Month: December 2016

Open post
anxiety making ill

Is anxiety making you ill?

    Anxiety doesn’t just affect the mind

    Does worry cause physical illness?

    Is anxiety making you ill? Anxiety is linked to physical illness. Recent research has shown that anxiety doesn’t just affect the mind, it may also make you physically ill. To be specific, anxiety is associated more than would be expected with a wide range of physical health problems.

    The DSM lists several common types of anxiety disorder: general anxiety disorder, social anxiety, panic attacks, simple phobias, OCD and PTSD. It is not surprising that anxiety is the most common problem presented to hypnotherapists.

    A recently published review of 48 high-quality academic research articles has confirmed that anxiety is the most common psychological problem. Around 4% of people experience some sort of anxiety disorder. Women are twice as likely to have an anxiety disorder than men. Surprisingly, young people are more affected than older groups.

    Common anxiety types

    The most common form of anxiety reported was generalised anxiety order (GAD). Other common forms found were simple phobias, and the least common was full panic disorder. People with long-term health conditions such as cancer, heart problems, heart and lung diseases all show a consistently high level of anxiety. It is not clear which one causes the other, but anxiety is almost always present.

    Anxiety is also very common with some mental health conditions, particularly bipolar depression and schizophrenia. Anxiety is also commonly found with various types of addictions, such as substance abuse, uncontrollable gambling and various types of obsessions.

    The review found that people with an anxiety disorder are at increased risk for the development of other anxiety and mood disorders. Anxiety is also a predictor of addictive behaviour.

    This backs up the assertions by many hypnotherapists that teaching people how to reduce their own  anxiety by self-hypnosis can have a positive effect on the quality of life.

     

    Source:

    O. Remes, C. Brayne, R. van der Linde, L. Lafortune. A systematic review of reviews on the prevalence of anxiety disorders in adult populations, Brain and Behavior, 2016; 6(7). doi: 10.1002/brb3.497

     

    Open post
    hypnotherapy and virtual reality

    Hypnotherapy and virtual reality

      Hypnotherapy and virtual reality may be coming to a screen near you. Is the future of hypnosis about therapy over the Internet?

      Anyone who has been doing hypnotherapy for a long time, will quickly realise that a lot of it is repetition of standard routines plus a personalised twist. Several companies have set up in business to exploit this fact. They offer personalised recorded therapy for stop smoking, weight loss, confidence, and other common problems. The basic deal is that you email your name and an idea of what your problems are and they will record an induction using your name, and try to adjust their standardised therapy routines to suit what you ask for. They then post the CD to you.

      The business proposition is that it is much cheaper than seeing a therapist face-to-face, and more personalised than just listening to a CD or MP3 recording. Modern audio technology is cheap enough, and easy enough to use, to make this possible. It is only a very short step to imagine the whole thing on simulated video. As well as choosing what you want to be cured of, you could also choose the gender, race, age and accent of your virtual reality hypnotherapist.

      The question is: is this actually a useful form of therapy?

      There are several problems with this. The first is that clients are very often do not know what it is that they want. The origin of a behaviour problem can often be hidden under layers of old programming. Even where the problem is a very straightforward thing, like stopping smoking, a successful treatment often depends upon working out why the person smokes. You then address that reason.

      The second problem is that everyone is unique. It really is too simplistic to think that a standard routine will work with everyone, or even with a high percentage of people.

      The third problem is that not everyone is equally hypnotisable. The advantage of seeing a therapist face-to-face is that the therapist can judge exactly how the words are being received, and adjust the delivery to suit.

      There is nothing wrong with delivering therapy by CDs. I have listened to CDs myself, and found some of them to be very useful. However, even with a full money back guarantee, I feel that there is going to be a very great number of people for whom it just won't work. Most of those won't bother asking for their money back, and will just assume that the problem is them. The danger is that the failure will leave the client even more in despair, believing that they are incurable.

      None of these personalised recording services have any sort of follow-up system, and is hard to see how they could have one that worked. But a face-to-face hypnotist can take the extra time to work out why you are not getting the changes you want.

      It does cost more, but isn't it better to have a service that works that costs extra, as opposed to a cheap service that doesn't work?

       

      Scroll to top