Diabetes is becoming a global problem. This is because we are getting better at distributing food around the world and, unfortunately, because unhealthy food is often cheaper than healthy food. Diabetes is a disease that you carry with you your whole life and it causes you to have to drastically change your lifestyle. This can sometimes be very difficult and that is where hypnosis can help.
What is diabetes?
Diabetes is a disease in which your body can no longer properly absorb the sugar you eat. There are different types of diabetes, such as type I and type II diabetes.
When you have type I, your body no longer has islets of langerhans and your body does not make insulin. This is a substance your body needs to transport sugar from the blood to the cells. The cells can then burn the sugar.
When you have type II you have a lot of fat. Fat prevents the absorption of sugar by insulin. It is like a wall, so to speak, preventing insulin from penetrating. You are then often called insulin resistant. If you have just developed type II diabetes, this can be reversed by eating super healthy so that you lose weight and your body has to process less sugar, but this is very difficult.
Chances are with both types of diabetes you will need to make changes to your lifestyle.
Then there are other types of diabetes, but the fact is that in all cases, something goes wrong with the insulin.
Treatment of diabetes
Depending on which form of diabetes you have, you may be medicated or need to inject insulin. In either case, you are also encouraged to live a healthy lifestyle in which you eat healthy and exercise enough.
This can be especially difficult if you have type II diabetes, as an unhealthy lifestyle is often the cause of this type of diabetes.
In the process, you need to check your blood sugar levels several times a day, and for this you need to prick yourself. After all, blood must be measured. This is very difficult if you have a fear of needles.
Support with hypnosis
Scientific research shows that hypnosis shows promise in terms of supporting the treatment of diabetes[1]. Hypnosis helps people make healthy lifestyle decisions to control diabetes that way.
Especially when an unhealthy lifestyle has led to diabetes, you may have beliefs that make it difficult to live a healthy lifestyle.
This can be related to lifestyle or to your self-image and self-esteem.
In many cases, you see in overweight people that there is something blocking them from living a healthy life. For example, this can be the feeling that you are not worth being healthy or the fear that if you are slim you will still have to deal with negative influences that you have now. Now you can then often at least blame the excess weight, then you can no longer do that.
You may also think that healthy living is too expensive or takes too much time. Where do you get the time to exercise? Where do you get the money to eat healthy food every day?
To change these types of beliefs, hypnosis can help by making new beliefs more present. The hypnosis causes you to absorb these beliefs more quickly and also "feel" it. For example, you can then repeat beliefs during self-hypnosis such as:
"I am worthy of healthy eating."
"I have all the time in the world to move more."
"I'm fun."
"I don't have to be athletic to be athletic."
"Healthy food is tasty food."
These are just examples of hypnotic suggestions. Depending on your beliefs and blockages, a hypnosis expert can help you with other hypnotic suggestions.
A post-hypnotic suggestion can help you perform healthy behaviors after hypnosis. For example, this can be some kind of command to do something, such as:
"When you're done with your work go for a half-hour walk."
Because you hear this while you are under hypnosis, you are docile and unconsciously follow this command faster as well.
Discovering beliefs
Sometimes it is not clear why you find it difficult to have healthy behaviors to control your diabetes. In that case, there are hypnosis techniques that can help you figure out your beliefs and see why those beliefs arose.
One way, for example, is the Socratic Conversation. In this conversation, the why question is repeated several times to get to the heart of your belief. Often, this exercise also ridicules the belief, making you more open to the new beliefs as described above.
Another way to identify and remove blocking beliefs is through regression. With regression, you mentally go back to the moment when your subconscious decided it was ok to do unhealthy things. These are often moments from your childhood and with your new knowledge you can look at this moment very differently than you did before. As a result, the blocking belief can already be resolved in 1 time and you can easily have a healthy lifestyle that helps control your diabetes.
Overcoming fears
If you suffer from diabetes, you may also suffer from a variety of fears to overcome.
For example, you may find healthy eating gross and have a fear of it.
You may have a fear of needles, and especially if you have to use needles to measure your blood sugar and inject insulin, this is a fear you must overcome.
You may even have a fear of exercising because you are afraid of getting injured.
For all such fears, hypnosis also helps. There are several techniques for overcoming these fears. What is often done is to gradually increase your exposure to your fear.
For example, you make a top 10 of your fear of needles, healthy eating or exercise.
For example:
- Photo of needles.
- Video of needles.
- A video of someone being pricked with a needle.
- A needle on the table.
- A needle in someone else's hand.
- A needle pricked at another.
- Holding a needle in your hand.
- Moving a needle.
- Poking Yourself.
- Injecting Insulin into Yourself.
These top ten that you may create yourself are then used to gradually expose you to your fears. For example, this is done first by getting you used to images and videos of needles.
For example, with hypnosis, the actual confrontation with the needle (or exercise or healthy eating) is first visualized so that you are prepared for the feelings of fear this releases in you. How your body becomes tense and how this reinforces your anxiety.
You also learn how to control your body during that visualization so you don't become more anxious than you are. This is often the first step in overcoming your anxiety. By noticing how you yourself influence anxiety, how you act anxious you also notice how you can stop acting anxious and therefore stop being anxious.
After all, the pain of a needle prick is nothing compared to the pain of a diabetic foot or blindness or other secondary symptoms caused by poorly managed diabetes.
Thus, by overcoming fears that are practically necessary to control diabetes, hypnosis is already helping to better manage diabetes. In doing so, hypnosis can help in multiple ways to encourage healthy behaviors that make the adjustment to a life with diabetes easier.
Want to learn more about hypnosis and how hypnosis helps solve problems whether it's your own or someone else's problem? Then come to the hypnosis playshop or enroll in one of the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' courses. Ask about online options if that suits you better.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207140701673050
