Ways to Treat Anxiety and Stress with Hypnotherapy
GUEST ARTICLE: by Marcus Clarke
Hypnotherapy is a technique that treats the patient while he/she is a relaxed or unconscious state. This form of psychotherapy employs guided relaxation methods that make the patient go into deep relaxation and deep concentration by entering the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is just about 10% of the brain while the subconscious is the rest (90%). Thus, accessing the subconscious effectively gives access to almost the entire brain where most of our memories are stored. This relaxation and concentration opens up the patient for discussions and suggestions with the hypnotherapist and thus allowing for treatment of stress and anxiety in the following ways:
1. It helps you mend relationships
Broken relationships, with either loved ones, parents or other close friends, can be really tough on some people. They can cause a lot of stress and anxiety or even lead to depression. Hypnotherapy induces the mind to go into a deep relaxation state, enabling hypnotherapists to assist the patient overcome some of the tough situations in the relationships and instill valuable ideas on dealing with relationships in the future.
2. It assists in determining the stress causing issues
Stress can be caused by many things like losing a loved one, losing a job, regrets, jealousy and guilt among many other things. Eventually, these experiences are kept in the subconscious mind and may trigger harmful events. Hypnotherapy allows the patient to access his/her subconscious mind and identify these stress causing issues.
3. It helps you solve these stress causing issues
After identifying these stress causing issues, hypnotherapy allows the patient to concentrate deeply on them while opening him/her up to discuss them with the hypnotherapist. The hypnotherapist can then, professionally, advice and direct the patient on the best ways of dealing with those issues or help the patient go through a self-discovery and self-healing process in which the patient comes up with his/her own solutions to settle them once and for all.
4. It helps you improve your physical body
In the process deep concentration and relaxation, a patient can access the physical body in a deep way. By clearing the subconscious off stress and anxiety causing thoughts, the patient can improve the physical body in correcting headaches, chronic pain and restless sleep which, in fact, could be causing part of the stress or anxiety in their minds.
5. It helps you release the traumatic experiences
After every hypnotherapy clinical session, the patient gets to access and talk about the traumatic experiences in his/her life. The session also gives the patient solutions to dealing with such experiences which are buried in the subconscious and can be used to deal with future occurrences of such experiences. This gradual process of removing anxiety and stress causing thoughts eventually makes the patient release all the traumatic experiences and replace them with positivity and solutions to dealing with such experiences in the future.
Hypnotherapy has come a long way through continuous research and continuous improvement. This has made it a possible winner and a go-to solution by psychotherapists when treating stress, anxiety and depression.
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Marcus regularly blogs at psysci, a psychology, science blog that examines the latest research and explains how findings can impact and improve people’s lives.
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Article posted: March 27, 2018