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What Hypnotherapy Is Used For
Hypnotherapy is the process of creating new associations for a thought pattern or behavior. It can be used practically to help a person change thought patterns and behaviors in many ways, including:
- Changing habits
- Overcoming health problems
- Managing stress and anxiety
- Relieving pain
- Overcoming fears and phobias
- Improving athletic or professional performance
- Overcoming depression
- Creating life changes
Changing Habits
Most people who use hypnotherapy seek it for help changing habits, especially habits that they see as bad or unhelpful. Habits are directly related to mental associations. For one reason or another, a person views something destructive as helpful, or, conversely, something helpful as destructive. As a result, that person seeks out the destructive activity or avoids the helpful activity over and over again.
In dealing with habits, hypnosis seeks to help people see things as they are—the destructive as destructive, and the helpful as helpful. Because common sense agrees with this premise, the mind often accepts these suggestions willingly and changes its associations, thereby allowing hypnosis to cure a person of his bad habit.
Smoking
One of the most common reasons that people currently use hypnotherapy is for help quitting smoking. Many people who had been smoking multiple packs of cigarettes a day have successfully stopped their habit via hypnotherapy. Hypnosis can also effectively help break habits of pipe and cigar smoking and tobacco chewing.
During a typical session, the hypnotherapist takes into account what appeals most to the subject about stopping his habit and makes suggestions intended to break the
habit. Examples of suggestions hypnotherapists use include:
- Enjoying a new, healthier life with clear lungs, clean teeth, and full breath
- Appreciating the freedom of letting go of a painful habit
- Finding new, joyful ways to relieve stress and relax
- Finding new, positive ways to socialize
- Realizing fully the consequences of each inhalation of smoke when thinking of the habit
As the mind begins to generate new thoughts about smoking, the impulse and compulsion to smoke begins to fade away. The subject frees himself of the desire to smoke and eventually the habit of smoking.
Diet and Eating Habits
Each person has an individual idea of what food is, what food is used for, and how much food is good for her body. These ideas create eating habits that can be either healthy or unhealthy. Circumstances in which eating habits can cause difficulties include:
- Eating to excess
- Eating for emotional fulfillment rather than to satisfy hunger
- Habitually eating foods that cause health problems
Through hypnotherapy, a person can effectively change her diet by changing the associations she has about food. In a hypnotic state, a subject can receive suggestions about:
- Which foods will appeal to her
- What circumstances will cause her to think about food
- How she will know that she has eaten enough
- How she thinks about her body
When successful, the subject reconditions her mind to have a healthy outlook about her body and diet.
Although hypnotherapy can be a helpful aid in changing a person’s eating habits, it has limits. Sometimes, people come to hypnotherapists looking to achieve “ideal” body forms that are not possible without intense dieting or physical training. If the person seeks a fitness-model body and not just more general health, she will not likely be able to achieve it through hypnosis alone.
Exercise Habits
Often coupled with work on changing eating habits, hypnotherapy for exercise habits offers another way to achieve health and balance. People who lack motivation to work out can successfully use their subconscious minds to change their ideas about physical activity.
A person who comes to a hypnotherapist to change his exercise habits may be told to visualize an exercise program that he enjoys and that he can maintain within his lifestyle. The hypnotherapist uses suggestion and positive imagery to help focus the person toward realizing his exercise goals. For example, the therapist may suggest that the person:
- Attend a fitness class three times a week
- Awaken refreshed at an appropriate time so that he can work out
- Appreciate the feelings during and after exercise
- Seek out and discover enjoyable forms of exercise
- Respect the limits of the body and learn to exercise without pain
- Appreciate the health benefits that accompany the exercise program
In some cases, for both diet and exercise, a person may have a strong negative association toward change because of a previous incident or memory. In these instances, regressive hypnotherapy to deal with the memory can be helpful for creating the change as well.
Nail Biting
The act of nursing creates a strong connection between a mother and her child, and associations of love, protection, and reassurance. As a result of these associations, some children suck their thumbs when they wish to stimulate these same feelings. As they grow into adults, nail biting often takes the place of thumb sucking. Stopping nail biting, therefore, generally requires creating a new association for feeling reassured.
