Does Hypnosis REally Work with Pain?

Very few terms in the field of psychology have the same emotional impact as the word hypnosis. Believe it or not, as popular as hypnosis has become, there is still no consensus about what hypnosis actually is and does.

Clients often believe that hypnosis is a state similar to the use of anesthesia in surgery but without any medication. Others fear they will experience mind control or have no memory of their experience. And, since many inductions suggest increasing comfort and the opportunity to sit back and relax, many individuals perceive that hypnosis offers rapid transformation with little or no effort on their part.

Most of us educate our clients to understand that hypnosis has many links with everyday experience. When we daydream, or are absorbed in a project that claims much of our attention, we can drift into an internal state where we lose touch with what is happening around us. An example is being "lost" in different state of awareness to the point where we don't hear someone calling us, or the phone ringing, We use this same ability when we go into hypnosis and lose track to some extent of what is happening in the environment around us to become more completely absorbed in our inner world.

From this naturalistic perspective, hypnosis is a way of using our brain's unique ways of processing information in intentional ways to help us achieve the changes we want to make. How we access these natural capacities occurs primarily through language-the language of possibility, the language of metaphor, the language of ease and comfort. Sometimes these suggestions are presented indirectly, outside of the client's awareness, and sometimes more directly in the form of suggested ways to reduce anxiety or increase relaxation as a stress management tool.

Dr. Dee Barrett, a hypnotherapist at Harvard Medical School is the author of The Pregnant Man, a collection of intriguing case stories that illustrate her uses of hypnosis. Barrett points out that a hypnotic trance is not therapeutic in and of itself. It is the use of specific and strategic suggestions and images tailored to address the client's unique needs that can evoke profound changes in behavior, emotions, thoughts, and sensory experiences.

As with many brain processes, experts don't know exactly how or why hypnosis works. Mark Jensen, psychologist at the University of Washington's School of Medicine, has published research findings that demonstrate how hypnosis and meditation create similar neurophysiological profiles. During both experiences, Jensen found that fast brain-wave activity such as thinking and cognitive processing, while slow-wave activity during both relaxation and meditative focus increases.

Jensen has studied how different regions of the brain are involved in processing pain. He has applied hypnosis to address different functions of the various brain areas and measured the impact on patient responses through brain scans administered during hypnosis sessions. For example,  Jensen has found that giving patients suggestions that extreme pain is really a minor type of suggestion that doesn't have to be bothersome results in the prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain that give meaning to 

  pain.

Roughly 80% of Jensen's patients experience a significant decrease in pain during hypnosis suggestions. For 50%, the pain reduction lasts for hours afterwards. For others, practicing self-hypnosis and meditation on their own, enables them to regulate and manage their pain successfully and automatically.

For more about Mark Jensen's use of brain science to target various brain functions with hypnotic suggestion to create pain reduction as well as successful skills in self-regulation, please sign up now for our July webinar, without highlights (edited transcripts) or with highlights. You will learn how Jensen connects brain science with hypnotic suggestion to maximize results in reducing, and changing the course of pain so that you can learn strategies that optimize pain relief for different kinds of clients with various pain presentations and patterns. Bridging from research to practice is the special feature of this outstanding training event.

To read an interview featuring Jensen that served as a source for this article, go here.

We hope you'll join us later this month to learn more about how and why hypnosis can uniquely help those who struggle with severe, pervasive, and intractable pain. It's a great opportunity to learn more about both the art and the science of hypnosis.

Best wishes,

Maggie