Losing weight can be frustrating, particularly when you feel as though you already know what you should be doing.

.Brain fog can be surprisingly frustrating. You know what you want to say, but the word won't come. You walk into a room and forget why you're there. You read the same paragraph twice without taking it in, lose your train of thought halfway through a conversation or find yourself struggling with tasks that would normally feel straightforward.

There are few things more frustrating than being tired all day, looking forward to going to bed and then finding that sleep simply won't come. You turn off the light, get comfortable and wait. Then your mind starts working. You think about tomorrow. You replay a conversation from earlier. You wonder why you aren't asleep yet. You check the time and start calculating how many hours of sleep you'll get if you fall asleep now.

A panic attack can be frightening, particularly when it seems to come from nowhere. Your heart may race. Your breathing may change. You might feel dizzy, shaky or unreal. Some people become convinced they are going to faint, lose control or that something terrible is about to happen.

If you've spent years going on diets, losing some weight and then gradually putting it back on again, the thought of starting another diet can feel exhausting. You may already know what you're supposed to eat. You probably don't need another list of forbidden foods or a complicated meal plan. What you may need instead is a different way of looking at weight loss. In my experience, lasting change is often less about following a diet and more about changing the everyday habits

We’ve all had those moments where we plan to exercise, but when the time comes, the sofa looks much more appealing.

Stress is a normal part of life. A certain amount can even be useful, helping you focus, respond quickly and deal with demanding situations.

If you've heard of Virtual Gastric Band hypnosis, you may be wondering exactly what it involves. Does it really make you feel as though you've had a gastric band fitted? Does anything physically happen to your stomach? And can hypnosis genuinely help you eat smaller portions?

Pregnancy can bring enormous excitement, but as the birth approaches it's also completely understandable to feel apprehensive about labour.

It's understandable, then, that so many people search for ways to "boost" their immune system — particularly during the winter months or at times when they feel run down. But there isn't a single food, vitamin, supplement or technique that can suddenly supercharge your immunity. A better way to think about it is supporting your immune system by looking after your health as a whole.

Living with ongoing pain can affect far more than the part of your body that hurts. It can interfere with sleep, drain your energy, limit the things you enjoy and, over time, affect your mood and confidence too.

Sleep anxiety is the fear or dread of not being able to sleep — and it's often worse than the sleeplessness itself. It tends to show up in one (or both) of these ways:

If you smoke and have been thinking about stopping, you probably don't need another lecture about why smoking is harmful. Most smokers already know the risks. Knowing you should stop and actually managing to do it, however, are two very different things.

Most of us know we probably shouldn't be on our phones late at night. And yet there we are — scrolling, checking, watching — telling ourselves we'll stop in just a few more minutes. If that sounds familiar, I want you to know that you are not failing at bedtime. You are caught in something that has been very carefully designed to keep you hooked.

It is one of the questions I am asked most often, and I understand why. Sleep is so fundamental to everything — mood, energy, health, concentration, resilience — that when it goes wrong, life can feel very difficult very quickly. And yet so many of the conventional approaches to insomnia either don't work, don't last, or simply don't reach the part of the mind where the problem actually lives.

The fear of public speaking is not really about speaking at all. At its root, it is about being seen and evaluated — and the subconscious mind's deeply held concern about what might happen if you are found wanting.

When you encounter something your brain perceives as a threat — whether that is a looming work deadline, a difficult conversation, or simply a relentless to-do list — your body activates what is commonly known as the fight-or-flight response.

If you live with irritable bowel syndrome, you may already have noticed that your symptoms don't always seem to follow a predictable pattern.

Anxiety has a way of creeping in quietly. It does not always announce itself with a full-blown panic attack. Sometimes it shows up as avoidance, overthinking, snapping at the people you love, or simply never feeling able to fully relax. Over my 25 years working with clients as a clinical hypnotherapist and psychotherapist, I have seen anxiety disguise itself in so many ways that people often do not realise it is running the show until they are absolutely exhausted by it.

I am asked this question more than almost any other. People come to me having tried meditation, or having heard about self-hypnosis, and they want to know — are they the same thing? Which one should I try? Will one work better than the other for what I am dealing with? They are great questions, and the honest answer is that while hypnosis and meditation share some common ground, they are quite different in how they work and what they are designed to do. Let me explain.