Suggestive hypnotherapy, regressive hypnotherapy, and positive imagery all can help a subject find a productive way to deal with worry so that his energy doesn’t translate into biting his nails (or other unhelpful habits). The suggestions made during hypnotherapy can help the subject to:
- Feel more confident throughout the day
- Associate nail biting strongly with the painful, chapped fingers that it causes
- Find helpful ways to deal with worry as it arises
Overcoming Health Problems
Many patients who take a sugar pill but are told that it is medication experience the same healing and pain relief as patients who take actual medication. This phenomenon, called the placebo effect, has been verified by many scientific studies. The placebo effect works because of belief: if a patient believes that she is getting better, different messages are sent throughout her mind and body. Patients who believe that they are getting better often:
- Relax
- Experience less stress about their condition
- Have lower levels of stress hormones (e.g., cortisol, epinephrine)
- Have higher levels of “feel good” hormones (e.g., endorphin)
- Have an increased immune response
All of these effects in turn aid the body’s natural ability to heal itself. Hypnotherapy draws on the placebo effect without the need for a sugar pill. Through suggestion and/or positive imagery, the subject feels less pain and starts to believe that she is indeed getting better. This belief leads to the thoughts, behaviors, and body changes that naturally help in healing. Many medical professionals have used hypnosis effectively as a primary or secondary treatment. Among the conditions that hypnotherapy has helped are:
- Migraine headaches
- Digestive complications (e.g., ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, Crohn’s disease)
- Psychosomatic disorders
- Skin conditions (e.g., eczema, herpes, neurodermatitis, pruritus, psoriasis, warts)
- Allergies
- Bed-wetting
- Tooth-grinding
- Sexual difficulties (e.g., premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, anorgasmia)
- Insomnia
- High blood pressure
In each case, suggestive, regressive, and positive imagery techniques can all be helpful processes. When suffering from physical ailments, patients should speak to their hypnotherapists about their condition to explore the options for using hypnosis as part of their treatment.
Managing Stress and Anxiety
Stress and anxiety exist as associations in a person’s mind. When a person feels threatened by the conditions around him, he has a stress reaction. Each time the person sees something that reminds him of the situation, his association recalls the stress response, and he feels tense. People can perceive all kinds of situations as stressful, including:
- Pressures at work
- Difficulties in relationships
- Life transitions (e.g., a new job, marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, relocation)
- Unexpected life changes
- Holidays
- Health concerns
Feelings of stress affect the body as well as the mind. Physical symptoms that may accompany stress include:
- High blood pressure
- Weakened immune system
- Insomnia
- Headaches
- Digestive problems
- Sexual dysfunction
- Menstrual/fertility difficulties
Hypnotherapy is a proven method for helping people to
relax and let go of stress and the physical symptoms that
accompany it. In order to achieve even a light state of hyp-
nosis, a person must relax. Therefore, any successful session
of hypnosis helps the person release tension in his body and/or mind. People who relax in hypnosis experience:
- Lowered blood pressure
- Lowered levels of cortisol (a hormone that the body releases in response to stress; high cortisol levels are linked with numerous physical diseases)
- Coherent heart rhythms
- Smooth and even breathing
- Normalized metabolism
The health benefits of hypnosis for stress management can be extended beyond the session as well. Sessions of hypnotherapy designed to help people to deal with stress include posthypnotic suggestions. The hypnotherapist will generally instruct the subject to:
- Remember how it feels to be relaxed
- Remember how she can reach that state
- Go through the same process to reach the same level of relaxation when experiencing the stress
When hypnotherapy is effective, the subject will be able to reach the same level of relaxation at any point in life, especially situations that she had previously associated as stressful. Teaching the client self-hypnosis (see Special Uses of Hypnotherapy) can also help her with relaxation. In self-hypnosis, the subject learns to put herself into the hypnotic state. By using self-hypnosis as a primary way to respond to stress—as opposed to turning to harmful habits such as smoking and drinking—a person can both lessen her stress levels and curb her habits.
Relieving Pain
The sensation of pain is unique to each individual. Two different people can be stuck with the same needle in the same place and each report different levels of pain. In many ways, pain is determined not so much by the message from the body to the brain but by the mind’s interpretation of what that message means.
Because the mind plays such a fundamental role in feeling pain, working with the mind, such as during hypnosis, can change the person’s experience of how much pain he senses. Through hypnosis, a person can reduce or even eliminate his feelings of pain. Both the American Medical Association and the American Dental Association have approved hypnosis as an effective method for dealing with pain. Common uses for hypnosis in pain relief include:
- Surgery
- Childbirth
- Injury
- Chronic conditions
Surgery
Before the discovery of chemical anesthesia, surgeons often prepared their patients for their procedures with hypnosis alone—a process called hypnoanesthesia. Today, it is more common to use hypnosis as a supplement to chemical anesthesia. Benefits of using hypnosis for surgical procedures include the following:
- Patients often require significantly lower levels of chemical anesthetic.
- Patients are often able to stay awake and relaxed for the entire procedure.
- Patients experience faster recovery times.
Not every patient experiences the same effects while under hypnoanesthesia, just as not every patient experiences the same effect while under chemical anesthesia. Patients should speak to their surgeons and their hypnotherapists about whether hypnosis might be helpful.
Childbirth
Hypnosis has gained particular popularity as a means of dealing with the pains from labor and childbirth. The techniques of hypnobirthing (using hypnosis to aid in childbirth) offer the following benefits:
- Mothers are less likely to have to take drugs
- Mothers are more likely to stay relaxed
- Mothers are more likely to have faster recovery times
Hypnobirthing can involve several different techniques. While in the earlier stages of the pregnancy, the hypnotherapist can hypnotize the mother and use positive imagery to have her visualize and create the conditions of a successful, pain-free birth. Additionally, the mother may be hypnotized on the day of the birth with appropriate suggestions to minimize the pain she feels.
