Hypnosis for Pain

Hypnosis for pain relief can decrease sensitivity to pain – known as hypno-analgesia – associated with significant reductions in pain ratings, need for analgesics or sedation, nausea and vomiting, and length of hospital stay.

How you cope and deal with pain varies because pain is subjective.  Earache, for some, can be quite painful, whereas others may say toothache is worse. Someone hearing this will smile and say, you do not know what pain is until you have experienced an epidural. Does this make sense?

Pain is a subjective experience influenced by your memory, expectation, stress, fatigue, environment, and genetic programming. This explains why the intensity of your pain may have no relationship to the severity of your injury—because it’s not just the injury itself that causes pain but your emotional and learned response to it.

The 3 Stages of Hypnosis for Pain Relief

First, the effects of hypnotic suggestions on brain activity are real and can target specific aspects of pain. Hypnosis for pain decreases the intensity of pain and significantly decreases intensity and the experience of intensity.

Hypnotic suggestions are given to decrease the unpleasantness resulting in a decrease in activity in the areas of the brain responsible for processing the emotional aspect of pain, but not those areas responsible for processing pain intensity.

Second, those other treatments become more effective when hypnosis for pain and hypnotic suggestions are combined with other treatments. When people with chronic pain are taught how to use self-hypnosis for pain management and improved sleep, they experience pain relief and sleep better. People who learn self-hypnosis can experience significant pain relief and a greater sense of overall well-being and control.

Third, hypnotic suggestions have been shown to reduce the time needed for medical procedures, speed recovery time, and result in fewer analgesics needed — all of which result in more comfort for the patient, but save the patient and the patient’s insurance companies money.

Did you know parts of your body, such as muscles, have memory?

Sometimes chronic pain has no obvious physical cause. The original wound may have healed, or there may never have been an injury as severe as the pain would suggest. Also, the brain can feel pain without input from the body. For example, an amputee may feel pain in a missing limb. The sensation of physical injury clearly cannot come from a body part that is not there, so it must originate in the brain. It appears that the brain can even cause pain by sending signals that tell nerve endings to release inflammatory chemicals.

Chronic pain syndromes can change how the body’s pain-sensing mechanisms and its natural pain-relieving systems operate. The nervous system becomes more sensitive to pain and less receptive to the brain chemicals that moderate or turn off pain. This “remodeling” of the nervous system is one reason that prominent pain researchers now believe chronic pain should be considered an actual nervous system disease.

It is a known fact that Hypnosis for pain relief assists patients in obtaining deep levels of relaxation, which often leads to more peaceful sleep, increased energy, and a diminished experience of pain.