This centuries-old technique of healing can successfully treat numerous nagging issues that are beyond our awareness and control. Could hypnotherapy be the solution for what ails you?
Your conscious mind commands and your subconscious mind obeys according to the rules that are loaded. The conscious mind encompasses your thoughts, habits and emotions. The subconscious mind will use the rules that are loaded connected to your expectations, desires and beliefs are beyond our awareness and control.
It’s a simple and safe intervention – Coined by English physician James Braid, who studied the practice during the 19 th century, hypnosis gets its name from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep.
The practice uses guided relaxation and focused attention to achieve a heightened state of awareness, sometimes referred to as a trance.
When a person is in a hypnotic state, they are more open to discussion and are better able to respond to suggestions, this makes it possible to help them with certain conditions such as smoking, insomnia, overeating, or even the perception of pain. The critical faculty of the brain is turned off, explains Barker, and the subconscious mind is listening – that’s where their habits lie. “I tell them what’s going to happen and then it happens, but first I set up the mind to let it happen.”
Hypnosis is not regulated in South Africa, so the best way to find good hypnotherapist is to look contact them and do the free assessment meeting – see if there is a connection, also see if the intent is focus on healing and ask many questions.
While treatment varies based on each individual’s condition, many conditions require just one session. A typical therapy session lasts about 90 minutes and can cost anywhere from R450.00 to R2100.00.
If you have a bad back, you go to the chiropractor, if your teeth hurt, you go to the dentist, but where do you go if you want to increase the thought capacity of your mind?
Stop Smoking
If you want to find the best way to quit smoking, you’ll navigate a long-list of over-the-counter and prescription nicotine-replacement medications as well as non-nicotine prescriptions to find the right fit. Quitting is vital, of course: Cigarettes are responsible for many deaths. Herbal remedies, behavioral therapy, and acupuncture are other methods people choose to quit smoking.
Hypnosis has been the answer to kicking his two-pack-a-day habit for many.
When you go to a doctor, they give you a pill, but they can’t give you anti-habit pills. To change his thought process and take away the emotional connection to help change his habit into a positive one.
No More Overeating
Making healthier food choices and exercising are key components for weight loss, but in some cases, successful weight loss also requires getting rid of the emotional and unconscious factors that prevent us from losing weight. The use of hypnosis for weight loss requires a different approach than when used for other conditions – it usually takes several sessions rather than just one to determine the individual’s personal triggers.
Before hypnosis is performed, I need to find out if they are all-day snackers or those who reach in the fridge between meals. Everyone is different, everyone has their own vice, and it takes a while to get that out.
HHC sessions start with embedded commands that help his clients control their eating habits. “After five or six bites, you close your eyes and tell yourself ‘that’s enough’ or every time you eat a plate of food you close your eyes and say ‘eat just half of what’s there.’”
Sleep Better
Not getting enough sleep can impair decision-making and memory, and it can lead to chronic health problems such as heart disease, obesity, and depression. While there are a variety of remedies for insomnia including medication, meditation, and cognitive behavioral therapy, getting enough sleep is not something you can talk yourself into doing.
Sleep is primarily managed by the subconscious. Trying to use conscious thoughts to fix this type of problem is like attempting to make a corporate change by going to the receptionist – you need access to the CEO.
Worrying about sleep is also one of the main reasons that you can’t fall asleep. Fear of insomnia is what causes insomnia. When you remove the anxiety and fear of not getting a good night’s sleep, you will get a good night’s sleep. To treat his patients, HHC first asks them to visualize a scene when they slept through the night, and then he uses hypnosis to put them there. – We have the person imagine the great night of sleep that they had in the past and then I have them remove the label of ‘I have insomnia,’ and replace it with ‘I sleep at least eight hours a night.’”
Cure Dental Phobia
The high-pitched whir of the drill, the pinch of the needle, or simply embarrassment of having someone look inside your mouth are just a few of the reasons that people avoid going to the dentist. While the industry is striving to use new dental technology to make a trip to the dentist’s office less stressful, dental anxiety affects about 10 to 20 percent of the world’s population.
Fear has kept many of my clients out of the dentist chair for years.
The fear can come from a negative experience at the dentist or hearing about someone who has had a negative experience. Whatever the case, it can be debilitating and once its programmed, the mind can run in default mode.
To help clients get over the anxiety of going to the dentist she uses neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which helps the brain “rewire” certain thought processes and get past loops of automatic thinking. “When they start to feel anxiety about going to the dentist, they can use NLP to interrupt the anxiety and re-wire the phobia on their own.”
Ease Chronic Pain
Pain is a signal that is helpful to us, but in the case of chronic pain, the nervous system may still be relaying the pain signal even after the body has healed. There are several ways your mind can make pain worse. “We can use hypnosis to turn it down.” HHC recalls a patient with chronic back pain who couldn’t sit still in the chair. “He described the pain as being a grizzly bear gnawing on his spine.” When she asked him what he wanted to do, he said he wanted to “put it into hibernation.”
HHC worked with the client to help him imagine the bear crawling into a cave on a cold day, curling up and going to sleep. While hypnosis is not magic, it can feel like it sometimes.