Pain from Injuries and Chronic Conditions
Often, a person’s reactions to pain make his condition worse than it already is. When a person experiences something painful, he generally:
- Tenses up
- Focuses on the sensations in the painful area
- Worries about what is going to happen in the future
- Grows upset about what caused the condition
Each of these reactions creates additional stress in the person’s body and mind. The increased stress can, in turn, intensify his experience of the pain, and he might enter a vicious cycle: feeling pain, having a stress response, feeling more pain, having more of a stress response, and on and on. Hypnosis can end this cycle by helping to:
- Relax the body, especially the muscles around the painful area
- Direct the attention away from the painful area
- Focus the mind on positive ideas for healing the pain
This process can be very effective in lessening and sometimes even eliminating the pain caused by all kinds of conditions. Some examples of painful conditions hypnosis can help are:
- Back pain
- Dental pain
- Pulled or strained muscles
- Broken bones
- Burns
- Cuts
- Arthritis
- Headaches and migraines
Overcoming Fears and Phobias
Fears and phobias often arise as a result of specific mem-ory associations. While growing up, a person interprets certain things that happen in life as threatening to her survival. Because survival is a basic instinct, the person naturally develops a negative association with the conditions that were around her at the time and a fear of the conditions coming about again.
Hypnotherapy has successfully treated all kinds of phobias, including fears of:
- Public speaking
- The dark
- Animals
- Bridges
- Heights
- Failure
- Death
Suggestive Hypnotherapy for Phobias
Under hypnosis, the subject receives suggestions that substitute the present phobia with a positive association. For example, if a subject is afraid of flying, a hypnotherapist might be able to instruct him to actually relax when thinking about flying and focus on:
- The freedom that flying brings
- The spectacular views from the sky
- The joy of being with family in other parts of the world
These suggestions would be customized according to what most interested and benefited the subject. When the process succeeds, the subject begins to think of flying as an exciting opportunity rather than a threatening attack.
Regressive Hypnotherapy for Phobias
Regressive hypnotherapy can also help with phobias. In regressive hypnosis, a subject tries to return to the time in his life when the phobia began. When he experiences the memory in a safe and therapeutic way, the fear that resulted from the memory lessens and can be eliminated.
Overcoming Depression
Much depression arises as a result of a person’s patterns of thought. These patterns of thought can involve:
- Internalizing anger
- Fearing the world and other people
- Not feeling adequate to life’s circumstances
- Seeing oneself as completely alone
- Telling oneself that conditions are hopeless and unmanageable
When these thoughts repeat within a person’s mind, he can experience feelings of:
- Sadness
- Frustration
- Loneliness
- Fear
- Anger
- Lack of control
These feelings can result in a person being depressed. A person can often deal with depression by changing the way that he thinks—also known as cognitive restructuring. Hypnosis can help bring about this change in the way a person thinks about his problems. The process of creating new patterns of thought under hypnosis can involve:
- Connecting the person to sources of joy
- Suggesting that the person will be aware of and appreciate positive-feeling states as they arise
- Supporting the person’s attempt to find closure and/or forgiveness for past hurts
- Directing the person’s attention to positive and enjoyable thought processes
Improving Performance
Whatever a person may be doing for work, sport, or leisure, there are always ways that she can develop her skills and become more proficient. Practicing a skill leads to improvement in the skill—but it’s perhaps less obvious that the practice itself can be improved as well.
Scientific studies have proven the benefits of visualization. Basketball players who visualize successful free throws in their practice improve at a greater rate than those players who practice without the visualizations. People who visualize working out have actually shown increases in muscle density without exercising at all. Through positive imagery work and suggestion in hypnosis, a person can
improve performance of any kind. With the aid of visualization, people have learned to, among other things:
- Relax while under pressure
- Increase production
- Improve relationships with coworkers
- Find creative solutions
- Hit a golf ball straighter and farther
- Swing a golf club or a baseball bat more smoothly
Creating Life Changes
Virtually everything that we create in life starts as ideas. From ideas, we:
- Begin careers
- Develop relationships
- Learn skills
- Find creative responses and solutions
- Make art, music, dance, and other creations
- Plan vacations and other activities
By working with the mind, as in hypnosis, a person can clarify and develop his ideas. For example, if a person wishes to find a new career, in a relaxed and focused state of mind he can fully identify his own individual talents and interests. Then, working with his deeper associations, the person can find creative ways to develop these interests and engage them in the world.
Working with life changes in hypnotherapy generally involves using positive imagery techniques. Through these techniques, the subject develops an exciting and realistic vision for his life, which is reinforced through suggestion. The excitement of the vision creates the momentum to aid the subject in accomplishing his goal.
Summary of Hypnotherapy Techniques
The following table summarizes the conditions that can be treated with hypnosis and the hypnotic techniques most often used to treat them.
Condition |
Most Commonly Used Forms of Hypnotherapy |
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Stress or pain |
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Fears and phobias |
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Smoking |
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Unhealthy eating or exercise habits |
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Nail biting and other “bad habits” |
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Performance problems |
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Insomnia |
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Migraines |
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General health issues |
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Sexual performance problems |
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Childbirth pains |
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Post-traumatic stress |
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Difficulty building relationships |
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Difficulty achieving personal goals |
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Depression |
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| Acknowledgments & Disclaimer |
