Beyond Worry - Hypnotherapy, Mindfulness and the Senses. By Sophia Barton-Pink, Dip. Hyp, MBACP (Accred), Fellow CMA

Have you ever lain awake at three in the morning, your mind replaying the same worries on a loop? You know the feeling: thoughts circle without resolution, the body tightens, and the harder you try to switch off, the more alert you become. This is not a character flaw. Worry, once established as a pattern, has a way of becoming self-sustaining, the mind locked in repetitive negative thinking long after the original concern has passed (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).

What I have found, over more than two decades working as a psychotherapist, including working within NHS and charity settings, is that even small, learnable shifts in attention can begin to change this. Not by eliminating difficult thoughts, but by changing our relationship with them. In this piece, I want to share some of the frameworks and approaches that I have found most useful, both personally and in my work with clients.

Understanding the Window

One of the most useful frameworks I return to is the Window of Tolerance, a concept developed by the neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel (Siegel, 1999) to describe the range in which our nervous system feels regulated and able to engage with experience. Within this window, we can think clearly, sit with difficult emotions without being overwhelmed, and respond to challenges with some degree of flexibility. Outside it, we either tip into hyper-arousal (anxiety, agitation, a racing mind) or into hypo-arousal, where we feel numb, flat, and shut down.

The 3am loop most people recognise instantly. Hypo-arousal is quieter, and easier to miss. The moment someone asks if you are okay and you genuinely do not know, not sad, not fine, just absent. That could be hypo-arousal.

For those who have experienced trauma, this window can become particularly narrow. When the past feels more vivid and intrusive than the present, the nervous system remains primed to detect threat, making it harder to stay grounded in the here and now. Even everyday stressors can push someone outside their window entirely, triggering dissociation, anger, or anxiety. The challenge is not a lack of willpower but a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do.

Mindfulness helps because it builds the capacity to notice these shifts before they fully take hold. A past client who had spent years managing severe anxiety once put it simply: "I used to think I was my anxiety. Mindfulness helped me see I was someone noticing it." That pause, small as it sounds, creates a gap, and it is in that gap that change becomes possible. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s foundational work on mindfulness-based stress reduction showed that regular practice reduces anxiety, stress, and the kind of repetitive negative thinking that fuels both. These findings have since been replicated across large-scale clinical studies and meta-analyses (Goldberg et al., 2018). Cognitive behavioural therapy is similarly well evidenced, and is established as a first-line treatment for generalised anxiety disorder (Papola et al., 2024).

What Self-Hypnosis Involves

Hypnosis is often misunderstood. It is not a mysterious trance, and nothing is done to you without your involvement. The clinical psychologist Michael Yapko, in his definitive text Trancework, describes hypnosis as an active process through which people discover strengths and resources they may not have realised they possessed, and that description matches my own experience of it, both personally and professionally. It was during my training with Adam Eason at the Anglo European College of Therapeutic Hypnosis in Bournemouth that I first began to understand how naturally hypnotherapy sits alongside cognitive behavioural approaches, mindfulness-based practices, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, an approach that focuses on developing psychological flexibility rather than attempting to eliminate difficult thoughts (Hayes, Strosahl and Wilson, 1999).

In practice, self-hypnosis is about deliberately focusing attention in a more absorbed and selective way. You settle the body, narrow your focus to a single point (such as a breath, a word, or a simple idea), and as attention deepens, distractions tend to fade into the background. As focus sharpens, the mind becomes more responsive to internally directed suggestion. This makes it easier to engage with helpful ideas, rehearse new patterns of thinking, and begin to shift habitual responses, not by forcing change, but by creating the conditions in which change becomes more accessible.

The Ego Strengthening routine, developed by the British hypnotherapist John Hartland, is a structured self-hypnosis practice focused on cultivating calm, confidence, clarity, and resilience. It is not passive. It involves learning how attention, imagination, and intention work together, and with practice, it becomes a reliable tool for returning to a steadier internal state.

Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté have each written, from different angles, about how unresolved stress and trauma do not simply live in the mind; they live in the body. Van der Kolk’s work shows how trauma can persist in somatic memory (the way the body holds and replays past experience) long after the original event has passed, shaping how we move, breathe, and respond. Maté’s argument is quieter but equally striking: that the long-term suppression of emotional experience carries consequences for physical health. Both point in the same direction. The body is not simply a passenger to what the mind decides.

The body, it turns out, can be reached through the senses as much as through the mind. Unlike other senses, smell bypasses the thalamus and connects closely with the limbic system, the brain’s emotional processing centre, which helps explain why a specific scent can retrieve a memory or shift a mood almost instantaneously (Sullivan et al., 2015).

Using a particular scent consistently during mindfulness practice can help anchor a sense of calm, so that over time the scent itself becomes a cue, something you can carry into daily life that gently calls the nervous system back towards stillness. It is also particularly effective when attached to an existing habit or routine; pairing a new practice with something already established makes it far easier to sustain. A single scent, chosen with intention and returned to consistently, can become one of the simplest and most portable tools you have. These are not elaborate interventions. They are small, learnable practices, and it is often the smallest shifts that prove most durable.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Progress rarely announces itself; it arrives quietly. A moment where you notice you did not spiral, or that you caught yourself before the loop took hold. A night where sleep came more easily than it usually does. A conversation where you stayed present. These small shifts are not incidental. They are the change.

Many of the responses that drive anxiety and shutdown were learned, and what has been learned can be worked with. Change does not require certainty, only willingness. The structure and the tools exist. What matters is the decision to begin.

I am fortunate to live close to a forest and near the sea, both are part of my own practice, places I return to when I need to slow down, to notice, to simply be in nature. I also find deep enjoyment in leading sound baths with mindfulness within the community, something I do as much for myself as for others. At home, I am kept grounded by my two grown-up sons and my Persian cat Doris, named after my late grandmother. These things are not incidental to the work. They are the work.

The person lying awake at three in the morning is not broken, and the solution is not to try harder to stop thinking. The aim is something quieter than that: learning to notice, to pause, and gradually, imperfectly, to return to a calmer place. Not once, but again and again, until the returning becomes easier than the getting lost.

May you find your way back to stillness, one small moment at a time.

Sophia 🤍Moonshack Founder

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical or therapeutic advice. Please seek professional support if you are experiencing significant anxiety or distress.

References

Goldberg, S.B., Tucker, R.P., Greene, P.A., Davidson, R.J., Wampold, B.E., Kearney, D.J. and Simpson, T.L. (2018). Mindfulness-based interventions for psychiatric disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 59, pp.52–60.

Hartland, J. (1971). Medical and Dental Hypnosis and its Clinical Applications (2nd ed.). London: Baillière Tindall.

Hayes, S.C., Strosahl, K.D. and Wilson, K.G. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. New York: Guilford Press.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living. New York: Delacorte Press.

Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Papola, D., Miguel, C., Mazzaglia, M., Franco, P., Tedeschi, F., Romero, S.A., Patel, A.R., Ostuzzi, G., Gastaldon, C., Karyotaki, E., Harrer, M., Purgato, M., Sijbrandij, M., Patel, V., Furukawa, T.A., Cuijpers, P. and Barbui, C. (2024). Psychotherapies for generalised anxiety disorder in adults: A systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials. JAMA Psychiatry, 81(3), pp.250–259.

Siegel, D.J. (1999). The Developing Mind. New York: Guilford Press.

Sullivan, R.M., Wilson, D.A., Ravel, N. and Mouly, A.M. (2015). Olfactory memory networks: From emotional learning to social behaviours. Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, 9, p.36.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking.

Yapko, M.D. (2019). Trancework: An Introduction to the Practice of Clinical Hypnosis (5th ed.). New York: Routledge.

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