Hypnosis for Optimum Physical Health & Emotional Wellness

Hypnosis is your friend if you're: Tired of trying to manage stress, weight gain, smoking, fears, pain, and other yucky things. Feeling like willpower just doesn't work. Struggling with feeling powerless. Spinning your wheels trying to solve the problems in your life on your own and realizing you need help from someone or something else. If any of the above resonates with you, then the good news is that NOW is the best time to start living a healthier and happier life! Hypnosis helps you use your Mind Power to help you make better decisions and instill healthy, happy habits for the long-term.

Email I feel better already>>>

Melissa Stefanski, PhD

Hello and welcome! Thank you so much for your time today. My name is Melissa Stefanski, and hypnotherapy is my labor of love. I used to get so anxious , so stressed out, that it felt as though my heart was going to pound out of my chest! I felt the stress in the form of headaches and nervousness throughout my body.  I would gain weight during especially stressful times, and my relationships suffered, too.  I have bought numerous products and countless self-help programs in search of that "thing" that's going to make these terrible feelings go away. Nothing was working.

I wasted a lot of time and money stuck in self-help hell!

I didn't want to go the medication route or spend lots of money on talk therapy (even though I am a mental health therapist!) 

When I stop and think about it, stress is at the center of many unwanted, and sometimes painful, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Whether it's overeating, smoking, drinking too much, low self-esteem, trauma, pain, (...the list goes on and on) it seems that stress on the body and the mind is the superglue keeping us stuck.

So, I started doing some research into quick and effective techniques to get my stress under control. That's what led to my becoming a hypnotherapist. 

Within just a few days of using hypnosis, I felt as though a weight (literally) had been lifted. My headaches dissipated.  I regained control over my thoughts, feelings, and actions. I became more responsive and less reactive in my everyday life. My physical health improved, as well as my relationships and emotional well-being. 

Manage stress (and it's all stress!) and difficult emotions by going through them instead of fighting against them.

I encourage you to take a multi-pronged approach to mental and physical wellness. There's no great panacea that will cure anyone.

• Hypnosis is not enough.
• Exercise is not enough.
• Healthy eating is not enough.
• No one thing is ever enough.

It's always many different activities, new habits, and techniques working together that help people improve their lives and achieve their goals. 

I have found that, when hypnosis and a healthy lifestyle are combined, true optimum health starts happening. The body is fortified, and the mind gains emotional mastery.

Let Hypnosis Be Your Reset Button manage stress

I've also spent a lot of time trying to make these feelings go away. I've done a lot of wishing and hoping to no longer be stressed and to be self-assured and at ease with whatever comes my way. Oh, to be as cool as a cucumber! Thus far, no one has figured out how to make stress vanish. So, let's stop wasting any more time on trying to banish stress. Let's manage stress. Unless you live in a bubble somewhere - and even bubbles burst - there will always be stress. Instead, decide to take on a new approach to stress. Rather than trying to make stress go away, try to understand it - kind of like keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

Okay, maybe "enemy" is too strong a word to describe stress. Maybe "frienemy" is more accurate. At any rate, dealing with stress is like hitting a patch of ice on the road. Your knee-jerk reaction may be to swerve to avoid the ice only to spin out of control. A better approach is to take your foot off the gas pedal. Take your foot off the brake, too. Face the ice and glide over it.

^{LIBERATE YOUR PROGRAMMING.}

ACTIVATE YOUR INNER MASTERMIND.

^{CREATE THE LIFE YOU REALLY WANT.}

I'm lazy so I stopped setting the bar so high I admit I'm a pretty lazy person. I enjoy vegging in front of the TV. I really love lounging around on a lazy Sunday. Knowing that I have to put in effort to get what I really want seems daunting, at times. I think most people can relate to this. Many people fail to achieve their goals, whether it be a weight loss goal or a work goal, because they set the bar too high. But, aren't we taught from childhood to set the bar high for ourselves? Yes, we are. But, setting the bar too high often results in quitting or not even getting started in the first place on achieving our goals. So many of us have the misconception that working on goals needs to be an all-or-nothing process.

To give you some examples, if someone were to tell me I needed to exercise 30 minutes today, my knee-jerk reaction would be, "I don't have 30 minutes to spare." But, if someone were to tell me I needed to exercise for one minute today, I'd think, "Okay, I can do one minute of exercise."

Why does this happen? People are usually excited when they first get their new gym equipment. "This is going to be the beginning of a new healthy lifestyle." A couple of weeks into the new treadmill routine, and reality starts to set in. "I don't have time to exercise today. I'll do it tomorrow." But, you know how the story goes. Tomorrow never comes. Before you know it, that piece of gym equipment is looking like the vestige of a sunken ship sprouting barnacles.

This same thinking creeps in with so many things we do in life. We either exercise for 30 minutes a day or not at all. We either clean the whole house or not at all. 

We either complete all our errands or none at all. You get the point. It's this "all or nothing" thinking that tends to lead people down the path of procrastination and failure.

I've fallen into this "all or nothing" thinking many times. I call it the "Perfection Myth." We believe that we have to complete things in a "perfect" way or not at all. I've had many gym memberships that have gone to waste because of the perfection myth. Just think of the all the home gym equipment collecting dust right now - or, better yet, being used to hang clothes on.

Can the perfection myth be tamed? I think so. As I've mentioned, I'm lazy.  This is what works for me. I've given up on setting the bar so high for myself. So, I've decided to set the bar low - so low that I'm successful. The brain is very adept at picking up on patterns and creating "apps" to help automate our thoughts and actions. By exercising for one minute each day, the brain has the amazing ability to pick up on this new habit and find other one-minute occasions for exercise. You can think of lowering the bar in this way as setting up mini goals for yourself. Mini goals are easily achieved and lend themselves to being done with more consistency than big goals. Exercising for only one minute will not train my body for a marathon, but that's not what I'm looking for. In my case, one minute of exercise is better than no minutes of exercise.

