​Emotional health is so important.
 
You only have to look at the world around you and read the news to realize how vital it is to learn to care for, support, guide, heal and master our emotions. It is a social and educational short coming that this is not a part of our foundational education (yet), but there are discussions and signs that this could be changing.
As a certified hypnotist, I really see up close and personal how our emotional health directly correlates to our happiness,  our goals, our desires, our relationship quality, our work quality and our overall success and fulfillment in life.
 
Emotions are natural. And even low emotions have their usefulness and their benefits.
Even unwanted, darker emotions have a place in our life as they provide important information and allow us to process our experience on earth.
 
However, when emotions begin to get in the way of living our lives in the best way possible, we need tools to learn to manage them.
 
Medication is, of course, an option. And for some people, it may be the best option.
 
For most of us, however, we can also benefit from learning to control and master our emotions. I'd like to start by asking you a question...
 
Are emotions real?
 
I would say yes...only in the sense that something is happening. But emotions are simply responses to neurological, physical and mental stimuli that are occurring in the body.
 
Many, if not most, of our emotions are actually in response to thoughts, and thoughts are simply interpretations of everything that is happening to us.
 
One of the brain’s main jobs is simply to make sense of everything that happens to us and everything that we see and experience. The objective truth is that we're all a bunch of electrons of varying density, speed and frequency.
 
But the brain needs a different story in order to make sense of that.
 
So enter the senses and our thoughts. Our emotions are responses to our senses and thoughts…so are emotions real?
 
One of the most powerful ways that I learned to regain control over my emotions was to question them and see them in a different way. This enabled me to strip the intensity from them.
 
If you find yourself feeling a way you don't want to feel, it can be helpful to sit with the emotion if possible and ask yourself, “I wonder what thought is contributing or causing this emotion?”
 
I can't tell you how many times I've done this myself, only to find that a brief painful memory, the perceived meaning I assigned to something someone said or a brief thought of something I have to do in the future has unconsciously caused me to feel badly.
 
Habits of emotion are often caused by habits of thought. So, if you notice a habit of emotion, it may benefit you to get curious and to peek and see what maybe lying beneath.
 
Remember that thoughts are not objective truth, but rather subjective interpretations of things that happen to us.
 
And because of that, they can be switched out for better ones at any time, resulting in better, healthier feelings more often.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kesha Dent is a certified hypnotist, certified RTT hypnotherapist, transformational coach and author of "Life Change Now: A 3-Step Guide to Manifesting What You Want Through the Magic of Being Who You Are". She helps professional adults to achieve life success, overcome anxiety, reignite their confidence and break out of their limitations to create a life of purpose, productivity and passion. You can find her at www.newworldcoaching.org  .

Many of us deal with difficult feelings that can affect our lives in various ways.
I don't recall really learning anything helpful in school about emotions other than we should “calm down” when we're feeling very upset. On the other hand, I also heard many people say, “Hey, your emotions are your emotions and you just have to deal with them.”
 
But is that true? Can emotions be controlled?
 
Many years ago, I got a new job. I thought it was what I wanted. But within a couple weeks of joining, I realized I made a huge mistake. Unbeknownst to me, my new supervisor had serious neurological issues which resulted in erratic and abusive behavior towards me and my colleagues.

My new shiny new job became an absolute nightmare.
 
And I didn't know how to cope.

​I couldn’t just quit as I needed a new job first, but in the interim I was having to deal with a pretty bad situation every day with seemingly no end in sight.

I dreaded going in and got nauseous sometimes before work.
 
I began to have intense anxious episodes culminating in what I now know are panic attacks.
 
I had never had panic attacks before though I had, of course, heard other people describe them. I had always assumed that they were exaggerating when describing the feeling of impending doom and absolutely hellish levels of uncontrollable emotions, fear, dread and actual physical sensations.
 
Many times, I could hardly catch my breath due to uncontrollable sobbing, and I thought I was going to die.
 
Though my partner did his best to help me, our home life suffered.
 
Eventually, I tried medication. Though it certainly improved my situation and I was grateful for it, I knew it was not a long-term solution for me personally.
 
I needed my emotions. And I needed to feel. And medication that causes me not to feel anything was just not a solution for me.
 
That's when I discovered hypnosis. It changed my life. It stopped the panic attacks. And I haven't had any since.

The main takeaway this experience gave me was a spotlight on the incredible power of our minds and how it is the command center for the body. Hypnosis helped me regain control of my body by helping me regain control of my mind.

So, let's start with a question. What in the world exactly are emotions?
 
Essentially, emotions are a response to neurological, physical or mental stimuli that are experienced in the body.
 
