy is a safe and well-researched approach with a long history of medical and scientific approval. The only type of hypnotherapy that is questionable is regression where the client is “taken back” to where the issues occurred. This is not a model of therapy that I practice…everything I do looks forward at where you want to get to, not looking back at why you think, feel, and behave this way. A favourite saying of mine is “a vicious cycle has no roots”. At the end of the day, we don’t need to understand where the issues came from, we just need to break the patterns going forward.

Everyone is different, and progress depends on a number of factors including how long these patterns have been present and how much work you're able to do between sessions. That said, six sessions is typically the minimum, and most people find six to ten sessions gives them a solid foundation for lasting change. We'll review regularly as we go, so you'll never feel like you're committing to something open-ended.

One of the things we'll do early on is set SMART goals together - SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound - so we have something concrete to track your progress against. We'll check in regularly to see where you're at and adapt those goals as we go.

Alongside that, I use established psychotherapy tools to measure change more precisely. One example is the SUD scale, short for Subjective Units of Distress - a simple 0 to 10 rating that has been used in behaviour therapy since the 1960s to track how intense a feeling is at any given moment. We might use this to measure how distressing a particular thought or situation feels at the start of our work together, and track how that number shifts over time. It's a small thing, but it gives us an objective marker of progress alongside how you're feeling day to day.

You'll likely notice some early signs of change too. The food noise becomes a little less intense. You notice an urge without acting on it. You can eat a snack without the usual guilt spiral. These are meaningful shifts, but having a measurable scale alongside them means we're not just relying on instinct to know things are moving in the right direction.

CBH is ideally suited to people with a difficult or complicated relationship with food that hasn't reached the threshold of a clinical diagnosis. If you have a diagnosed eating disorder, I wouldn't be the right person to support you, as that requires specialist clinical input beyond my scope of practice. If you're unsure whether that applies to you, the best first step is a free discovery call where we can talk it through honestly, and I can point you in the right direction if needed.

This isn't a weight loss programme, but that doesn't mean weight loss can never be part of your bigger picture. It's more about the order you do things in.

My belief is that if you sort out your difficult relationship with food first, you'll be in a much stronger place to think about weight, if that's still something you want, afterwards. Trying to force weight loss while the underlying patterns are still running tends to be what keeps people stuck in the cycle of losing, regaining, and starting over.

So what tends to happen as we work together is that the obsessive thinking quietens, the restrict-and-rebound cycle slows, and things often begin to shift naturally. For some people that includes changes to their weight over time. For others, what changes most is how they feel, the headspace, the freedom, the absence of the constant noise.

Once you're no longer at war with food, you get to make calmer, clearer decisions about what you want next. And that's a much better place to start from.