Hypnosis for Healthcare for Providers or Carers

Hopefully, if conditions promoting these responses starts to take a toll, then you can find a sympathetic ear, seek help, and solidarity to change the circumstances, and regain your equilibrium. Ultimately, having some control to change stressful environments is key to evolving coping strategies; changing either your response, or the precipitants of damaging levels of stress.

Self hypnosis can be one way to change your own emotional reactions. Rumination about upsetting events, a tendency to extrapolate potential negative consequences, or self-undermining thoughts, can often amplify a stressful event . Initiating a light trance state can be a relaxed way of spending 10-20 minutes – re-setting one’s default to catastrophise, getting some distance from an upsetting moment, and choosing to go back to a memory exemplifying the best of life, can be both a quick tonic, and de-activating your sympathetic nervous system. It can give you new perspectives on an experience once you have had time to rest and consider a wider picture. Seeing our thoughts as mental weather, and giving ourselves permission to ignore or neutralise the unhelpful emotional chatter within, replacing it with some self-compassion, is far more effectively done within a light trance state.

Whether you are caring for someone else who is chronically unwell, or working within healthcare professionally, then a means to fortify your resilience is surely worth trying? We have been repeatedly impressed at how quickly hypnotic techniques can take effect, especially if practised in the small intervals of down-time you may have.
Some of the audio files designed for patients may have relevance to the physically well, but mentally exhausted, such as ‘Managing difficult emotions’, or those to help sleep.

Perhaps just taking the time to write down the issues pertinent to your sense of distress can help you articulate and devise your own therapeutic strategy, so that you can implement these (using imaginary metaphors) within hypnotic trance. You could even record your own audio files.

Ultimately, we feel confident you can certainly get an insight as to whether these techniques could help your own patients, and perhaps ignite an interest in learning about hypnosis in greater depth.

We feel that clinical hypnotherapy is a ‘Cinderella’ science…one that should be integrated back into many realms of life, but most definitely within medicine. With wider re-appropriation within the medical profession, the scientific method can be used to scrutinise how best to use it….particularly within the digital age. Do let us know if you want to be collaborators after trying it for yourselves.

With the huge disparities in healthcare provision throughout the world, although far from a panacea for all ills, it is perhaps one of the safest, but most versatile tools that could be employed at minimal cost to bring a sense of empowerment, and symptom improvements for millions who are suffering without means for relief. We would be delighted to ignite interest, experience and initiative within our medical fraternity to allow the ripple effects of clinical hypnosis to benefit everyone in some way.