A whole swathe of people have discovered the benefits of mindfulness during lockdown and it’s been great to hear stories about how this enforced pause helped people to connect with and start their own mindfulness practice.
We know that mindfulness can help people deal with a range of conditions, and now there’s new research to show that when you combine mindfulness with hypnotherapy it can have a particularly positive effect on stress levels.
Medical News Today shared the findings of researchers at Baylor University in Texas, which revealed that hypnotherapy can help to make mindfulness more accessible to those who want to practice it.
According to the researchers, using hypnosis alongside mindfulness makes it quicker for people to develop the mindfulness skills that can prove so useful in dealing with everything from stress to anxiety.
Study co-author Dr Gary Elkins explained that hypnosis and mindfulness are highly complementary treatments, because they both involve focusing attention.
He commented: “Combining mindfulness and hypnotherapy in a single session is a novel intervention that may be equal to or better than existing treatments, with the advantage of being more time effective, less daunting and easier to use.”
Although the study in the US only involved 42 participants, it revealed that the individuals who received hypnotherapy alongside mindfulness kept up with their practice almost daily across the eight weeks of the study.
They also reported an average satisfaction level of 8.9 out of 10 when asked about the process and reported much lower levels of stress than those who were in the control group and not practicing mindfulness.
We know all about the benefits of both mindfulness and hypnotherapy and use both these techniques to help people with a range of mental health challenges.
We offer hypnotherapy in Wimbledon, as well as virtually and elsewhere in London, to help people cope with everything from anxiety disorders and panic attacks to acute phobias and pain management.
Mindfulness therapy is another part of our offering, and is known to help people who are struggling with anxiety, stress, recurrent depression, eating disturbances, grief, relationship breakdowns, panic attacks and substance misuse.
Both hypnotherapy and mindfulness could be therapies many more people want to explore in the coming months given the additional stress we are all under following the global Covid-19 pandemic and other major world events.
As an article for Woman&Home recently noted, none of us are born with anxiety, it is behaviour that we learn throughout our lives and therefore it’s behaviour that we can unlearn, often with some help.
When you use hypnotherapy to treat anxiety, you’re not only trying to remove the anxiety itself, but to enable that person to have control over their anxieties and emotions.
Sheila Granger, an internationally renowned hypnotherapist, explained the concept to the publication. She said that hypnotherapy “looks to almost upgrade somebody’s thinking about something and more importantly, how somebody reacts to something”.
She added that, with anxiety, “it’s mainly about accepting that we cannot change what is happening around us”.
Comments