Overcoming fear of chemotherapy with hypnosis
When you're sick, it's no fun, and then when you have to undergo chemotherapy, the courage can sink in. You hear many stories of people who experience chemotherapy as a horror. Who can no longer eat and have to vomit when they do. Chemotherapy makes your body weaker with the goal of also making the cancer weaker so that it can be cleared more easily by your immune system. The only question is who wins the race to the bottom your body or the cancer
Still, chemotherapy is better than no chemotherapy and is often used to overcome cancer. Hypnosis can help you if you are looking forward to chemo so that you start with more courage and so that you can keep yourself strong in difficult moments.
When undergoing therapy, you may experience vomiting and nausea. One fear you might have if you’re dealing with these symptoms is that if you report them, the doctors will change your medication dosage, even though you currently have something that could help you recover.
Improve sense of control
Fortunately, there are definitely other options besides simply adjusting the dosage of medication. Vomiting is something that can happen, and that’s just how it is. Nausea, however, is something everyone experiences subjectively[1]. For example, some people are more prone to motion sickness because they are more sensitive to the sensation of nausea.
Hypnosis can help you reduce feelings of nausea. Your subjective experience of a situation depends on the beliefs you hold about how the world works and how you function within it. These beliefs also extend to what chemotherapy does and how you react to it. Changing these beliefs and viewing the therapy differently can already help reduce your feelings of nausea.
Changing beliefs is often done initially through regression therapy. This is because past events in your life have led to these unhelpful beliefs. With regression therapy, you travel from the most recent moment when you experienced anxiety back to the very first moment. At that first moment, the issue is addressed in a way that reduces your anxiety about chemotherapy. All of this takes place while you are under hypnosis.
In addition, you can use hypnosis to gain the belief that you can control your nausea. This is usually done with a visualization of a button, or several buttons, that you can control and with which you control your feelings. For example, you can visualize a volume knob, a temperature knob or the buttons in an elevator.
Because you do this while under hypnosis, the sense of control becomes more pronounced, and you truly believe that you can do it. This makes it a reality for you, allowing you to interpret your feelings of nausea differently during difficult moments of your chemotherapy.
This knowledge can already reduce your anxiety about chemotherapy.
Scientific research also shows that hypnosis works better against the expectation of nausea and the feeling of nausea during chemotherapy than cognitive behavioral therapy. In any case, it works at least as well, if not even better[2].
Music to reduce anxiety
While undergoing chemotherapy, say the moment you are on the drip, familiar music also helps you suffer less anxiety. Researchers were even able to find this in people's blood pressure and heart rate while undergoing chemotherapy. The questions that people had to answer also showed that this improved quality of life compared to people who did not listen to music during chemotherapy.
This was due to a reduction in fear, anxiety, and fatigue[3].
Live music even works best. So if you have a friend who can sing a song, bring them along!
Overcoming fear of falling through chemotherapy
In addition to fear of nausea and vomiting, chemotherapy can also weaken you, making you anxious about falling[4]. This is very unfortunate, because if this causes you to unnecessarily lock yourself up to be in a safe "soft" environment it doesn't really make the disease more enjoyable.
Researchers indicate that staying active, even during chemotherapy, is important for maintaining strength and reducing the risk of falls. Of course, this should be done in consultation with your doctor.
Hypnosis can also help you overcome the fear of moving, by overcoming the fear of falling.
Research on hypnotherapy for children undergoing chemotherapy shows that it not only helps alleviate nausea and the fear of it. Other side effects associated with chemotherapy were also reduced or, at the very least, kept stable. Over time, these children experienced less stress and fewer functional impairments than children who did not receive hypnosis. Hypnosis can therefore help prevent the worsening of these symptoms[5].
Making yourself stronger for chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is a challenging time in life when you could really use some self-confidence. One way hypnosis can help reduce your fears is by making you mentally stronger.
This can be done in multiple ways. One way often used for making yourself stronger is by repeating hypnotic suggestions. Because you do this while you are under hypnosis, this also enters you more deeply and more quickly becomes part of your identity and the basic feeling you have about yourself.
These may include suggestions such as:
"I am strong."
"I can do anything."
"My body does everything it can to protect me."
"My body is doing everything it can to make the chemo work."
These are just examples. Depending on your beliefs and fears about chemotherapy, you may receive other suggestions from your hypnosis expert.
Making yourself relax during chemotherapy
Relaxation exercises are also very important to suffer less from chemotherapy. At times when you get anxious or experience a lot of stress from chemotherapy, a relaxation exercise can do a lot to get that tense feeling out of your body.
One way hypnosis can help with this is through guided visualization. Before you get this visualization, the hypnosis expert will ask you questions about places where you have enjoyed relaxing or where you can imagine yourself totally relaxing. For example, this could be a place you imagined in a book or a location from a movie.
Next, you get the guided visualization. This can take the following form, for example:
"You walk up to the place where you had ultimate relaxation on your vacation. You feel how the ground or floor there feels at your feet. It's a nice feeling and each step helps you relax further. You look for that place where you can sit or lie down to relax your whole body for a while. You feel how the sun shines on you (possibly through the window) and the warmth warms your body. A ray of the sun gently passes over your body like a scan and the warmth of that ray relaxes every muscle. The tension is removed from your feet, your upper back can relax again, and you don't even press your tongue against your palate anymore. You feel a blanket of relaxation come over you and you can lie or sit there and enjoy the sounds that are in your place of relaxation. You completely relax."
This is just an example of a guided visualization. Depending on your relaxing spot and whether you find heat or cold relaxing, this can be varied.
Hypnosis is a tool that has been used for an incredibly long time and is also increasingly used to support people going through cancer treatment. This can also be done if you actually have to undergo surgery instead of chemo.
Want to know what hypnosis feels like and whether you can hypnotize others? Then come to a hypnosis workshop and learn hypnosis in just one day.
Would you like to help people facing challenges or undergoing chemotherapy relax through hypnosis? If so, you can sign up right away for a training program at the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands. Ask about the online options if that suits you better.
Or check out the other opportunities and events we give.
[1] https://www.ons.org/sites/default/files/hawkins.pdf
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2354.2006.00736.x
[3] https://academic.oup.com/jmt/article-abstract/44/3/242/955004
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0966636213006863
[5] https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/88/1/34.short