For some people, medication will be the best option.

However, because a LOT of our emotions are actually in response to conscious and unconscious thoughts, many if not most of us also have the option of controlling a lot of our emotions naturally by controlling our thoughts.
 
Your mind is constantly going. And your body is constantly reacting to those thoughts.
 
Most people are capable of controlling some or a lot of their emotional responses by controlling their thoughts.
 
If you are experiencing an increase in unwanted, undesirable and destructive emotions, a good place to start, if possible, is to become more mindful of the thoughts that are going through your head all day.
 
Practicing thought mindfulness and thought work is a powerful way to grasp more control over your emotions. This can certainly be done using several different methods.
 
Hypnosis is one such method that can make it a lot easier.
 
It worked for me, and it has worked for millions of other people.
 
But regardless of if you choose to try hypnosis or not, it can be very beneficial and powerful to check in with yourself frequently and ask yourself the following questions.

“How am I feeling right now?”
 
“Why am I feeling this way?”

“Do I want to feel this way?”

“I wonder what thoughts may be causing or contributing to this feeling?”

​And finally...

“Can I choose a better thought right now?” (HINT: The answer is  always YES!)




ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kesha Dent is a certified hypnotist, certified RTT hypnotherapist, transformational coach and author of "Life Change Now: A 3-Step Guide to Manifesting What You Want Through the Magic of Being Who You Are". She helps professional adults to achieve life success, overcome anxiety, reignite their confidence and break out of their limitations to create a life of purpose, productivity and passion. You can find her at www.newworldcoaching.org  .

As a certified consulting hypnotist many people ask me about hypnosis, naturally. One of the questions I get is, “How can hypnosis improve my life? Kesha, you say that it can help me to reach my goals and make me more successful. But could you please explain how it does that?”

​The first thing I want you to know is what master hypnotherapist Marisa Peer calls Three Rules of the Mind.
 
These rules are important for you to understand how your mind works. Once you understand how your mind, aka your greatest tool, works, you can better understand how hypnosis comes into play as a way to improve your life and to make you more successful towards reaching your goals.

1.Your mind has two main jobs - to keep you safe and to give you what you want.
That's it. All of the incredible, miraculous perplexing, powerful things that your mind does for you can best be distilled into these two categories.
The thing about these two main jobs, however, is that they often can conflict, and when they do, your mind is more likely to place importance and emphasis on safety over getting what you want. To your mind, if left on default mode, it is more important that you be safe than happy.
 ou can see how this can be an issue when it comes to wanting to go after things that you want. This becomes an even bigger issue when you can consider the fact that under the category of safety lies a whole bunch of things that most people don't realize, chief among these comfort.
To your mind, being comfortable means to be safe, and being uncomfortable means to be in danger.
This is an issue because in most cases going after what we want creates discomfort.

2. Your mind loves what is familiar and avoids what is unfamiliar. This piggybacks directly off the previous rule and the fact that your mind seeks comfort and avoids discomfort.
 What is familiar is what is comfortable, and to your mind, it would rather keep doing what it knows then do something different that could possibly contain threat. Therefore your mind on default mode seeks out repetition of the past. It seeks out repeating behaviors, even unwanted  behaviors.
 
3.An unconscious subconscious belief, once accepted by the mind, will remain so UNLESS challenged and replaced by a new belief.
Your beliefs determine your behavior, your responses, and also how you react to adversity and challenge, which is an absolute given in life. The problem is that many, if not most of our beliefs are formed early in our lives when we are children, adolescents and even early adults.
 
We are so often wanting to change while using old, outdated beliefs that were formed when we were younger, less wise, less powerful versions of ourselves.
 
If you are experiencing issues in getting what you want, it may be time to take a look at what you believe about yourself, about your place in the world, about the world itself and what you're actually capable of.
 
Hypnosis is a powerful and natural method to override unhelpful patterns and to create new ones, giving us more success in life.

Can you make these changes on your own without hypnosis? Absolutely! The mind is such a powerful force of nature and is just beginning to be truly understood.

​However, hypnosis can make these changes easier.
 
Because a lot of our obstacles are on the unconscious level, hypnosis provides an excellent tool that works at that level to create deep and lasting change.



​ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kesha Dent is a certified hypnotist, certified RTT hypnotherapist, transformational coach and author of "Life Change Now: A 3-Step Guide to Manifesting What You Want Through the Magic of Being Who You Are". She helps professional adults to achieve life success, overcome anxiety, reignite their confidence and break out of their limitations to create a life of purpose, productivity and passion. You can find her at www.newworldcoaching.org  .