Engineering your trail running brain to run easier

Hypnotherapist Mimi Jamieson offers up some fascinating insight

Hypnotherapy is a form of therapy that involves communicating with a person’s subconscious mind. The idea is to tap into the subconscious mind in order to alter how a person behaves in a given circumstance. I think it’s likely clear at this point how hypnotherapy could help a person like a trail runner in their sport, especially when it comes to any sort of mental hangups.

Mimi Jamieson is a BA graduate of Psychology, and a Hypnotherapist and Sex therapist from Victoria, BC, and joined me on the podcast to discuss the potential benefits of hypnotherapy for trail runners. She mentioned that any one of us is capable of tapping into our own subconscious, just many of us lack the ability to get there on our own, and that’s where a hypnotherapist can help. Mimi spoke about how she uses hypnosis and hypnotherapy to help her patients.

Ep. 2 How can Hypnotherapy help me run? With Mimi Jamieson

“I utilize hypnosis to get to the deeper parts of the subconscious mind to make really deep, lasting change… working on positive suggestions. I utilize various modalities of psychotherapy in hypnosis to create those beneficial changes.”

Mimi spoke about how traditional forms of therapy only involve the conscious mind and this is why hypnotherapy can be beneficial as well, as it goes deeper than the conscious mind. This allows a person to get to the root of the issue and change how they feel in that scenario in the future (think less coping skills and more just getting rid of the thought before it even enters).

“Communicating with the subconscious parts (of the brain) to train them, to teach them an alternative way of dealing with life stressors, or triggers, and that's ultimately how the change really happens.”

Mind Engineer

Mimi was a great guest on the podcast as well, make sure to give a listen to hear direct from her!

It seems kind of wild that we could train our brains to avoid negative thoughts entirely. Imagine running (insert your flavour of distance here) and never having those kinds of negative thoughts creep in at all? The hypnotherapist can help you achieve this incredible feat of subconscious strength.

How?

Training of course!

It’s not a one-time thing. You won’t be sat in front of a stopwatch and told you are getting sleepy. You will need to commit some time and energy to it. Nothing crazy though, most people require 6 sessions over 6 weeks that are 1 hour each, though sometimes more sessions are necessary.

“Using hypnosis prior to doing that long race, I communicate with the subconscious to be able to tuck away and avoid going down those dark pathways while on the run. The idea would be that you wouldn't even have any dark thoughts. We would do the deep programming.”

If deep programming and avoiding dark thoughts intrigues you, I’m right there with you. Mimi described what she does as a hypnotherapist as akin to being a mind engineer.

“That’s essentially what it is, we are programming (your mind). Imagine that you are the engineer and you're sitting in, and programming your mind. I get to be the programmer. I get to say, okay, while this body is running, while it is doing the race, the door, the gateway to these dark thoughts or negatively imposing thoughts will be locked. They won't even enter this body during that run.”

Hypnotherapy has a wide range of uses and it seems that helping a person run could certainly be one of them. The mind is an incredible thing and I love learning about anything people are using to find success. The idea we can shut out negative thoughts from entering by simply training ourselves (and our subconscious) is awesome!

What do you think? What are some mental training tips and tricks that you would offer up?

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