As the seasons turn to fall, it seems inevitable that we start thinking about the holiday season. For some people, this is an exciting time filled with decorating and cooking fancy meals. For many people, it's a challenging time filled with family dynamics like split custody, separation from loved ones, or past memories of hurt or loss. Most people fall somewhere in the middle.

Why the Holidays Bring Up Winter Blues and Seasonal Stress

The holiday season also falls during the darkest time of the year, when mood can dip, the days are short, and it's dark by the time you head home from work. All of this can add up to lower mood and higher stress, a pattern many people recognize as the winter blues or seasonal stress.

If you struggle with feeling down during the holiday season, you are not alone. Many people even feel guilt about having these winter blues. With so much to be thankful for, we can feel guilty for wanting something different. Or we can feel regret about past situations or choices that led us to our current reality.

Even those who look forward to the holidays can be overwhelmed with stress and anxiety about getting everything done, making sure no one feels left out (an impossible task), and the extra financial strain that can come with this time of year.

What Gets Lost in the Holiday Rush

What often gets lost in the hustle and bustle of the holidays is the true meaning: a focus on gratitude and appreciation, of love and connection (even if that's with yourself), and slowing down to enjoy the moment that is, not the one you think you should be having.

I have struggled myself for years with a sense of holiday blues, or the feeling that something is missing in my life, or in myself, that would bring the joy I see depicted in holiday shows. It's easy to feel like you're broken or there's something wrong with you when all around you, you're being told to be having SO MUCH FUN from November through January (a season that, honestly, is best suited to being snuggled up in front of the fire). There are a lot of ways to celebrate the holidays, and that includes treating them like any other day. There's no wrong way to approach this season.

Join Me for Hypnosis for the Holidays

Because this issue is so near and dear to my heart, I'm hosting an online event this year: Hypnosis for the Holidays. We're getting this handled before Halloween, so you'll have plenty of time to apply the techniques and get centered before the holidays kick off.

During this 90 minute live online hypnosis event, we'll talk through common holiday triggers, family dynamics, stress, travel, and you'll experience a live hypnosis session tailored to our group. If you've been searching for holiday stress relief, seasonal depression support, or an online hypnosis event that actually meets you where you are this time of year, this is built for you.

Sunday, October 25, 2026 | 3:00 to 4:30 pm ET | Online via Zoom

$15 early registration (through October 8), $22 after

The hypnosis portion is recorded, and your camera can stay off.

Reserve your spot 

If you have any questions, or could use some one-to-one support in the meantime, feel free to schedule a free consultation to learn more about my modalities and how hypnosis can support you through the holiday season.

Wishing you a holiday season that feels happy for you.

You know what you need to do. You might have known for days, weeks, or longer. And still you find yourself doing anything else: scrolling, reorganizing, responding to emails that don't matter, suddenly becoming very interested in cleaning out a drawer.

Procrastination is one of those problems that feels like laziness from the outside and feels like torture from the inside.  You're spending enormous amounts of mental energy avoiding something while also feeling bad about avoiding it.

What Procrastination Actually Is

The standard model of procrastination treats it as a time management problem. Get a better system, break the task into smaller pieces, set a timer, use the two-minute rule. These strategies can help at the margins. But if your procrastination has real staying power, a strategy isn't what's missing.

Procrastination is usually an emotional regulation problem. The task you're avoiding triggers something uncomfortable. It might be fear of failure or fear of judgment (or even a fear of success). It might be perfectionism, which is its own form of anxiety. It might be the specific dread of starting something that requires sustained focus. It might be that the task is connected to something you have complicated feelings about.

Whatever the specific flavor, avoidance is your nervous system's way of temporarily escaping the discomfort. The temporary relief you get from not doing the thing is what keeps the pattern running. It works in the short term, so the brain keeps doing it.

Understanding this intellectually doesn't make it stop. If it did, everyone who'd ever read about procrastination would have solved it.

The Part You Can't Willpower Your Way Out Of

When procrastination has been a pattern for a long time, it becomes automatic. The avoidance behavior fires before the conscious decision-making part of your brain has fully come online. You're picking up your phone, opening a new tab, or finding something else to do before you've consciously chosen to.

And the emotional component underneath it is running in the subconscious. You might be aware of a vague dread around the task. But the specific belief or emotional charge driving the avoidance is often below the level of conscious awareness.

This is why telling yourself to "just do it" works only occasionally, and never for long. You're asking the conscious mind to override a subconscious pattern, and the subconscious usually has more horsepower.

What Hypnotherapy Targets

Hypnotherapy for procrastination works by going to the subconscious level where the pattern lives. There are a few different layers we might work on depending on what's driving yours.

The emotional charge underneath the avoidance. If the task is triggering fear of failure, fear of judgment, or some other uncomfortable emotion, we work with that emotion directly. Often it connects to older experiences and beliefs about your capability or worth. When that charge is reduced, the compulsive need to avoid the task reduces with it.

