Diabetes and hypnosis: Improving your management
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 condition 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.
If you have type 2 diabetes, you have a lot of body fat. Fat prevents insulin from absorbing sugar. It acts, as it were, like a barrier that insulin can no longer penetrate. You’re often referred to as insulin-resistant in this case. If you’ve only recently been diagnosed with type II diabetes, this can still be reversed by adopting a very healthy diet 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 what type of diabetes you have, you may be prescribed medication or need to take insulin injections. In both cases, you’re also encouraged to maintain a healthy lifestyle that includes eating well and getting enough exercise.
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 addition, you’ll need to check your blood sugar levels several times a day, which requires pricking your finger. After all, a blood sample needs to be taken. This can be very difficult if you’re afraid 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 maintain a healthy lifestyle.
This may be related to lifestyle or to your self-image and self-esteem.
In many cases, you see that people who are overweight have something holding them back from living a healthy life. This could be, for example, the feeling that you aren’t worthy of being healthy, or the fear that even if you’re slim, you’ll still have to deal with the same negative influences you face now. While you might often be able to blame your excess weight for this, that’s no longer an option.
You might also think that living a healthy lifestyle is too expensive or takes too much time. Where do you find the time to exercise? Where do you find the money to eat healthy 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 eliminate limiting beliefs is through regression. With regression, you mentally go back to the moment when your subconscious decided that it was okay to engage in unhealthy behaviors. These are often moments from your childhood, and with your new knowledge, you can view these moments very differently than you did in the past. As a result, the limiting belief can be resolved in a single session, allowing you to easily adopt a healthy lifestyle that helps keep your diabetes under control.
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 feel anxious about exercising because you’re 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.
Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and how it can help solve problems—whether they’re your own or someone else’s? Then come to the hypnosis workshop or sign up for one of the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands. Ask about online options if that suits you better.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207140701673050