When women come to me for hypnotherapy, one of the questions they normally ask is, ‘Will I be able to go into a trance?' They worry that hypnosis is a strange, unfamiliar state that they won't be able to reach.

I tell them the same thing that I will tell you now, we all go into a trance many, many times during the day. Whenever you are watching TV, driving a car, daydreaming, basically whenever you are doing anything familiar, you can slip into a trance-like state. It's times when the unconscious mind takes over, we feel relaxed and we don't really have to think about what we are doing.

If you've ever had an experience when you were driving to a place that you've been to many times before and once you arrive there, you can't quite remember the journey, then that is an example of a being in a trance. Your unconscious mind has got you to where you want to go, without even thinking about it, clever huh?

The thing is, we can also go into a trance when it comes to food. We can eat without even realising it, making automatic, unconscious choices, just because it's a familiar way of being for us.

As a personal example, whenever I used to drink a cup of coffee, I would always want something sweet to go with it, a cake or some biscuits. I would go into a coffee shop and slip into my ‘food trance', ordering my americano and a muffin automatically. It was as if the barista was saying, ‘look into my eyes, look into my eyes' and swinging a clock backwards and forwards in front of me! Once I became aware of this unconscious choice I was making, I started to experiment with not having a cake every time I had coffee and, do you know what? I found that I actually didn't enjoy those muffins too much, they left me feeling bloated and tired. It was more enjoyable to focus purely on the coffee, one of my pleasures in life.

So, I wonder whether there are times when you slip into a food trance? Have a think about it now. Are there times when you make an automatic choice about what you are going to eat? Perhaps there's a certain time of day when you always reach for food (late afternoon seems to be a common time for this) whether you're hungry or not? Maybe you always have something sweet after a meal?

Make a decision to notice your food trances over the next couple of days. Once you become aware of them, you give yourself a choice. It is so empowering to become aware of your unconscious behaviour and realise that you can choose to do something different.

So, sometimes I still decide to have cake with my coffee (as you know, I don't believe in deprivation!), but I make this decision consciously and that feels powerful.

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