Manage Bereavement
Whether it’s dealing with a national tragedy or the loss of a loved one, the feeling of loss or bereavement can be debilitating, causing anxiety, insomnia, and depression. Letting yourself feel the loss through crying helps your body and mind, hypnotherapy offer help for those coping with loss – including talking about the death of your loved one, taking care of your health, reaching out to others who are dealing with the loss, accepting your feelings, and celebrating the life of the one you lost.
Coping mechanisms for dealing with loss are personal. Hypnotherapy can help by providing positive suggestions to help cope with the symptoms of grieving and help with finding ways of dealing with loss as time passes. HHC helps people cope with loss by having them put a “timer” on their bereavement. “Normally, they let me know when they are sick and tired of being sick and tired of bereavement.”
Relieve Anxiety
There are things only someone living with anxiety can understand, like how debilitating and desperate the condition can be. Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental disorders, affecting many people. While anxiety is usually treated through medication or therapy or a combination of both, many people also turn to hypnosis.
A hypnotist works to identify the root of stress or anxiety, whether it is situational, physical, or based on an issue from the past.
The subconscious mind is what makes you feel anxious and drives bad habits. When someone comes to see us about nail-biting, nail-biting isn’t usually the problem, it’s anxiety. When a man came to see HHC about a speech impediment, he treated him for anxiety. His problem was not speech related, his problem was in his mind. During the session, HHC had the man regress back in time to when he was six years old. He had climbed onto the roof of his house and his father yelled at him for being on the roof.
While the some research does not support the claim that stuttering is caused by an emotional event HHC believes it was this incident – the anxiety of being yelled at by his father combined with the fear of being on the roof – that contributed to his speech impediment.
During the session, I kept the memory the same, but changed the reaction of his father from being angry to one where he held his arms open and loved him rather than yell at him. When he came out of hypnosis, his stammer was gone.
Stop Tinnitus
Ringing, buzzing, hissing, whooshing, or whistling sounds that nobody but you can hear are signs of tinnitus, a condition that is experienced by many people. While tinnitus can be temporary or ongoing, there is no cure for most types of the condition. Treatment options include hearing aids, behavioral therapy, sound therapy, and TMJ treatment.
Hypnosis is also an option to stop tinnitus. The mind causes tinnitus. It happens because the person is expecting it to happen and once you remove the thought of expecting it, the sound disappears.
Make Chemotherapy more Tolerable
One of the earliest documented uses of hypnosis with a cancer patient occurred in 1829, when M. le Docteur Chapelain used hypnosis to relieve the suffering of a patient with breast cancer. The doctor used hypnosis as an anesthetic during a mastectomy and during the operation, the patient was said to be “calm and evidenced good pain control.” While today anesthesia is the preferred means for surgery.
Hypnosis still plays a role in the treatment of cancer and is often used to reduce stress and anxiety as well as minimize the side effects of chemotherapy such as nausea and vomiting.
Primarily we help them deal with the symptoms and help them change how they are processing pain, who often works with cancer patients. HHC cannot give them false hope, but we can put them in a comfortable state and help them with healing. HHC says that often cancer patients are shuffled from doctor to doctor, making them feel as if they are just a number.
HHC make custom recordings for our clients to listen to during their chemotherapy treatment–it’s a personal experience with a hypnotherapist that can go a long way.
Improve athletic performance
Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Mike Tyson are just a few well-known professional athletes that have turned to hypnosis to help with their athletic performance. Athletes have long used hypnosis to eliminate negative thoughts, de-stress and relax the mind and body, and help with focus and concentration so they can “be in the zone.”
This mental training can increase confidence, consistency, and ability, and it applies to all levels of athletes, including those recovering from injury and those just learning a sport. Most athletes go to a hypnotist to improve their performance, but actually they are going to improve their mind.
Hypnotherapy can change your thought process and turn your bad habits into positive ones.
HHC uses golf as an example. – It takes a lot of mental endurance to be a successful golfer.
You have to alter your perception and reality and you have to mentally play the game as well as physically – the critical mind is closed, but the subconscious mind is in a heightened state.
Quicker Recovery from Surgery
HHC uses hypnosis to help people post-surgery to shorten their recovery time and in some cases, wean themselves off pain killers prescribed by their doctor. HHC had one person come to us post-surgery and tell me she didn’t want to live because she had been cut off from her opioid prescription. HHC used hypnosis to interpret the pain signal in her brain. Thoughts and emotions travel in pathways, and that’s how habits are made.
At first it is just a pathway through the woods but over time that pathway eventually becomes a trench that you can not get out of.
Through hypnosis, HHC teaches the brain and nervous system to take a different pathway. After three sessions, my patient said to me that she wanted to live.
Ease IBS
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) affects many people. While the exact cause of IBS is not known, the impact from the disease can range from mild to debilitating. Stress, although not the cause of IBS, can worsen the symptoms of IBS.
While treatments range from probiotics to following a diet that minimizes trigger foods – known as a low-FODMOP diet – to antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy, hypnosis has also been shown in studies to be an effective treatment for IBS.
Hypnotherapy uses relaxation techniques followed by hypnotic suggestions to help patients learn to control their symptoms. The results of the studies showed that patients experienced improvement in their quality of life and in the common symptoms of abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, and bloating.
If you have any questions about our Hypnosis Sessions please e-mail us here: info@hypnotherapycenter.co.za.
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Ref:. www.thehealthy.com