Cardiac arrhythmias: Supporting treatment with hypnosis

Heart arrhythmias are incredibly annoying to have. Instead of your heart beating in a normal rhythm, it suddenly beats too fast or too slow and just weird. The electrical signals your heart receives to beat a certain way are no longer beating.

What is this really about? What lies behind this and what can hypnosis do for people with arrhythmias? Find out in this blog.

Heart arrhythmia

Not everyone who has a cardiac arrhythmia is aware of it. Sometimes such an undetected disorder can even suddenly lead to cardiac arrest. You suffer from an arrhythmia if it is lower than 60 beats per minute at rest, if there is no obvious cause for it such as a super strong condition, or if your resting heart rate is higher than 100 beats per minute.

1 to 5 percent of people suffer from cardiac arrhythmia.

To find out if you have an arrhythmia, a doctor will first listen to your heart. Does he/she hear anything abnormal? Then a cardiac ultrasound may be taken. You may also be asked to wear equipment for 24 or 48 hours to see if your heart suddenly starts to suffer at certain times during your day.

There are an awful lot of problems you can have with your heart, generally people get medications or even a pacemaker to fix heart arrhythmias[1].

Factors contributing to heart rhythm disorders

Atrial fibrillation is the most common of cardiac arrhythmias, but its risks differ between the sexes. Scientists therefore indicate that there should be more research on this disorder in women. In fact, a correlation has been found between the number of children women have and the risk of developing this heart disorder.

As you age, you become more and more likely to develop this disorder (this applies to both men and women). If you are 80+ you have a 13 to 17% chance of developing this disorder.

Some other factors include:

1. Overweight.
2. Poorly controlled diabetes.
3. High blood pressure (60-80% of people with arrhythmias have high blood pressure)
4. Smoking (1.44 times more likely to cause cardiac arrhythmias).
5. Too much LDL cholesterol (bad cholesterol)
6. Getting pregnant at an older age (^3rd trimester can be exciting then for cardiac arrhythmias)
7. Having 3 to 4 or more children. (So I get to keep an eye on my wife 😉 )
8. Getting menopause under the age of 45[2].

Preventing cardiac arrhythmias

Fortunately, there is an awful lot people can do themselves to prevent heart arrhythmias. British research involving nearly half a million people found that walking at a brisk pace lowers the risk of heart arrhythmia.

If you can walk at a speed of 6.5 kilometers per hour and you do this regularly it will help lower your chances of developing cardiac arrhythmias. Fast runners have a healthier heart in this regard, and doing this regularly further lowers your chances.

In addition, your metabolism and inflammation in your body also play a role[3]. This is why you also want to eat healthy, because that will also help you suffer less inflammation in your body.

Heart arrhythmia treatment support with hypnosis

If you are having a (relatively) minor heart surgery, hypnosis can help, reducing the need for sedation. In addition, hypnosis can be helpful after heart surgery. In Geneva, Switzerland, hypnosis is also widely used in hospitals.

There, a man experienced complications after heart surgery, which led to anxiety. Hypnotherapy was then used to alleviate the anxiety . This also helped restore the heart’s rhythm to a calm and normal beat, as evidenced by the ECG results.

A 24-year-old woman with heart problems that could not be completely resolved by medical intervention was also given hypnotherapy to reduce stress. In this case, too, hypnosis helped return the heart rhythm to normal, which was also visible in the ECG results[4].

These are only 2 cases, and so you can't yet say that it always helps, but it does show that in Switzerland they use hypnosis to supplement cardiac treatments when they find that a client needs it. Especially if the client does not respond well or cooperatively to medical treatments.

In some procedures, the anesthesia required to prevent pain can actually lead to worse outcomes. It can therefore be a matter of life and death to use as little anesthesia as possible, but how do you do that? Hypnosis can also be very effectively used to alter pain perception, thereby reducing the need for anesthesia and increasing the likelihood of success.

A placebo may then be chosen because people will think something is being done, but research shows that hypnosis works better than a placebo to reduce pain and minimize the amount of anesthesia needed[5]. Other research also shows that hypnotic communication during surgery is helpful in reducing pain, which increases the likelihood of success of the procedure[6].

Hypnosis thus works on the clients' psyche and can act on pain perception, thus supporting medical treatment for cardiac arrhythmias.

Heart arrhythmia caused by stress

Sometimes a cardiac arrhythmia can result from a stressful event, such as violence at your work or something similar.

Researchers are also curious about the role hypnosis may have in stress-induced cardiac arrhythmia. To this end, they triggered subjects to have a variety of emotions and then neutralized them through mental relaxation with hypnosis.

This was shown to help normalize heart function[7].

Other studies also indicate that it is important for people with arrhythmias to do something in addition to medication to control your response to stress, such as with yoga, meditation, relaxation therapy and even breathwork[8].

So, if someone suffers from a heart rhythm disorder and this can clearly be linked to stress or a traumatic event, In addition to standard treatment, hypnosis or hypnotherapy can be used to alleviate the stress and process the trauma, thereby reducing its impact on your nervous system and, consequently, your heart. Furthermore, knowledge of self-hypnosis can help you stay calm in situations you would normally find stressful.

Simply performing relaxation exercises while under hypnosis affects the composition of your blood[9]. This has been studied in women suffering from chronic stress.

Other research shows that hypnotherapy for stress also helps lower blood pressure[10]. This may say something about your blood vessels, but also about how hard your heart is working.

In the case study, reducing anxiety also helped take away the man's stress, which helped his heart beat normally after he had already undergone surgery to do so.

Cardiac arrhythmia caused by depression

Depression also greatly affects the functioning of your body, including your heart. If you have had a heart attack before and you are depressed it makes you more likely to die from a heart arrhythmia[11].

Thereby, communication between the heart and brain is 2-way. A depressed brain can make the heart beat worse, but a badly beating heart can also make the brain more depressed[12].

So reason enough to do something about depression so that the heart behaves "right" again.

Since obesity can also be a problem causing cardiac arrhythmias, the combination can be even more awkward.

A study on hypnotherapy for anxiety and depression in overweight individuals found that it helped reduce anxiety and depression[13].

Depression and anxiety are often caused by beliefs about how life works. If these beliefs make you feel depressed or anxious, they are often limiting beliefs.

A hypnotherapist can help you find and transform those limiting beliefs so you can enjoy life and your body again. Research even shows that hypnotherapy can work better than cognitive behavioral therapy for depression[14].

Learn Hypnosis

Would you like to learn hypnosis to help people suffering from physical symptoms influenced by emotions? Then come to the free masterclass for an introduction.

Or register directly for one of our events and trainings. You can take the trainings in class in Assendelft or live online. If you take the class online, you still participate in the classroom class. We have computers so you can even do assignments with people taking the classes on location.

Click here for our calendar.

Click here for our training courses.

Do you have a question about our training program? Schedule a one-on-one consultation here.

Sources: