Confidence and Self Esteem Therapy Kenilworth Warwickshire

16/10/2025

Insomnia, Sleep Issues , Misophonia
Client referral posted today ,
" Great, and effective hypnotherapist. Stuarts techniques really work and will change you're life for the better.
Hi my name is Neil. I came across Stuart Downing when I found myself seeking out hypnotherapy to treat problems I was having with my sleep due to living next door to previous neighbours who were very noisy and whom had kept me awake. Thankfully, after a couple of months, the neighbours had moved on, but unfortunately as a result, I developed an anxiety about getting to sleep, which in turn lead to me developing an insomnia which was caused by the anxiety. I had also developed Misophonia as a result, and had become hypersensitive to certain noises, such as any bangs or thuds. Even though the neighbours had left, my anxiety still persisted, which only caused me even more anxiety as I couldnt understand why I just couldnt relax as I knew the neighbours were no longer there. It got too the point where the anxiety around my sleep was so bad, that it really started to have a profound effect on my life. I felt I couldnt enjoy life anymore, I just wasnt happy. I had felt like I had lost the ability to relax, as a result it really started to effect my relationships with my family as I just wasnt me anymore, so to speak. Thats when I knew I had to do something as I felt it was destroying my life. I researched hypnotherapy. I was curious as to how it worked, and researched whether or not it would be beneficial for the issues that I was going through. I sought out a few hypnotherapists, thats when I came across Stuart Downing. I did my research on him, and discovered that he could treat issues around sleep/anxiety. I read his reviews, which were all positive. I booked a consultation with Stuart, who was very friendly and reassuring and explained how hypnotherapy worked and the methods he was going to deploy in helping to heal me. In the consultation, Stuart told me that I would only require three to four sessions at the most, which I was surprised about to be honest, as I felt so afflicted by my issues. What can I say? Well, after just one session, I already noticed a vast improvement in my sleep quality. I was sleeping longer and deeper, and waking up totally refreshed. Over the last few weeks of the sessions , my sleep and anxiety has just got better and better. I feel much less anxious, and lot more relaxed, like a weight has been lifted. I am so glad that I decided to invest in the sessions with Stuart, and would recommend it to anyone who is considering hypnotherapy. Stuart helped me learn that a lot of fear is irrational and totally unnessacary, and that I can rationalise with myself that I do not need to feel that fear. I have also learnt extremely effective relaxation techniques, which have really helped me. I f I ever experience any difficulties in the future, I will be sure to utilise these techniques. So, if you have any issue that is effecting you to the point where it is having a profound effect on you're life, then I would highly recommend that you book yourself a consultation with Stuart Downing, it can and will change you're life!
Neil 14/10/25
If you need help with sleep issues , contact Stuart 07825 599340
stuart@hypnotherapy4freedom.co.uk
https://hypnotherapy4freedom.co.uk/reviews
https://hypnotherapy4freedom.co.uk/hypnotherapy-services/hypnotherapy-for-sleep-disorders-insomnia

05/02/2022

Life Coaching for Anxiety/Stress - changing old negative patterns and beliefs, introducing new coping techniques and strategies., increasing confidence and self esteem
Enjoy calmer and more relaxed relationships in both personal and work life
Call Stuart - 07825 599340 for a free telephone consultation - stuart@stuartdowning.co.uk
www.stuartdowning.co.uk
Client reviews - https://www.stuartdowning.co.uk/client-reviews

I coach people through change, allowing clients to find direction and achieve their potential. Successful coaching is a process, requiring regular meetings and continuous support between sessions. I work from several locations Edgbaston, Birmingham, Kenilworth, Warwickshire, Harley Street, London, L...

06/06/2021

09/05/2021

online appointments -
Call Stuart -07825 599340
stuart@hypnotherapy4freedom.com
www.hypnotherapy4freedom.com

09/05/2021

Great Client Review posted today on independent third part review site
Call Stuart 07825 599340 for a free 30 minute consultation to discuss how therapy /coaching can benefit you
Online appointments available now
stuart@stuartdowning.co.uk
https://www.stuartdowning.co.uk/client-reviews
www.stuartdowning,co,uk

I cannot recommend Stuart enough. Stuarts professionalism and understanding of such a wide variety of life issues that effect mental health, relationships and personal development allowed me to work a process of recovery from rock bottom. Stuart is not just a Hypnotherapist his talking therapy is al...

04/05/2021

for , - online appointments available -07825 599340 - stuart@stuartdowning.co.uk
www.hypnotherapy4freedom.com

26/03/2021

NEW... Client review .... Insomnia and anxiety - resolved rapidly with sleep therapy .
Call Stuart -07825 599340 for a free consultation to discuss how sleep therapy
can resolve your issues and return to peaceful sleep
Online Zoom appointments available NOW
stuart@hypnotherapy4freedom.com
https://hypnotherapy4freedom.com/.../hypnotherapy-for...

Thankyou for your commitment towards my anxiety and insomnia problems, I feel so relieved to have found Stuart , he helped me to learn about how to reduce panic attacks aswell as self development in training myself to cope with anxiety around sleeping, before I met him I really was struggling to cop...

21/03/2021

Does striving for academic perfection cause eating disorders?
Academic pressure has been linked to eating disorders in teenagers. Studies have found that the incredibly high pressure on teenagers to achieve in the academic arena may trigger eating disorders with female students being the most vulnerable.
Pressure can come from several areas resulting in teenagers seeking some sort of outlet. The outlet that is selected isn’t always the healthiest or most constructive. Society, schools, and parents can all create pressure on teenagers to do well academically. These three groups can pressure an individual to aim for perfection, which is an impossible task.
The competition for places in college, university, and/or the workforce has led to a greater degree of pressure. Striving for academic perfection can result in negative forces applied to a teenager’s mental health.
The fight for perfection
A lot of parents put pressure on their kids to achieve perfection in their academic careers. Whether it be perfection in the classroom or on a school sports team, young people can feel weighed down and suffocated by the pressure. Many parents that ask for perfection from their children were not perfect in their academic years. Nor are they perfect as grown-ups making their desire for flawless academic work to be hypocritical.
Failure is used to describe someone that has not succeeded. However, the word is thrown around all too often leaving teenagers feeling like success and failure in life are black and white. There are grey areas in life and simply being imperfect is not the be all, end all to success.
Academic success and anxiety
Striving for academic success can build anxiety in teenage students. As a young person moves through high school, the pressure to do well increases. They may want to obtain a university scholarship, certain test score to get into a prestigious university, or do well on an interview to land an internship. The pressure to achieve these items can build anxiety.
Perfectionism in childhood can produce eating disorders as individuals grow older. A person’s life can be greatly altered by striving for perfectionism. They do not know how to deal with the stress and anxiety, and thus have a poor relationship with food as the outcome. Mental health issues can result and these can be life-endangering. Eating disorders can also be life-long and as the teenager becomes an adult, become greater due to even more pressure being experienced.
The link between perfectionism and eating disorders
There is a misconception that eating disorders develop because an individual wants to lose weight. An eating disorder doesn’t always come out of someone seeking to drop a few pounds. Perfectionism in academia and eating disorders demonstrate how mental health issues can develop in young people.
Eating disorders develop out of underlying emotions, thoughts, and feelings. These drive a person to behave in certain ways. On the surface, most people would consider an eating disorder to be about food. However, there are typically underlying issues such as academic perfection pressure that creates the eating disorder.
Treatment programs help individuals treat the underlying problems in eating disorders and not just the symptoms. Parents can play a key role in the treatment of an eating disorder brought on by perfectionism by explaining to their teenagers that failures occur in life. In addition, showing their child that academia doesn’t have to be black and white can perform wonders for a teenager’s mental health.
Call Stuart 07825 599340 if you are a loved one are experiencing issues with eating and perfectionism .
stuart@stuartdowning.co.uk
https://www.eatingdisordersbirmingham.co.uk

https://hypnotherapy4freedom.com/hypnotherapy-services/hypnotherapy-for-eating-disorders

Eating disorders are on the rise. Hypnotherapy 4 Freedom have had huge success treating clients with eating disorders and helping them back to normal eating

21/03/2021

Post Covid Stress Disorder
Those who had severe Covid-19 symptoms have found themselves admitted to ICUs and receiving mechanical ventilation and would clearly expect to share the heightened risk of subsequently developing PTSD in the form of Post Covid Stress Disorder. However, it appears that Covid-19 patients are generally experiencing poorer mental health outcomes than might be expected regardless of the course their illness took or the treatment they received.
A study of Covid-19 patients in the UK by Imperial College London and the University of Southampton included over 13,000 patients with suspected and confirmed Covid-19 and a variety of outcomes. It found that mechanical ventilation was strongly correlated with subsequent symptoms of PTSD; but the UK study found a higher rate of patients, one-in-three, subsequently experienced those symptoms.
Although the UK sample was controlled to try to account for other external factors, if it were considering purely ventilated patients the difference might not be significant; the relevant numbers in both studies were small. However, the UK study found that regardless of treatment received patients reported key PTSD symptoms, the most common being intrusive images or flashbacks.
The proportion of those in the study who reported symptoms of PTSD included one-in-five of those admitted to hospital, but not ventilated, and one-in-six of those who simply received some medical treatment at home. Perhaps most interestingly one-in-ten of those who had Covid-19 but managed their symptoms without medical help or intervention also reported PTSD symptoms after their recovery.
Covid-19’s effect on mental health
There also seems to be an association between Covid-19 and other mental health problems. Initial research has suggested that one-in-five people with a positive Covid-19 test are diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, such as depression or anxiety, in the following three months, of those around one-in-sixteen for the first time.
A follow-up study, still in preprint, suggests an increased rate of neurological and psychiatric problems in the six months after an initial positive test.
Why this is the case is unclear, and as the studies highlight, it’s not impossible that the patients were more likely to contract Covid-19 as a result of behaviours associated with poor mental health, rather than developing poor mental health as a result of Covid-19. However, the apparent increase in other neurological conditions may suggest that Covid-19 is not purely a respiratory illness and adds to the evidence that it can have effects on other parts of the body, in this case the brain.
Non-Covid Stress Disorder
Poor mental health, including PTSD, is not limited just to those that have contracted Covid-19. The negative effects on mental health of the pandemic have been observed in people who, although they have not had the illness, have been exposed, in some way, to its effects.
Healthcare workers comprise the main part of this group, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, those working in ICUs are the most at risk. The Covid-19 pandemic put unprecedented pressure on ICUs and ICU staff, during peaks they were required to work beyond their usual capacity, in some places using makeshift ICUs with equipment being adapted to help them cope.
And while ICU staff may be used to death, the nature of death during the Covid-19 pandemic changed. With families unable to visit, farewells were said while staff held phones and tablets aloft and were unable to provide even simple comforts like a human touch. A study of nurses in China found that about one-in-six had PTSD following the exposure to Covid-19 patients.
There are several protective factors and stressors that will affect the likelihood of staff to suffer from PTSD symptoms, from the protection provided by simple job satisfaction to the stressors of having experienced loss to Covid-19 elsewhere or the strains of insufficient or inadequate PPE experienced by many early in the pandemic.
Perhaps the biggest stressor on healthcare staff was the moral injury. There is a correlation between moral injury — the feeling of responsibility, fault or failure — and PTSD. While entirely unjustified, Covid-19 provided lots of opportunities for healthcare staff to feel a moral injury, whether from the patient they were unable to save, being off work because of Covid-19 or symptoms, or having to make difficult decisions when resources were stretched.
There is even some evidence that there may be a population-wide exposure to stress as a result of the pandemic, a type of vicarious stress disorder. While this indirect exposure to trauma would not meet the strict diagnostic criteria for PTSD the effects on the wider population’s mental health has often been commented on. A survey by the CDC found that two in every five people had suffered an adverse mental health effect as a result of the pandemic. A quarter of these were trauma- or stressor-related.
Coping with Post-Covid Stress Disorder
Whether Post Covid Stress Disorder is a condition in its own right or just a particular presentation of PTSD it will require professional treatment. PTSD can respond well to treatments like therapy or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing,(E.M.D.R ) but untreated can persist for years after the trauma.
In practice, many people are best trying to increase the known protective factors and decrease exposure to stressors associated with PTSD. This will mean ensuring there is adequate social support, security — both financial and physical — and good healthcare provision available. While healthcare workers should also have access to support at their workplace and access to PPE.
Unfortunately, when fighting a pandemic, these are the very things that are almost immediately removed. Policies designed to reduce transmission can cause social isolation and have economic effects putting people’s livelihoods at risk. And while healthcare workers have job security, the pressures caused by a pandemic can mean the system’s resources have to be prioritized for the patients rather than the staff.
Research is still ongoing, but the studies so far suggest that it’s reasonable to expect more will be discovered connecting Covid-19 with poor mental health and some form of post-Covid stress disorder. Just as the long-term physical impacts of Covid-19 are still unknown, we don’t know what the long-term mental health impacts will be. However, we can be confident not just that there will be some, but also that they will not be limited just to those who had the virus.
Call Stuart - 07825 599340 for a free confidential call if you feel Post-Covid Stress Disorder is affecting you .
stuart@stuartdowning.co.uk
Online Zoom appointments available
https://www.emdrtherapykenilworth.co.uk/

08/03/2021

Sleep and Dreaming

Not all dreaming is the same.
Dreams can be funny, frightening, sad or strange. Flying dreams can be euphoric, chasing dreams can be terrifying, forgot-to-study-for-my-exam dreams can be stressful.
There are several dream classifications, including nightmares, recurring dreams, and lucid dreams.
Nightmares are broadly defined as frightening dreams that result in some degree of awakening from sleep. "Bad dreams" are considered a less severe form of nightmare. Most people experience nightmares throughout life, usually very rarely and, less commonly, with more regularity. A small percentage of the population—studies suggest around 5%—have nightmares as often as once a week.
Nightmares can result from different triggers, including stress, emotional upheaval, and traumatic experiences. They can occur as side effects of some medications, use and abuse of drugs and alcohol, and illness. Nightmares themselves disrupt sleep by not only by waking the sleeper, but also leading to a fear of falling asleep and returning to a disturbing dream.
Nightmares can have other negative sleep-related health consequences, as well. According to research, they may contribute to insomnia, daytime fatigue, depression, and anxiety.
Studies indicate that people with certain conditions may be more likely to experience nightmares, including:
Migraine
Obstructive sleep apnea
Clinical depression
Night terrors, or sleep terrors, create another frightening dream-like experience. While they are frightening and disruptive to sleep, night terrors are not the same as nightmares. Night terrors are very intense episodes of fright during dreams. These frightening episodes are often accompanied by screaming or yelling, as well as by physical movement such as leaping out of bed or flailing in panic. Research suggests that sleep terrors occur during non-REM sleep dreaming, while nightmares tend to happen during REM sleep.
Adults do experience night terrors, but they are somewhat more common in children. Estimates suggest that as many as 6% of children experience night terrors, most often between the ages of 3-12.
Recurring dreams are ones that reappear with some pattern of regularity. Studies suggest that recurring dreams may contain more threatening content than regular dreams. Research suggests links between recurring dreams and psychological distress in both adults and children.
Lucid dreams are an especially fascinating form of dream. In lucid dreams, the dreamer is aware of the fact that he or she is dreaming, and often can manipulate or control the dream as it unfolds.
Research links lucid dreaming to unusually elevated levels of brain activity. Studies have found that lucid dreamers displayed significantly higher brain wave frequencies than non-lucid dreamers, as well as increased activity in parts of the frontal lobe. This area of the brain is deeply involved with conscious awareness, a sense of self, as well as language and memory. Studies of lucid dreams are not only shedding light on the mechanics of dreaming, but also on the neural underpinnings of consciousness itself.
Dreams appear to be influenced by our waking lives in many ways.
Theories about why we dream include those that suggest dreaming is a means by which the brain processes emotions, stimuli, memories, and information that’s been absorbed throughout the waking day.
According to research, a significant percentage of the people who appear in dreams are known to the dreamer. One study found more than 48% of dream characters were recognizable by name to dreamers. Another 35% of characters were identifiable to dreamers by their generic social role or relationship—as a friend, doctor, or police officer, for example. Fewer than one fifth of dream characters—16%—were unrecognizable to dreamers.
Other research indicates that a majority of dreams contain content related to autobiographical memories—memories about the self—as opposed to episodic memories, which deal with events and details, such as locations and times.
There’s a body of study that suggests our waking lives have great influence over the content of our dreams. Pregnant women dream more about pregnancy and childbirth. Hospice workers who act as caregivers to others (whether patients or family members) dream about the experiences of caregiving and the people for whom they care. Musicians dream twice as often about music as non-musicians do.
There’s also fascinating research that shows our capacity to dream beyond our waking experiences, in profound ways. Dream reports of people born paralyzed reveal that they walk, swim, and run in their dreams as often as people without paralysis. Dream reports of people born deaf indicate they often hear in their dreams. These reports may lend credence to the theory that dreams serve as a broad, virtual-reality model of waking life—a proto-consciousness—that instructs and supports survival and growth.
Daily life experiences don’t always present themselves in dreams immediately. Sometimes an experience from life will filter through to a dream after several days, or even a week. This delay is what’s known as dream lag.
As much as dreams may contain aspects of everyday, routine life, dreaming is also a state in which we contend with extraordinary experiences. Another likely function of dreaming appears to be processing and coming to terms with traumatic events. Grief, fear, loss, abandonment, even physical pain are all emotions and experiences that often replay themselves in dreams. Studies of people who’ve experienced loss of loved ones indicate that most of them dream about the deceased.
Some of the most common dream subjects include:
School dreams (studying, taking tests)
Being chased
Sexual dreams
Falling
Being late
Flying
Being attacked physically
Dreaming of someone dead being alive, or someone alive being dead
A recent study of the content of nightmares found the most common themes included:
Physical aggression
Interpersonal conflicts
Experiences of failure and helplessness
Researchers found fear to be the most common emotion in nightmares and bad dreams, though it’s often accompanied by other emotions as well.
Call Stuart -07825 599340 to discuss your sleep issue and how sleep therapy can help resolve sleep issues .
stuart@stuartdowning.co.uk