Can Hypnosis Treat Fibromyalgia?

About 5 million Americans suffer from fibromyalgia.    The condition is characterized by severe muscle pain, sore tender points and body fatigue.  Its onset can be sudden, as in the person who develops fibromyalgia after experiencing a trauma, such as a car accident.  It can also be more gradual.  Fibromyalgia can go into remission and then appear again. People with Fibro should avoid stress because stress tends to exacerbate the symptoms.

There are many different types of treatments available for fibromyalgia, including prescription medications, acupuncture, water aerobics, hypnotherapy and massage therapy.  What works for one person may not work for another.

One might not immediately think of hypnosis as a treatment option, but studies show hypnosis can turn off pain receptors in the brain.  That’s something fibro sufferers could really benefit from.  Indeed, according to a recent study in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, where scientists compared the brain imaging scans of 20 women diagnosed with fibro with the scans of 10 healthy women, the Fibro sufferers had pain receptors that were much more active.  If we could only shut those pain receptors off? Well, now we know we can..with hypnosis.

In most Fibro sufferers, the stress response is constantly being triggered and the body has simply forgotten how to produce the relaxation response. Hypnosis can help reprogram your mind so that you’re producing the relaxation response much more readily and easily.

For more info on how you can benefit from hypnotherapy, please email me at melany@hypnoswitch.com.

Can Hypnosis Cure Bipolar Disease?

Treating Manic Depressive Symptoms with Hypnosis

Bipolar disease, also known as manic depressive disorder, is a type of mood disorder.  Everyone has highs and lows, but people with bipolar have extreme highs and lows.  This can sometimes inhibit their ability to function in life.  Extreme bouts of bipolar can lead to aggressive and/or self-destructive behaviors.  Some bipolars have audial and visual hallucinations.  Many bipolars turn to drugs and alcohol as a way to self medicate.  Some of the symptoms of bipolar disorder include:

• insomnia
• reckless behavior
• impulsive behavior
• racing thoughts
• delusions and hallucinations
• severe depression and thoughts of suicide

Bipolar is a very difficult disease to treat. Patients are generally given psychiotropic medication, but finding the right combination of meds can be difficult. Also, many bipolars prefer not to take their meds as it robs them of the supersonic energy they feel during the mania.

So, what’s the alternative?  Well, how about hypnosis?  If hypnotherapy is a great tool for molding the human mind, why not the bipolar mind?  Those were some of the questions I asked myself when I first started treating manic depressive symptoms using hypnotherapy.

My first experience with a bipolar patient was about 10 months ago.  When he first came to my office, he was in pretty bad shape. He was drinking excessively (to the point of black-outs) as a way to manage his illness.  He had severe insomnia and debilitating anxiety. He was totally out of control.

10 months later, he’s still sober.  He’s been taking his meds more consistently and he’s much less anxious.  He’s been sleeping better and he feels more balanced and in-control.

Can hypnosis cure bipolar disease? Maybe not entirely. But it can certainly be very useful in relieving some of the symptoms.

For more info on how hypnosis can alleviate bipolar sysmptoms, please write to us online or offline (melany@hypnoswitch.com).

Nail Your Next Audition Using Hypnosis & NLP

People have strategies for everything they do: boredom, love, depression, happiness, even audition anxiety.  A strategy is a specific order and sequence of internal and external representations.  It’s just like a recipe for baking a cake. If you add the right ingredients in a certain order, you end up with a delicious result! The same is true for your states of mind.  Most people think of anxiety as something that happens to them.  If that were the case, no one would ever be able to get past it.  Anxiety is something you do, not something that happens to you.  If you can figure out the sequence and order of representations that produces your anxiety, you can interrupt the pattern and get a different result!

So, how do you elicit your strategy?

Most people are not aware of their strategies.  They typically run in your head in a matter of seconds and are usually pretty automated. The idea is to become more conscious of your strategy by asking yourself how you got there in the first place.  In terms of the ingredients of your strategies, you could have visual (internal/external), auditory (internal/external) or kinesthetic (internal/external) cues. When eliciting someone’s recipe for audition anxiety, the best way to do it is to get the chef back in the kitchen.

Think of a specific time when you experienced audition anxiety.  Rewind the movie to the very beginning. What was the first thing that happened that let you know it was time to do anxiety?  Was it something you saw?  Something you heard? Something you said to yourself?  For some actors, the anxiety begins as soon as they get a call from their agent.  (External auditory).  For others, it starts when they walk into the audition room.  (External visual).  Once you determine the first ingredient, move on to the second and third, and so forth.  It’s important to run through the entire sequence of representations.

