Stressing Out?- The Power of Hypnosis To Calm And Heal

By Deborah Lindemann C.H.T.

Did you know that your body can’t tell the difference between real and imagined fear? The inability of your body to know the difference is both beneficial and destructive, depending on how you use the power of your mind. It also holds the key to why hypnosis is so healing.

The fact is, most stress is based on some underlying fear. Though not all stress is harmful, excessive or inappropriate stress weakens your immune system and can lead to many serious health conditions and diseases. According to psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser of Ohio State University, when you are stressed your Pituitary produces a hormone called ACTH. This hormone triggers the adrenals to produce another hormone called cortisol that attaches itself to your T-Cells, greatly inhibiting these immune cells from doing their job.

Not all stresses are created equal. The type of stress that soon dissipates, like getting caught in traffic, is not as destructive as the kind that continues on, like a bad marriage or caring for an aging parent. Events or situations that seem to have no solution, that are ongoing, that produce continual fears, are the most damaging to your immune system. Extreme examples include rape or physical abuse. If you are living with a fear that some traumatic event might happen again, or you keep reliving the fear, your body continues to re-experience the same destructive affects of the original event.

You may also have unconscious and unresolved childhood or past life memories that are still affecting you emotionally or physically. Although you are consciously unaware of them, the emotional imprint can still be causing you anxiety and ill-health.

Now here’s how hypnosis addresses the beneficial fact that your body can’t tell the difference between a real and imagined situation. Hypnotherapists have known for decades that whatever your mind can imagine while in hypnosis, you can heal or change.

Try this experiment: Imagine that you’re biting into a lemon. You feel the skin burst open as your teeth penetrate the rind. There is a spray of lemon juice that floods into your mouth. Just imagining this begins to produce saliva juices flowing in your mouth. This simple demonstration shows the power of your mind to produce physical affects simply by imagination. Imagine how that same power of imagination could be amplified if you were working on healing a specific health or emotional issue?

An exciting research project published in August 2000 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry has scientifically shown the power of imagination under hypnosis. Stephen Kosslyn, professor of psychology at Harvard, led the study. While hypnotized, people were told to see color where only shades of gray were actually present, and to see gray when actually looking at brightly colored rectangles. Subjects lay in a scanning machine that recorded brain activity. When a subject sees color while not hypnotized, brain activity shows only in the right hemisphere. However, in hypnotized subjects both the left and right hemispheres responded to the suggestion of color. Kosslyn concludes, "What we have shown for the first time is that hypnosis changes conscious experience in a way not possible when we are not under hypnosis."

Imagine what hypnosis can do for you!