Hypnotherapy for Health

09/26/2026

I teach this to hold my hypnotherapy clients and I’m aware of it myself

Negative language can affect more than your emotions it can also influence how your brain and body respond to stress. Even relatively brief exposure to negative or threatening words may activate the stress response, increasing cortisol and placing greater demands on brain regions involved in memory, learning, and emotional regulation. One area particularly sensitive to prolonged stress is the hippocampus, a structure essential for forming memories and processing information. When stressful experiences become persistent, repeatedly elevated cortisol levels can interfere with normal hippocampal function and, over longer periods, chronic stress has been associated with structural changes in this region. This helps explain why constantly being surrounded by hostility, criticism, or threatening language can feel mentally exhausting. Words are not processed as meaningless sounds; the brain interprets their emotional significance and responds accordingly. What people repeatedly hear can therefore influence stress, attention, memory, and emotional processing, leaving effects that extend beyond the immediate conversation.

09/20/2026

09/20/2026

How medication changes your brain

09/19/2026

As a Nurse anesthetist I am super aware of how smoking destroys different parts of our body. My 2 hour stop smoking sessions work wonders every time. Then I add a follow up session 3 weeks later as those emotional issues that ci******es were hiding need to be resolved with hypnotherapy release. This is way better than antidepressants . Call me to find out more even on Zoom it works. email me to find out more [email protected]

The issue is underemphasized in clinical diabetes care, authors say.

09/11/2026

Hypnosis Ahead of Breast Surgery: What a Fifteen-Minute Session Changes

Researchers at Oslo University Hospital set out to compare two brief, low-cost ways of preparing patients for breast cancer surgery: a short hypnosis session or a guided mindfulness breathing exercise, each lasting fifteen minutes and delivered in the two hours before the operation. Reme and colleagues randomized 203 women to one condition or the other, and kept the surgical team and the trial statistician blind to which one each patient had received. Everyone received the same anesthesia and the same postoperative care, so any difference in outcomes could reasonably be traced back to those fifteen minutes.

About half an hour after patients came around from anesthesia, the hypnosis group reported somewhat less fatigue and emotional distress than the mindfulness group, differences of roughly six points on a hundred-point scale for each. They also received less fentanyl after surgery, though the gap was small in absolute terms, and opioid use during surgery itself did not differ between the two groups. Pain, nausea, and general discomfort came out about the same either way, and the trial recorded no adverse events tied to either intervention.

The authors are candid about the limits of a single-site study with early-recovery outcomes and no correction for multiple comparisons. Read narrowly, the trial suggests a brief preoperative hypnosis session may ease the emotional load of coming out of surgery and modestly trim opioid use afterward, without doing much for pain itself.

Reme, S. E., Munk, A., Montgomery, G. H., Schnur, J. B., Falk, R., Smits, M., & Jacobsen, H. B. (2026). Preoperative hypnosis versus mindfulness for reducing postoperative symptoms in breast surgery: A randomized clinical trial. Anesthesiology, 144(3), 559-569

09/11/2026

Hypnosis and Pain Management

By Ron Klein, MCS, NBCCH

For more and more health care professionals and alternative practitioners, hypnosis is one of many complementary therapies that are now regarded as mainstream. Regardless of how they are labeled, hypnosis, biofeedback, meditation, relaxation training or autogenic training, there is strong evidence that for many people these complementary approaches work for both acute and chronic pain management.

Hypnosis is an altered state of awareness and relaxation that has been used for over 150 years to alleviate pain. During hypnosis, the person becomes relaxed and is guided to focus on suggestions to let go of distracting thoughts. In this relaxed, focused state, people can experience actual physiologic changes, such as muscles tension lessening, and an increase sense of overall comfort. Then, the person can accept and integrate suggestions for reducing pain. The client can also be taught self-hypnosis and to reinforce the suggestions for reduced pain and increased comfort for themselves.

Research has shown hypnosis to be helpful for both acute and chronic pain. In 1996, a panel of the National Institutes of Health found hypnosis to be effective in easing cancer pain. In recent years, the effectiveness of hypnosis to decrease sensitivity to pain known as hypno-analgesia has been supplemented by well-controlled experiments.

In their 2003 review of controlled clinical studies, Dr. Patterson and fellow psychologist Mark Jensen, PhD, found that hypno-analgesia is associated with significant reductions in ratings of pain, the need for analgesics or sedation, nausea and vomiting, and length of stay in hospitals.

Hypnosis has also been associated with better overall outcome after medical treatment and greater physiological stability. Surgeons and other health providers have reported significantly higher degrees of satisfaction with people treated with hypnosis than with others who received no hypnotic techniques for pain management.

Klein, R. (2014, July). Hypnosis and pain management. Your Health Magazine.

For more and more health care professionals and alternative practitioners, hypnosis is one of many complementary therapies that are now regarded as mainstream. Regardless of... Continue Reading

09/11/2026

A New Look at Hypnotherapy for IBS

Almogbel and colleagues pooled sixteen randomized controlled trials of hypnotherapy for irritable bowel syndrome, ranging from tiny pilot studies of a dozen participants up to one trial of 362, and looked specifically at abdominal pain relief, treatment dropout, and quality of life. How many participants improved on abdominal symptoms varied a great deal from trial to trial, anywhere from 40% to 81%, and when the authors pooled dropout data from twelve of the studies that tracked it, they landed on a rate of 8.0%. Using a stricter yardstick, a pain reduction of at least 30%, the pooled response rate across studies came out to 56.3%. Group-based hypnotherapy held up about as well as individual sessions in several of the included trials, and the authors point to group delivery as a cost-effective option worth considering where one-on-one sessions aren't practical.

The review also found broad gains in quality of life and reductions in anxiety and depression across the pooled studies. Its authors are upfront that the trials varied considerably in protocol, comparison condition, and how outcomes were measured, and they call for more standardized research before treating these pooled numbers as a single, settled effect. Even with that caveat, the review's overall takeaway, that hypnotherapy is a tolerable and effective option worth a place in IBS care, held up well against the published article itself.

Almogbel, E., Al-Harbi, F. A., Alamro, A. M., Al-Saif, A. K., Alghamdi, S. M., Alkhalifah, K. A., Alayed, R. S., & Al-Mutairi, T. A. (2026). Efficacy of hypnotherapy in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS): A systematic review and meta-analysis. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 68(1), 56-70.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a functional gastrointestinal disorder that is characterized by abdominal pain and altered bowel habits and has a significant impact on quality of life. The curren...

09/09/2026

What hypnosis offers

The American Psychological Association’s Division 30 defines hypnosis as a state of consciousness involving focused attention, reduced peripheral awareness, and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion. Hypnotherapy refers to the therapeutic application of hypnosis to a medical or psychological concern (Elkins et al., 2015).

For those people who already understands their anxiety intellectually, hypnosis offers something different. Hypnosis creates an opportunity to experience calm, competence, and to choose different responses.

06/30/2026

Your subconscious mind is always listening. Think about the wording you use!

06/30/2026

The reality of using hypnosis for pain relief

With promising initial results in hand, UW Medicine researchers led...