Can Hypnosis Help With Stress?
We all know that stress can take a toll on our physical and mental health. But what if there were a simple, natural way to reduce stress? Enter hypnosis.
Hypnosis is a safe, natural, and effective modality for stress management. Hypnosis has been used across multiple cultures for hundreds of years, but even today it is still widely misunderstood. That is largely because of the way it is portrayed in movies, television, and books. In fictional works, hypnotism is often portrayed as a sort of dark art or form of mind control. In reality, hypnosis is much more simple and beneficial than most folks realize.
How Does Hypnosis Work?
During hypnosis, your mind is in a focused state while your body remains alert. In this state, you are more open to suggestions. When you are under hypnosis, you are not unconscious or asleep. You are aware of your surroundings and can still make decisions. You will still hear noises from the world around you, think your own thoughts, and be aware of what's going on.
The goal of hypnosis is to help you make positive changes in your life. In this case, to better manage stressful thoughts and feelings. Let's dig deeper into that, now.
How Can Hypnosis Help With Stress Management?
Stress management is all about taking control of the stressors in your life and learning how to cope with them in a healthy way. When you are in hypnosis, the heightened suggestibility that comes with the state means that hypnosis can be used to help you change the way you think about stressors and learn new coping mechanisms.
Hypnosis isn't going to magically take all of your stress away. Stress is part of everyday life. What hypnosis can do is help you change your learned reaction to stressful situations. We teach our clients to do this through two primary approaches: a proactive model and a reactive model.
Most people in western culture are almost always dealing with stress reactively. We live busy lives, and have a lot going on, and it's common for us to accumulate stress throughout the day and then feel the need to vent it or release it somehow. We use the metaphor of stress as a pebble to describe this process. On most days, little moments of stress add up, like picking up a pebble off the ground and putting it in your pocket. By itself, the pebble is no big deal, but later on, when your pockets are full of pebbles, it's uncomfortable to move around with your pockets so stuffed! We need a way to "empty our pockets."
For this, we encourage people to learn self-hypnosis. Self-hypnosis is the process of putting yourself into the hypnotic state. There are simple techniques for this that you can learn to use quickly and easily. Since self-hypnosis is a skill, almost anyone can learn it. Once you learn how to do it, you can take the skill with you anywhere and use it at almost any time. This portability and flexibility is what makes it ideal for stress management. You can do self-hypnosis sitting at your desk, on a bench in the park, or on the couch at home.
This brings us to the other model we like to promote to clients, the proactive model. When you learn self-hypnosis, you then have the ability to practice it before your stress gets really bad. We call it "emotional hygiene." Just as we've all learned physical hygiene (taking a shower, brushing our teeth, clipping our fingernails) we should have regular habits that help us maintain a healthy emotional state. Self-hypnosis is a great tool for this!
To return to our earlier metaphor, one strategy we teach is "don't pick up the pebble in the first place." For example, if you are prone to worry, hypnosis can help you learn how to focus on the present moment and let go of negative thoughts about the future. Every time you worry, it's like you're sticking a pebble in your pocket. With hypnosis, we re-train the brain to not fixate on the thoughts of worry and go to another mental state instead. We love to promote gratitude as an alternative state. There are many benefits to practicing gratitude.
If you're looking for a natural way to reduce stress, we highly encourage you to use self-hypnosis. It's safe, effective, and almost anyone can learn how to do it. So why not give it a try? We teach an online self-hypnosis class right here at Best Hypnosis Training. Check it out!
