For many people, hypnosis is only seen as a trick used by magicians who get people up on stage and convince them into believing they have turned into a chicken. How hypnosis is viewed by the media might make it seem like it’s just for fun, but there’s far more to hypnosis than entertainment. In fact, hypnosis can be a great benefit to your health and wellbeing.
Hypnotherapy is one of many different types of therapy, and can be used as a psychological treatment to help you experience changes in sensations, perceptions, thoughts, or behaviour, and is performed by a trained, licensed healthcare professional, like a psychologist or a physician, and never a stage magician!
Hypnosis usually includes suggestions for relaxation, calmness, and overall well-being, which may last just during the session but can sometimes be reactivated later by the patient. Common approaches involve instructions to think about pleasant experiences or verbal cues to draw you into a trance-like state.
Here are four common health issues hypnosis can help:
1. Trouble Sleeping, Insomnia, and Sleepwalking
If you have sleep issues, hypnosis can help relax you and help you find restful sleep if you suffer from insomnia, or train you to wake up when you feel your feet hit the floor if you’re a sleepwalker.
Verbal cues from your hypnotherapist will put you in a trance-like state, which feels similar to when you’re that engrossed in a book or movie you remain unaware of what’s going on around you, to help you relax and find the restful state that allows you to fall asleep.
2. Anxiety
Relaxation techniques taught through hypnosis can help relieve the feelings of anxiety. It can be more effective in people whose anxiety stems from a chronic health condition, rather than a generalised anxiety disorder, but it can be useful in helping people who struggle with a phobia.
Hypnosis works to help anxiety by encouraging your body to activate its natural relaxation response through the use of a phrase or nonverbal cue, slowing breathing, lowering blood pressure, and instilling an overall sense of well-being.
3. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) Symptoms
Clinical studies have supported the effectiveness of hypnotherapy on IBS. It is an abdominal pain created by your bowels, and hypnosis can help improve the symptoms of constipation, diarrhoea, and bloating.
IBS can also cause secondary symptoms such as nausea, fatigue, backache, and urinary problems, and hypnosis can help with these too.
Hypnosis leads you through progressive relaxation, providing soothing imagery and sensations to combat your symptoms.
4. Quitting Smoking
Giving up cigarettes is not an easy task, and there are many methods to help kick the habit, such as nicotine patches or prescription medications. While the research is still vague about the effectiveness of hypnosis on smoking cessation, many people have found that hypnotherapy has helped them stop.
For hypnosis to work for smoking cessation, you need to truly want to quit smoking. Hypnosis can work in two ways. The first is to help you find a healthy, effective replacement action, and then guide your subconscious toward that habit, rather than smoking.
The second is to train your mind to associate smoking with undesirable feelings like a bad taste in your mouth or a foul odour from smoke.
Have questions about hypnosis and how it can help you? Talk to a hypnotherapist in Putney to arrange an appointment today.
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