Most clients are pursuing hypnotherapy for the first time. They are not only new to hypnosis but have no experience with meditation, guided imagery or progressive relaxation. Most want to overcome long-term personal challenges with weight, stress, addiction or fear.
There is a common thread of frustration when clients discuss their situations: dieters fail; medications, at best, are just symptom management; and traditional talk therapy is often described as a constant reminder of the problem with no sustainable solutions. New clients may not know much about hypnotherapy but they have a really good idea of what hasn’t work so far.
Important components to success with hypnotherapy involve comfort and trust. If new clients are comfortable with the practitioner, the surroundings and trust that this individual is acting in their best interest, then chances of a positive client experience are greatly enhanced.
My sessions run about 20 minutes. With clients wearing Bose noise-cancelling headphones, my voice is evenly mixed with soothing music and nature sounds delivered through a high-end audio system. It’s during this relaxed, receptive level of thought, where positive supportive suggestions and imagery can become quickly rooted.
The initial advantage of hypnotherapy over other modalities is that it feels really good. Overwhelmed, stressed-out clients typically experience deeper relaxation than they’ve experienced in a long time, on the initial visit.
Another even more significant advantage is the meditative effect. People who routinely meditate are more relaxed, focused and mindfully aware of what is important to them. They don’t act impulsively, they make better choices, and they are happier, healthier and live longer. Think of hypnotherapy as goal-oriented meditation.
In fact, most clients experience unexpected freedom, clarity and relief in areas unrelated to what they came to fix because of this meditative effect. In general, they are more relaxed and confident which usually translates into better communication with others and a sense of feeling more in control. Clients also typically report increased depth and quality sleep; awakening more refreshed and energized.
My clients get an MP3 recording of each session for home reinforcement which they can access with their phone. By listening to sessions on a daily basis this relaxing, mindful perspective becomes their new baseline, making it much easier to succeed with their goals. [contact]
by: Paul Gustafson RN CH
Paul reviews how his clients experience meditative benefits as well.
When I’m stressed, I listen to a 20-minute mindfulness meditation tape. It always helps me feel calmer and more relaxed. Many meditative practices can do this.
Mindfulness meditation is getting a lot of attention because it seems to help with so many physical and psychological problems—like high blood pressure, chronic pain, psoriasis, sleep trouble, anxiety, and depression.
It’s also been shown to boost immune function and stop binge eating. No one knows for sure what’s behind these benefits, but physical changes in the brain probably play a role.
Mindfulness meditation is a mental discipline. You start by focusing your attention on your breath, a sensation in the body, or a chosen word or phrase.
You note the thoughts, emotions, and background sounds that arise from moment to moment, observing them without analyzing them or making judgments about what’s going on around you.
If you drift into thoughts about the past or concerns about the future, you bring your attention back to the present, for example, by refocusing on your breathing. It takes practice.
A new study, published in the May 2011 issue of Neuroimage, suggests that one effect of all this focusing and refocusing is increased brain connectivity. Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles compared the brain activity of volunteers who had finished eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction training with that of volunteers who did not do such training.
Functional MRI scans showed stronger connections in several regions of the meditators’ brains—especially those associated with attention and auditory and visual processing.
Unfortunately, the study didn’t scan the volunteers’ brains before mindfulness training, so no one can say for sure that mindfulness training was responsible for the differences.
At Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers used MRI scans to document before and after changes in the brain’s gray matter—the “processing” neurons—associated with mindfulness meditation.
The density of gray matter increased in regions governing such distinctly different activities as memory, self-awareness, and compassion, and decreased in the amygdala—the part of the brain associated with fear and stress.
We covered this intriguing research in the April issue of Harvard Women’s Health Watch.
At the moment, scientists can only speculate about the relationship between these brain changes and the health benefits associated with mindfulness meditation.
But the research adds to growing evidence that meditative practices can alter the body at a fundamental level—even, it turns out, at the level of our genes.
Meditation elicits the “relaxation response,” a state of deep relaxation first described more than 35 years ago by mind-body pioneer Dr. Herbert Benson, currently emeritus director of the Benson-Henry Institute of Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Since then, Benson and his colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have discovered that relaxation techniques (including meditation and yoga) turn certain sets of genes on and off in people who practice them regularly.
Benson, who is the medical editor of Stress Management: Approaches for preventing and reducing stress says these genes are involved with controlling “how the body handles free radicals, inflammation processes, and cell death.”
By: Carolyn Schatz
The intervention is called mindful hypnotherapy. “Mindfulness is a type of meditation that involves focusing attention on present moment awareness.
It can help people cope with stress, but can require months of practice and training,” said researcher Gary Elkins, Ph.D., director of the Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory at Baylor University.
“Hypnosis also involves focusing attention, but it includes mental imagery, relaxation and suggestions for symptom reduction.”
Hypnosis interventions are typically brief and have been used in pain and symptom management in clinical practice. The study’s basic premise is that using hypnosis to deliver mindfulness goals could have many advantages, Elkins said.
“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,” he said. “This could be a valuable option for treating anxiety and stress reduction.”
As a brief intervention, mindful therapy could be widely disseminated and is an innovative new mind-body therapy. The study is published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.
Elkins noted that while mindfulness by itself can be an effective treatment for stress and anxiety for some people, it typically is provided in eight weekly sessions that last two hours or more each week and include an
all-day retreat of eight or more hours.
That amount of time, more than 24 therapy hours, may be a burden in cost and time for some people. Also, research has not shown that mindfulness-based treatments are consistently superior to standard cognitive behavioral therapy, he said.
For the study of mindful hypnotherapy, the Baylor research team recruited 42 individuals with self-reported high stress. Half took part in an intervention of one-hour weekly individual sessions that included hypnosis inductions and suggestions for greater mindfulness.
Participants also were given self-hypnosis audio recordings lasting about 20 minutes, each with suggestions for a hypnotic induction, relaxation and greater mindfulness.
The second group did not take part in the intervention. Intervention material focused on present-moment awareness, nonjudgmental awareness of the five senses, nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts and feelings, self-hypnosis, compassion for self and others, awareness of personal values and meaning in life and transition to long-term practice of mindful hypnotherapy, Elkins said.
At study’s end, the intervention group reported a large decrease in stress and a significant increase in mindfulness. Most were highly satisfied with the number of sessions, the ease of home practice and the clarity of content, Elkins said.
The average participant practiced almost every day, and overall satisfaction with the intervention was 8.9 on a scale of 10.
In comparison, those who did not participate in the intervention reported no significant difference between pre- and post-study stress level. A limitation of the study was its small sample size, Elkins said.
Future studies of a larger number of people could be of value, as well as testing mindful hypnotherapy for such concerns as anxiety, depression or chronic pain, he said.
Hypnosis can dry up warts leaving smooth healthy skin. [
info]
Bruxism or jaw clenching/teeth grinding can be very painful. [info]
