www.newhypnotherapy.com
More and more doctors now realize that hypnosis is powerful
medicine. Why this is and how it happens is still something of a mystery, but
science is proving that hypnosis can improve your health in amazing ways. It
can help relieve pain, make breathing easier for people with respiratory
illnesses, aid with gastrointestinal ailments and relieve depression just to
name a few. The most astonishing evidence is coming from research on healing.
In a pilot study published in 1999, Harvard University
psychologist Carol Ginandes, Ph.D., showed that hypnosis can help broken bones
heal faster and, in a follow-up experiment published in 2000, Ginandes and her
research team discovered that women who had breast reduction surgery recovered
far more quickly after undergoing hypnosis.
It is speculated that hypnosis alters the levels of certain
chemicals found in the brain that influence the nervous system, hormone
production, and the immune system. It appears that hypnosis effects how genes
in cells express themselves, turning some functions on and others off. Studies
using brain scans and other imaging technology are providing explanations as to
how and why hypnosis works in helping the body heal itself.
Hypnotherapy uses relaxation techniques such as deep
breathing, imagery, visualization and positive suggestions. Clients often say
to me that they experience a feeling of peacefulness and euphoria yet are fully
aware during a session. This is similar to what is experienced during
meditation. As David Spiegel, director of the psychosocial treatment laboratory
at Stanford University School of Medicine and coauthor of Trance & Treatment:
Clinical Uses of Hypnosis (American Psychiatric Publishing) explains, there is
"some overlap with meditation" however, "hypnosis focuses on the ability to do
something for a specific purpose." And this is how hypnosis achieves its
strength, by using positive statements and suggestions while a client is in a
fully relaxed state. This enables the client to more easily focus on past
problematic patterns or behaviors and it is this ability to more easily focus
that results in the desired change. A sort of spring cleaning for the mind.
Working from the inside out, releasing negative thoughts, perceptions and
behaviors and replacing them with the positive thoughts and suggestions that the
client desires.
It is this technique of focusing and strengthening willpower
that is responsible for hypnotherapy's high success rate, particularly for
clients who want to lose weight or quit smoking. A University of Connecticut
review of six weigh-loss studies found that 70 percent of study participants
rated hypnosis better than cognitive therapy alone.
Arreed Barabasz, director of the laboratory of hypnosis
research at Washington State University in Pullman and coauthor of
Hypnotherapeutic Techniques (Brunner-Routledge) agrees. The suggestions,
however, must not emphasize what you are against, but rather stress the positive
goals and imagery that you are seeking. For the client who wishes to quit
smoking, positive suggestions about their body and visualizing their lungs
becoming clear and free of smoke as well as instilling images of the client
happy, healthy and smoke free are the types of suggestions that are most
effective. When Barabasz tested this approach on 300 heavy smokers who had
previously quit and relapsed, almost half stayed smoke-free 18 months after
hypnotherapy - compared with 10 percent for the nicotine-replacement therapy
alone.
Research has shown that cancer patients who receive
hypnotherapy prior to or during chemotherapy sessions experience less nausea and
vomiting than those going through chemotherapy without the aid of hypnosis.
The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental
Hypnosis, April 2000 discovered that hypnosis relieved pain in 75 percent of the
people studied.
And this list goes on and on.
As more and more doctors and patients are beginning to
recognize that mental states and emotional and physical well-being are
connected, hypnosis continues to be used more frequently. Hypnosis can help you
to take back control of your health and your life and once you have taken back
control, then the real fun can start, realizing all the possibilities available
to you, all the directions you can go and finally realizing that your life is a
journey not just a destination. A journey that you can now control.
Linda Simmon, C.Ht.
www.newhypnotherapy.com
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After over 20 years of being a paralegal, Linda Simmon
decided it was time to take a new direction with her life and is a graduate of
The Hypnosis Motivation Institute, the first nationally accredited school for
hypnotherapy in the United States. For more information on Linda, her CD’s and
downloadable mini-session as well as telephone or face to face sessions, visit
www.newhypnotherapy.com