Once you’ve elicited the strategy, it’s time to scramble it.  In other words, throw in a wrench to the normal order and sequence, and you end up with a different result! For instance, if you find that you always get nervous as soon as you see other actors in the audition room, you could interrupt the pattern by imagining everyone in their underwear.  If you find that your anxiety always begins while you’re driving to the audition, you could interrupt the pattern by imagining that you’re cruising around Gotham in your Batmobile.  The sillier your pattern interrupt, the more likely you are to override the old pattern.

And, if you scramble it enough times, you simply won’t be able to play the old record anymore! Can you imagine going into every audition feeling confident and secure?  It’s entirely possible and it’s all up to you!

Hypnosis Cures Late Night Eating

I can’t tell you how many clients come into my office complaining about the “late night munchies.”  Take Ms. S for example.  She insists that daytimes are a “piece of cake.”  “I’m good all day long,” she proclaims, “but when night time rolls around, it’s like the tiger has come out of its cage and there’s nothing to stop me from eating everything I can find in the cupboard.”

Ms. S is a single mom. She works hard all day long and doesn’t take breaks. When she gets home, she goes into mommy mode and doesn’t take any time for herself.  Only after her daughter goes to sleep, does she finally settle down.  She’s been so wound up all day long, that her body is screaming for nurture.  When she finally settles down, she chooses to numb out by plopping down in front of the television and snacking on empty carbohydrates.  This is typical behavior for a late night eater.

If you’re a late night eater, it’s probably because your body and/or mind is being deprived of some crucial ingredient during the day.  It’s like a jack-in-the box toy; if you keep twisting the crank, eventually the lid will pop open and the clown will pop out of the box.  Same thing with your body.  If you don’t feed it properly during the day and if you neglect to take periodic breaks for your mind, you’re bound to pop!

When working with late night eaters, I’ll often suggest that they take periodic breaks throughout the day, feed themselves properly in order to prevent blood sugar drops and practice self hypnosis or meditation.

Its perfectly fine to watch TV as a way to unwind, but eating in front of the television is a no-no! Eating should be done in a peaceful setting where you can be conscious of each bite (without any distractions)!

For questions about late night eating or to schedule a free consultation, please contact melany@hypnoswitch.com

Insomnia and What You Can Do About It

The Importance of Sleep

Sleep is vital to our health and well being. Yet millions of us, especially those of us in high-stress jobs, are not getting enough. Surveys conducted by the National Sleep Foundation reveal that 60 % of adults report having sleep problems a few nights a week or more.

Poor sleep has a price. Not only does it affect your mood, energy level and ability to concentrate, it can also take a serious toll on your health.  Research shows chronic sleep deprivation contributes to significant health problems such as obesity and heart disease.

For most insomniacs, hypnosis is probably the last option that comes to mind. Insomniacs will try everything from sleeping pills to home remedies. The problem with sleeping pills is that they do not offer a permanent solution.  Most insomniacs suffer from circular thinking.  Instead of clearing her mind at bedtime, the insomniac uses bedtime as an opportunity to process unresolved issues that may have arisen during the day. After repeatedly engaging in this type of circular thinking, her mind becomes conditioned to viewing bedtime as “processing time.”

The only way to break the pattern of sleeplessness is by reprogramming the mind so that the insomniac begins to associate bedtime with rest and relaxation. That’s where hypnosis comes in.

Using Self Hypnosis To Get To Sleep

If you have difficulty falling asleep, you can start reversing this condition by using self hypnosis.  First, make sure that your body is completely relaxed. Release all tension from each part of the body, starting with your feet and working your way up to your head.  Take a really deep breath, hold it for a moment, then slowly exhale. Next, roll your eyes up (eyelids closed, looking up into the forehead). This causes the eyelids to “flutter,” replicating the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) of sleep.

Next, visualize or imagine being in a very comfortable, relaxing spot (it could be a garden, beach, any type of relaxing setting). Use all of your senses to get in touch with the relaxing place that you have created in your mind. If unrelated thoughts enter your mind, allow them to keep on moving, like leaves falling off a tree. Increase the feelings of relaxation in your mind and body until you finally doze off into a nice, natural sleep.

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