The association between the task and discomfort. The brain has learned that this kind of task equals this kind of feeling. That's a learned association, and learned associations can be changed. In trance, we can work with that connection and help the brain build a different, more neutral or even positive association with starting.

The identity piece. Some procrastination is connected to a self-concept: "I'm someone who struggles to focus" or "I've always been this way" or "I'm not disciplined." These identity-level beliefs can maintain the pattern even when surface-level strategies are helping. We address those directly.

Future pacing toward action. In the trance state, guided imagery can help your brain rehearse starting, working, finishing, and the way that feels. This creates a kind of neurological preview that makes the actual behavior easier to access.

A Note on Perfectionism

If your procrastination is driven by perfectionism, there may be a specific identity layer we need to work through. Perfectionism is usually a protection strategy: if I never fully commit to starting, I can never fully fail. The belief underneath it often has something to do with your value being conditional on your output.

That's not a strategy problem. That's an identity belief, and it's one that hypnotherapy and IEMT can address directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if I procrastinate on everything, not just one thing? Generalized procrastination often has a more central emotional or identity driver, rather than task-specific fear. It tends to respond well to hypnotherapy because we can work with the underlying pattern rather than each individual task.

Can this help with ADHD-related procrastination? Hypnotherapy can be a useful support for ADHD, but it works differently than it does for purely anxiety-driven procrastination. It can help with emotional regulation and focus, but it's not a substitute for ADHD-specific treatment. We can discuss your specific situation in the consultation.

How quickly will I notice a difference? Many clients notice something different within two to three sessions. A full shift in a longstanding pattern usually takes more time than that, but the early sessions often produce enough of a change to feel motivating.

I've tried every productivity system and nothing has stuck. Is this different? Yes, because it works at a different level. Productivity systems are conscious tools. They work if the subconscious is cooperative. Hypnotherapy addresses the subconscious pattern that's making the conscious tools ineffective.

Not sure which pattern is contributing to your procrastination? Take my quiz to help you narrow it down.

Ready to stop fighting with yourself over this? Book a free consultation. Let's get to what's actually driving the avoidance.

Identity Is Not Just Self-Image

When most people think about identity, they think about self-esteem or self-image. How you feel about yourself, whether you think you're good enough or worthy or capable.

But identity runs deeper than that.

Your identity is the set of beliefs your subconscious holds about who you fundamentally are. Not how you'd like to see yourself or how you present yourself to others but what you actually believe about what's possible for you.

These beliefs operate as a filter. Every piece of incoming information, every opportunity, every relationship, every version of yourself you could become, gets filtered through this subconscious identity. Things that match the filter feel natural and possible. Things that don't match it feel forced, fake, or just out of reach.

This is why you can know, consciously, that you're capable and still not feel capable.The conscious knowledge is there, but the subconscious belief hasn't been updated yet.

Where Identity Beliefs Come From

Identity beliefs aren't formed through logical reasoning. They're formed through experience, particularly early experience, and particularly experiences with emotional weight.

A childhood in which love felt conditional,  a parent or teacher who responded to your achievements with criticism, failures at a critical moment. Being told, explicitly or implicitly, that you were too much or not enough. That you needed to be different, or that certain things weren't for "people like you".

These experiences create conclusions. Not spoken conclusions but encoded ones.The subconscious files away something like: "This is who I am. This is what happens to people like me. This is what I can and cannot have."

And then those encoded beliefs run your life.

You don't experience them as beliefs. You experience them as reality. And that's what makes them so hard to change through willpower or positive thinking alone.

Why Affirmations Don't Work (Or Stop Working)

Affirmations are an attempt to update identity beliefs through conscious repetition. And sometimes they help, at least temporarily.

But they're working at the wrong level. You're using the conscious mind to try to overwrite a belief that lives in the subconscious. And if the subconscious belief is strong enough, it will simply reject the affirmation as false. You say "I am confident and capable" and some part of you immediately responds "no you're not." The stronger belief wins.

Lasting identity change requires working at the level of the belief.

How This Work Happens

IEMT works with those core conclusions you drew about yourself from significant experiences. Using guided eye movements, IEMT can help the brain reprocess these ideas and feelings.

Hypnotherapy creates access to the subconscious mind so you can continue to build positive associations to your authentic self. 

What clients often describe afterward isn't always a dramatic revelation. Things that felt impossible start to feel possible. The pull of old self-limiting behaviors weakens. The new version of themselves that they could only picture before starts to feel more like them.

The Gap Is Not Who You Are

The gap between who you are and who you want to be isn't evidence that you're not capable of change. It's evidence that you have beliefs about yourself that haven't caught up with what's actually true.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does identity change work take? It varies. Some clients notice significant shifts in a handful of sessions. Others with deeper or more complex imprints benefit from more extended work.