I set mini goals for myself all the time, not just to manage stress, but to manage almost everything. Another example is cleaning the house. Just thinking about cleaning the house makes me tired. It's something I would put off all the time until the house reached critical mass and really needed attention. So, what I do now is clean the house in parts. I don't have time to clean the entire house today, but I can manage to clean the powder room. Tomorrow, I have time to clean some mirrors. The next day, I may do a little dusting.

Setting up mini goals can really protect you from really stressful situations resulting from procrastination. Think about all the poor souls who put off getting their tax info together until the eleventh hour. No one likes to think about getting tax stuff together. Again, it's mostly because we think we have to either get it all done today or not at all.

Guess what happens? Most people go for the "not at all" option but end up doing it all when the pressure's really on. There is another option available, a very simple one. Get some tax info together - not all the required info, but some. I find that setting time limits is extremely helpful. I don't want to work on taxes for hours on end, but I'm willing to give 15 minutes. Setting mini goals with time limits is a surefire way to beat procrastination.

Why am I saying all of this? Because lowering the bar and setting mini goals is a great approach to manage stress. People tend to believe they have to resolve all stressful issues in their lives in order to be happy. I tended to feel this way about my own shyness. I felt for so long that people are either outgoing or they're not. I knew I definitely was not outgoing. I often wondered what it would be like to feel self-confident and speak my own mind without caring. Somehow I believed the notion that self-confidence had to mean self-confidence to the extreme. A self-confident person should feel confident no matter what the situation. That's why I resigned myself to being shy for so long. I had the perfection myth deeply instilled in my brain. Over time, though, something wonderful happened. I started to give little public speeches on the topic of stress. When I first started doing this, I never gave much thought to how this was helping me. I would give my little talks and really enjoyed them. I got better and better at presenting classes to small groups, and my confidence grew exponentially. It dawned on me one day that I was accomplishing a lot through this mini step. I realized for me this was all I needed. To be confident didn't require me to deliver speeches to crowds of thousands. I wasn't doomed to being shy. I could let my voice be heard. I'm no Tony Robins. But, I realize now that I don't have to be anyone else but myself to be my best. I can optimize who I am and my unique assets. I can lose weight and manage stress and so can you... What I know is life goes up and down. Sometimes, we have a collection of little stressors that gnaw at us. At other times, we have major crises that bring us down. Then we have the periods of tranquility, during which some of us may actually worry about what's going to stress us out next! At any rate, we will always know stress in one form or another. It's better to do something to manage stress than to give up. What kind of tools will you find here? You'll find a comprehensive guide to help you lead a healthy lifestyle, including my favorite technique: HYPNOSIS!

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You'll discover many techniques for harnessing the power of your thoughts so you can gain control and manage stress and manage weight. 

Not all stress benefits from a "calm down" approach. Relaxation techniques can be beneficial, but sometimes your stress might require more of an "energy releasing" or active approach. At other moments, we need a really good laugh to diffuse stress.

Not every technique works for everyone and every "body" to manage stress. The work involved in stress management comes in figuring out what helps YOU the most. Whatever works, works. The good news is that this really is a go-to site for finding the right fit for you. There are so many strategies to help manage stress here that you're bound to find the sweet spot.

Here you'll find the best of the best techniques and insights to help you manage stress - and it's ALL STRESS!!! You'll  learn effective strategies to manage stress such as diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, visualization, mindfulness, humor, exercise, healthy eating, and (my favorite)  hypnosis - just to name a few! 

I like easy and quick methods to manage stress, so that's what you'll find here.  As with anything else in life, habits get easier with practice. You can retrain your brain to manage stress - and it all boils down to stress.  You can do this!

Manage Stress Before It Manages You... I’m confident that you'll find helpful resources to equip you with the right tools to help you face and transcend life's challenges. Whether you’re struggling with weight loss, smoking cessation, pain relief, stress management, and so on, it's important that you know you don’t have to be alone on this journey. I'm here to support you every step of the way! LISTEN TO THIS ANXIETY RELIEF HYPNOSIS AUDIO>>>

The Starfish Story

You've probably heard this story before, but I really enjoy it every time I read it. I hope you will, too.  Here it goes… ~ Once upon a time, there was an old man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach every morning before he began his work. Early one morning, he was walking along the shore after a big storm had passed and found the vast beach littered with starfish as far as the eye could see, stretching in both directions.

Off in the distance, the old man noticed a small boy approaching.  As the boy walked, he paused every so often and as he grew closer, the man could see that he was occasionally bending down to pick up an object and throw it into the sea.  The boy came closer still and the man called out, “Good morning!  May I ask what it is that you are doing?”

The young boy paused, looked up, and replied, “Throwing starfish into the ocean. The tide has washed them up onto the beach and they can’t return to the sea by themselves,” the youth replied. “When the sun gets high, they will die, unless I throw them back into the water.”

The old man replied, “But there must be tens of thousands of starfish on this beach. I’m afraid you won’t really be able to make much of a difference.”

The boy bent down, picked up yet another starfish and threw it as far as he could into the ocean. Then he turned, smiled and said, “It made a difference to that one!” ~

 ~Adapted from The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley (1907 – 1977)

I've never known anyone to just wake up one day and magically be stress-free. What I do know is that by committing to practice one simple relaxation technique or tackling one little task on your to-do list adds up day by day. There's a cumulative effect to managing stress.  Taking mini steps every day to manage stress amounts to feeling great.  There won't be a designated day when you'll say, "Yes, this was the day when my stress got under control." But, after some practice, there will come a realization that somewhere along the way, things just got better. hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis hypnosis