More depth: what to do to live more deeply
Wanting more depth in your life can be about your relationships, conversations, work and even finding people to have more depth with. But what is "more depth" anyway? And how do you achieve it? In this blog, we take a closer look at it.
More depth in your relationship
Let's start with many people's greatest desire, which is to have a relationship with depth. A relationship where you can have good conversations, do things together that you both care about and where you are completely happy with your soulmate.
After all, what makes you succeed in forming a deep relationship with someone? Research shows that when other people push you to enter into a relationship with someone, it is not helpful for the depth of that relationship. Especially not if you are still young and basically just responded to peer pressure[1].
The depth of a relationship is also about the intimacy you share with each other—and for once, I’m not talking about the kind that happens between the sheets. The way you form attachments also influences how you interact with your partner. Research shows that people who can form secure attachments to others and those with a “preoccupied” attachment style often demonstrate greater commitment and are able to have more meaningful conversations with their partner than people with other attachment styles.
With anxious attachment, you're often a little further away from your partner and may take longer to answer a question.
What is interesting is that people with anxious or preoccupied attachment are more likely to express fears[2].
Therefore, to get more depth in a relationship, take a look at your own way of attachment and that of your partner to see if there is a possible cause there in what does not feel like a deep relationship to you right now.
With hypnosis and mindfulness, you can do a lot to deepen your relationship. For example, by doing something together while being mindful—that is, keeping your thoughts in the here and now—you can already strengthen the bond in your relationship, which in turn can lead to greater depth.
In addition, you can use hypnosis to find out what beliefs you have about what constitutes depth in a relationship and to what extent you can influence this yourself. You can then use hypnosis techniques to practice, for example, ways to get more depth in your relationship or to look at your relationship in a different way. The latter is especially useful if you find out during hypnosis that your relationship is actually deep enough already.
More depth in conversations
Having conversations with your loved one is one thing, but you also have friends you talk to and may want to have more depth with. Research shows that girlfriends are more likely than friends to talk about intimate matters and everyday things.
For example, women talk more deeply among themselves about their family and personal matters than men do when they are among themselves.
Men actually talk about sports more often and more deeply than women when they are among themselves.
Men generally talk about personal topics, sociocultural topics and activities when they are among themselves.
Women generally talk about family matters, personal topics and worldly matters (such as things you want) when they are among themselves[3].
So as a man, do you now talk mostly about sports, but would like to talk about society? Then know that for men this is quite a normal topic that you can broach from time to time. Be careful though, political affiliations can deepen friendships, especially if there are similarities, but they can also cause you to become alienated from each other if you have no similarities.
Research also shows that people may fear uncomfortable feelings when deepening conversations with strangers, but this was not too bad in the end. People often have certain expectations about the importance people place on information one exposes about themselves. They often underestimate how important other people think it is.
Not being able to properly assess another person can hinder you from adding depth to a conversation[4].
So sometimes for deeper conversations you just have to take a leap of faith and see where the ship runs aground, it just might be that your conversations with friends and strangers can be much more profound than you think. If only you give them the chance.
Hypnosis can help you identify and remove any mental blocks you may have that prevent you from deepening a conversation.
More depth in life
In addition to deep relationships and deep conversations, you may also want more depth in your life in general. Depth in your life is often about giving meaning to your life[5].
It's not that your life can only be meaningful in one way[6].
What is often the case is that you can become happy in two ways. Namely, by just doing fun things and by doing meaningful things. Just doing fun things often works well to be happy in the short term, but if you find that you want more depth in your life, it is important to pay attention to the second way to be happy.
Then you want to do something you can say, "I did something good for the humanity/people around me."
Helping people, for example, is a way to add depth to your life. For example, you see that many people take the training at Hypnosis Institute Netherlands because they want to help other people with all kinds of problems.
Sometimes with problems they have overcome themselves
And sometimes with problems people around them have had.
Now, of course, you don't have to go straight into training and become a coach or hypnotherapist to gain more depth in your life.
You can also look into volunteering. In nursing homes and hospitals, you’ll often find people who bring a cup of tea or coffee to patients and visitors. This is work that allows you to make people’s stay just a little bit better.
Then you can also help out at the food bank.
Or you can look in your community for people who need help or in whom you can reduce loneliness .
Then there may be school students who would benefit from your knowledge and you can help them with homework or something similar.
Are you more into animals? In animal shelters, they are often also looking for caretakers to keep the animals social.
At first glance, these things may seem like mostly extra work, but you get satisfaction instead of money in return.
These may even be activities you can do with your partner or friends to gain more depth in your relationships that way as well.
No one to have depth with
This, of course, is very unfortunate. The research on deepening conversations already revealed that many people do not dare to enter into depth with strangers, while even strangers often have no problem with this.
So here, too, you might ask yourself: Is it really that you have no one to provide depth, or is it that you don’t expect depth from anyone around you? In that case, hypnosis can help you identify your beliefs and discover how to find more depth in your relationships or how to meet new people with whom you can share a deeper connection.
In addition, you can also check out places that are meaningful and where you can volunteer to find like-minded people who are also seeking more depth in their lives.
Who knows what you might encounter.
Hypnosis can help you gain more depth in your life by looking at the beliefs you have about yourself and other people. In particular, working with your expectations can play a big role in this to still get more depth in your life.
In addition, you can work on your bonding in your relationships so that you dare to open yourself up more and thus create more depth.
Want to know how hypnosis works and how it can help you? Then come join a free online masterclass.
Or register right away for one of our seminars or trainings. Then at least you will already find people who want to learn more about developing themselves and/or helping other people.
You get right to work with techniques to make yourself and others feel better.
Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:
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