What if I don't know what my identity beliefs are? I can't point to a specific one. That's common. You don't need to be able to articulate them consciously. The subconscious knows where they are, and the work can proceed without you having a clear intellectual map of the territory.

Is this the same as inner child work? There's some overlap, but the approach is different. You will not be interacting with or visualizing your child self.

What if I've tried therapy and feel like I understand my patterns but can't change them? Understanding a pattern and changing it are different processes. Hypnotherapy and IEMT work at the level where change actually happens.

Ready to close the gap? Book a free consultation and let's talk about what identity-level work could look like for you.

It typically starts with one bad night. 

You might have something on your mind: a deadline, a difficult conversation, a worry. You lie awake longer than usual, watch the hours tick by, and eventually fall into a shallow, unsatisfying sleep. The next morning, you're tired and a little on edge.

And that's when the loop begins.

The Loop Explained

Here's what the stress-sleep cycle looks like in practice:

Stress disrupts sleep. An activated nervous system  (one running on stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline) is biologically incompatible with sleep. Sleep requires a shift into the parasympathetic nervous system (rest-and-digest). Anxiety keeps you in sympathetic mode (fight-or-flight). The two states are physiologically opposed.

Poor sleep amplifies stress. Sleep is when your brain processes the emotional residue of the day, consolidates memory, and literally clears metabolic waste. When that process is disrupted, your emotional regulation suffers. The amygdala (your brain's threat-detection center) becomes more reactive. Things that wouldn't bother you when rested suddenly feel urgent, threatening, or overwhelming.

Which creates more sleep disruption. Now you're lying in bed, more tense than yesterday, and that stress is making it harder to fall asleep (which is making the tension worse), which is making sleep harder.

Without intervention, this loop can persist for months or years. Many people develop an additional layer: anxiety about sleep itself. The bed becomes associated with wakefulness, frustration, and failure. The act of trying to sleep becomes its own stressor.

Why Standard Sleep Advice Often Isn't Enough

The conventional guidance for poor sleep is well-intentioned and not wrong: keep a consistent sleep schedule, avoid screens before bed, limit caffeine, make your bedroom cool and dark, practice a wind-down routine.

These are good suggestions. But they address the conditions for sleep, not the driver of the problem.

Stress, old patterns, and anxiety don't switch off at 10pm just because you've dimmed the lights and put your phone in another room. Optimizing your sleep environment will only get you so far. (And, most of my clients already have an excellent routine to prep them for sleep)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), while effective for many people, works primarily at the conscious level. It helps you identify and challenge the unhelpful thoughts about sleep ("I'll never be able to function tomorrow"). But it may not reach the underlying emotional charge that's generating those thoughts in the first place.

How Hypnotherapy Addresses Both Sides Simultaneously

This is where hypnotherapy offers something genuinely different: it works at the level where the loop is maintained.

The anxiety-sleep cycle is, at its core, a pattern that lives in the subconscious nervous system. It's not a rational calculation your mind is making. It's a conditioned response that happens automatically, beneath the level of conscious control.

Hypnotherapy accesses that subconscious level directly. In the deeply relaxed trance state, a skilled hypnotist can help you:

Retrain the nervous system's default mode. Through carefully crafted suggestions and guided imagery, the brain can be helped to recognize the sleep state as safe, familiar, and accessible, rather than effortful and uncertain.

Dissolve the emotional charge underneath the anxiety. Often, sleep anxiety is tangled up with other emotional patterns: a sense of not being in control, unprocessed worry, or even deeper beliefs about rest and worthiness. Hypnotherapy can address these root layers without requiring you to consciously articulate them.

Break the conditioned association between bed and wakefulness. If you've spent months lying in bed feeling anxious and frustrated, your brain has begun to associate that environment with those feelings. Hypnotherapy can help recode that association.

Reduce overall nervous system baseline. When your general anxiety level drops sleep becomes easier to reach and more restorative once you get there.

What Clients Typically Experience

Many clients notice changes within the first few sessions. Common reports include:

• Falling asleep more easily, with less mental chatter
• Waking less frequently during the night
• A reduction in the dread or anticipatory anxiety around bedtime
• Feeling more rested even before sleep duration increases significantly
• A gradual return of trust in their body's ability to sleep

Results vary, and hypnosis sn't a one-session fix for deeply entrenched insomnia. But for most people, addressing the subconscious root of the loop produces more durable change than symptom management alone.

The First Step

If you've been caught in the anxiety-sleep loop it's worth considering that the problem isn't your environment or your habits. It may be the underlying pattern driving the whole cycle.

Book a free consultation with to talk through what's happening with your sleep. I specialize in hypnosis for sleep issues. You may want to check out this client interview video, as well!