What Can Hypnotherapy Help With?
Hypnosis is a versatile tool since it utilises a mechanism you were born with, it goes with you everywhere and it used in everything you do - your mind! For that reason, it might be quicker to describe what hypnotherapy can’t help with!
I have used hypnotherapy to help people relieve anxiety, overcome depression, break unhealthy habits, quit smoking and improve sports performance. More specifically, how does this look in a person’s actual experience?
Anxiety
For some people, just the thought of leaving the house is enough to set off a wave of unsettling feelings. This was the case of my first ever client, all those years ago. Once a fun and sociable person, this person gradually became more and more of a recluse with low self-esteem and confidence, having not left the house in years. After just one session of hypnotherapy I received a text saying how much better she felt. She went to the pub with an old friend and even booked a holiday!
We can feel anxiety about so many things in life - money, relationships, safety, work, our own sense of self. All of these issues can be helped with hypnosis because it all comes from the same source - the part of you that is built to keep you safe. It’s an important part of you. Without it you’d be jumping into traffic. It’s just become overactive, hypervigilant, and hypnotherapy helps to calm it down, to recalibrate.
Depression
The most common remedy given to people with depression is drugs. However, this doesn’t solve the root of the problem, and only works on a third of the people a third of the time. There are much more effective remedies for depression that last a lot longer. These include understanding the role of rumination in maintaining a depressed state and interrupting sleep, meeting essential human needs - connection, agency and competence to name a few - and developing problem-solving skills. This is what I do with my clients and have seen drastic improvements in their mood, outlook and energy in just a few sessions.
Addiction
Whether it’s nicotine, sugar or class A drugs, hypnotherapy can help to reduce your cravings (or eliminate them entirely), empower you on your recovery journey and teach you new, healthy habits that serve your long-term development without the need to resort to using harmful substances. In a hypnotherapy session for addiction, we will look into what is going on in the brain when using addictive substances or engaging in addictive activities, and therefore gain a better understanding of what to do to no longer rely on it.
Sports Performance
A friend of mine, George Horlock (also known as some kind of vegan superman) is a strong, fit and muscley man, spending hours in the gym every week. Together we performed an experiment to see if hypnosis could help him lift more in the gym. He laid on the bench and successfully lifted 110kg. After attempting 112.5kg to no avail, I stepped in and hypnotized him. He laid back and attempted it again, this time successfully lifting that extra 2.5kg. He described it as feeling as if a light switched on inside him which lifted the weight for him.
A couple weeks later we went to the pull-up bar at the outdoor gym. “My personal best is 16 pull-ups. Anymore than 18 and I’d be impressed” he said. This time, we went straight in. I hypnotized him and he jumped on the bar. After a whopping 23 pull-ups he jumped down.
If you’ve had doubts hypnosis is real, I trust this brings you some faith.
Click here to watch the video!
The List Goes On
Hypnosis can be applied to pretty much any area of life - work, business, creativity, relationships, mental health, emotional wellbeing, money, decision-making, problem-solving… You name it, hypnosis can help because it is like taking a microscope and going deeper into whatever it is you are doing. Whether you are a psychologist, a therapist, an artist, a designer, a teacher, a builder, a hairdresser, a father, a mother, it taps into your natural ability to learn and make changes to enhance your experience, to improve your ability and to engage more efficiently.
Therefore, a better question would be…
What Can’t Hypnosis Help?
While I will work with anyone I feel I can help, there exists a handful of people and problems that I wouldn’t use hypnosis with. These include:
Psychosis
Severe personality disorders
Mental health crisis
Past-life regression
Legal testimony
Acute or unexplained pain
Everybody wants to be happy, to be free from pain and suffering, and I believe we all have the ability to achieve that. Everybody has the innate ability to change how they feel, to learn, to utilise their strengths and achieve personal fulfilment, however I would not want to risk making conditions worse. For example, hypnosis is considered contraindicated with psychosis because psychosis involves a distortion between reality and imagination, involving delusions, and hallucinations. Hypnosis, which intentionally alters perception and attention, could further blur the lines between reality and imagination, increasing confusion or distress rather than providing clarity or relief.
While it is possible to help a person suffering from cancer using hypnosis, to relieve stress, to reduce fear and anxiety, The Cancer Act 1939 prohibits practitioners from claiming they can cure or treat cancer.
Conclusion
I hope this gives you a better understanding of what can and can’t be treated with hypnotherapy. In summary, the vast majority of problems, challenges and experiences can be helped, changed and improved with hypnosis. There exists a small handful of issues I will not work with because there are specialist professionals who are trained to work with them safely.
David Stewart
Evergreen Hypnotherapy
Shedding light on the mysteries of hypnosis.
