How Does Hypnotherapy Help with Chronic Pain?

Living with chronic pain is life-altering, to say the least. Chronic pain can interrupt daily life activities, our ability to connect with our loved ones, and even the way we think and feel about our lives and ourselves. Even day-to-day pain that is low grade can be incredibly impactful and put a negative stain on what once were pleasurable events and interactions. 

In many cases, modern medicine's approach to pain is quite limited, usually including pain medication that might be helpful but not without sometimes serious side effects and risk for addiction. Acupuncture, bodywork, physical therapy, and other body-based modalities can usually be quite powerful to reduce pain and improve quality of life. The issue, however, is that you often can’t ‘take the treatment home with you’ and need to continue to receive treatments to continue to benefit.  

Some patients benefit from talk therapy to help improve their quality of life while living with pain or illness. This can help us shift and change how we interact with our experience and find meaning when it might feel like there is none. But again, the results from therapy might be minimal at first, taking time and effort to attain. 

What about a treatment that produces impactful, noticeable results usually instantly? One that also teaches you tools and practices you can take home with you so that you eventually won’t even need the practitioner at all? 

Enter: Hypnotherapy for chronic pain and illness. 

Hypnosis is used for many complaints and intentions, even as entertainment, but hypnosis for the management of pain and bothersome symptoms of illness is an incredible treatment! You’ll work together with your hypnotherapist to identify where you want to focus your intention. Then, you'll undergo a hypnosis induction and process, which feels like a deep meditation or visualization. You’ll leave with a tangible tool and practice to employ on your own. 

What is Medical Hypnosis?

Medical hypnosis is simply, hypnosis used to address medical issues. Hypnosis for medical issues generally consists of working to help our clients reduce pain, reduce annoying or chronic symptoms, prepare for surgery or other treatments, and, of course, work through the stress, anxiety, and grief that may be associated with their medical condition. Hypnosis is also often used to help people break bad habits and create new habits, in the context of medical hypnosis, this might mean increasing healthy eating, quitting smoking, reducing alcohol consumption, or changing our relationship to exercise. 

It’s helpful to have a hypnotherapist who is well-versed in medical issues, treatments, and care as your medical hypnotherapist, but it isn’t a requirement. Dr. Kim is a Licensed Acupuncturist and holds a Doctorate degree in Acupuncture & Chinese Medicine, she’s been in practice since 2010 and has worked with thousands of patients with varying complaints over her career. That knowledge of the body, medical issues, illnesses, and the experience of caring for patients and clients going through physical and mental challenges makes Dr. Kim a great ally on your care team. 

How Does Hypnosis Work for Pain? 

Hypnosis can help you relieve pain and even change your experience of pain in a multitude of ways. Research shows us, through functional MRI studies, that during hypnosis, a part of the brain known as the salience network is less active. The salience network includes the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of our brain that reacts when we feel threatened. When you get a jump scare while watching a horror movie, that’s the anterior cingulate cortex at work. By downregulating this part of the brain, we feel more calm and less reactive to pain and the stories we might tell ourselves about our pain. For a cancer survivor, a new symptom or pain might trigger anxiety and panic that the disease is back or spreading, using hypnosis can quell and diminish that reaction (Bai, 2024). 

Research also shows that hypnosis is quite consistent in its ability to modulate the pain response, producing significant decreases in pain for chronic pain patients. It is often more effective than non-hypnotic interventions like attention training, physical therapy, and education. The efficacy of hypnosis for pain relief finds a moderate to large pain-relieving effect, making it a safe and effective treatment for chronic pain management (Elkins et al., 2007).

Simply put, hypnosis helps us modulate the way our brain and emotions respond to pain. Instead of thinking it is catastrophic, we can downregulate that reaction through hypnosis. We also employ strategies through self-hypnosis, think of that as ‘hypnosis homework’ you will get after a session that you can use on your own to work with pain or bothersome sensations as they arise. We work by shifting our subconscious beliefs and patterns around our perception of pain and increasing our ability to perceive comfort and relaxation. 

With techniques like mindfulness, breathing techniques, progressive muscle relaxation, autogenic training, and visualization, we can shift how we respond to pain and even change our physiology in response to it. These techniques can help us relax more, increase or decrease blood flow to parts of the body, and increase muscle relaxation, which, in turn, decreases pain. 

What Do you Mean Change my Experience of Pain?

Our state of mind, history, and outlook play a huge role in our experience of events in our lives, especially pain. Pain can cause an emotional reaction, and emotional reactions can also cause pain via the mind-body connection and the body's physiological response in our emotional reaction. Some say pain is all in your head, and technically, this is true, as our pain responses and reactions originate and are processed via the brain, but our mindset and outlook also play a role in how we perceive pain, and what it means for us. 

When we work on the inner emotional pieces of pain with hypnosis, we start to work with our pain instead of against it. We begin to have more awareness of our internal state and the stories we tell ourselves about what our pain, illness, or disability means. We also begin to re-program outdated beliefs, patterns, and habitual reactions to pain or discomfort, shifting our pain experience. A common saying is that the fear of pain is often greater than the pain itself, and this statement really gets under the premise here that a large part of our experience of pain is in our beliefs about it. 

With hypnosis, we can quite effectively change our experience of pain, which can result in pain reduction but, most notably, results in a different emotional response to pain which improves our quality of life. 

Are There Types of Pain or Illness that Hypnosis Works Better for?

We generally focus on chronic symptoms and pain, as new acute symptoms are something that needs to be addressed with your healthcare team. Some common complaints we work with in hypnosis include reducing pain, learning to interrupt a migraine before it takes hold, dealing with intense menstrual cramps, the side effects of chemotherapy, or preparing for surgery. We can also work with any emotional or mental distress you’re going through instead of, or in addition to, the physical symptoms and sensations. 

I’m Skeptical, How Do I know if Hypnotherapy for Chronic Pain is Right for Me?

Believe it or not, the vast majority of people are hypnotizeable, but some more easily than others. A state of hypnotic trance isn’t like it is in the movies, where you are fully controlled by the hypnotist and unaware of what’s going on. You are fully present and cognizant the entire time and have full control of your body and mind. 

Hypnosis is simply a very deep state of trance or relaxation. In this state, we have greater access to our subconscious mind, which allows us to make big, effective changes quickly. People who tend to be more easily hypnotized are those who are creatively visual, have vivid imaginations, have experience with hypnosis, and even have migraines with auras. 

It’s important to speak to your hypnotherapist before a session. This gives you the chance to ask any important questions and get to know them and the process a little better before committing to a session. Dr. Kim offers free discovery calls specifically for this purpose. She wants to know that your intentions are a good fit for her practice and for hypnosis in general before you work together. 

The best way to determine if this is right for you is to try a session and see it firsthand. It might surprise you! Put on your curiosity cap and go in with an open mind and a willingness to try something new. With minimal to no negative side effects or harm, hypnosis is a safe and usually very effective way to manage pain and anxiety and change your habits for the better!

References: 

1. Bai, N. (2024, February 2). How hypnosis can alter the brain’s perception of pain. Scope. https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2023/04/14/how-hypnosis-can-alter-the-brains-perception-of-pain/

2. Elkins, G., Jensen, M. P., & Patterson, D. R. (2007). Hypnotherapy for the management of chronic pain. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 55(3), 275–287. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207140701338621