PMS - Premenstrual syndrome: treatment with hypnosis

Actually, you always feel okay, but a few days before your period you notice that you like life a little less and that you are more anxious than usual. If this is recognizable to you, you may be suffering from premenstrual syndrome (PMS). This syndrome can be very unpleasant for you because it can have a lot of impact on your work, your relationships with people and how you feel about yourself.

In this blog, we take a closer look at this syndrome, its treatments and how hypnosis can help.

Symptoms of premenstrual syndrome

Premenstrual syndrome is diagnosed based on exclusion. This is because the symptoms can also occur with other mental problems or physical problems, if those are ruled out then you will often only be diagnosed with PMS.

There are all kinds of symptoms you can get from PMS and they are both physical and mental, namely:

1. Depressive feelings
2. Mood swings
3. Abdominal Pain
4. Sensitive breasts
5. Headache
6. Fatigue
7. Irritation
8. Tension
9. You're feeling a dip
10. Insomnia
11. Sleepiness
12. Feeling overwhelmed
13. Weight gain
14. Bloating
15. Muscle pain[1]

Usually these symptoms begin in women between the ages of 25 and 35. When you actually get your period, the symptoms disappear again and you feel okay for the week.

About five to eight percent of women who menstruate suffer from PMS[2].

Premenstrual syndrome treatment

Treatment for PMS often consists of lifestyle changes, such as reducing stress, regular exercise, having a healthy diet and reducing salt and caffeine intake.

Sometimes medications that affect your serotonin or hormones are also prescribed, but these can have side effects. Therefore, try to improve everything without medication first.

You can also take supplements for vitamins A, E and B6, calcium and magnesium. Multivitamins are also helpful tools to get all that in order. For vitamin B6, though, it may be helpful to do additional testing to see if it is needed. This vitamin does not have to be taken as a supplement by every woman with PMS.

In addition, keeping a journal can be recommended so that you can be aware of your symptoms and figure out what works and what doesn't to address them (source 1).

It is also helpful to stick to a structured sleep schedule, regardless of whether you suffer from sleepiness or insomnia.

Therapy is also a way to treat PMS (source 1).

Premenstrual syndrome and hypnosis

So therapy can help with premenstrual syndrome, and hypnotherapy is one form of therapy that helps women with PMS. There are several ways in which hypnosis can help.

One way is through improving relaxation. A study in which women received three hypnosis sessions to promote relaxation found that even a month later, symptoms of PMS were less than in the group that had not received hypnotherapy to improve their relaxation[3].

In addition to promoting relaxation, hypnotherapy can also help reduce stress. Stress is often a reaction to unconscious beliefs you have about how the world works and how you are supposed to function in it. If this is made difficult by circumstances then stress follows. With hypnosis, you can do something about those beliefs that will subsequently make you less stressed.

One study found that women who had had hypnotherapy suffered less stress from PMS as a result than women who had not had hypnotherapy[4].

Anxiety is also very annoying if you suffer from PMS, and this can be treated with cognitive behavioral therapy or cognitive hypnotherapy. In a study in which women received 8 group sessions, once each week, of cognitive behavioral therapy in a group or cognitive hypnotherapy in a group or nothing, it was found that both therapies worked equally well to reduce anxiety in women with PMS[5].

If you suffer from PMS, you may also experience a lot of pain. Cognitive behavioral therapy while in hypnosis works very well to reduce menstrual pain, body sensitivity and emotion sensitivity, according to research. As a result, women experienced better health and quality of life[6].

Helping women who suffer from PMS

As a coach or someone who works in healthcare, you may encounter women who suffer from PMS and want to do something about it.

If you then have knowledge of hypnosis, you can already do an awful lot to help women with this problem.

Initially, with knowledge of hypnosis, you can help them with relaxation. Relaxation can be done in many ways, but it is also an important step for inducing hypnosis.

Then you can use hypnotic suggestions to deepen relaxation

Then you can deepen the hypnosis by suggesting how the woman walks down a staircase, into a basement with a door. Behind that door is a place where she feels completely comfortable. This can be a place she has been, or a place she creates in her imagination.

When she is ready, she can open the door and go to the place of complete relaxation. You can deepen the relaxation there, too. For example, with a guided muscle relaxation.

You can also give and visualization about a light that cleanses the body completely. You can give suggestions on how this light sucks out the air that causes the bloating and how it transforms the pain into something light and something easy to let go of.

In this way, you transform relaxation into a treatment for pain for PMS, for example.

Reducing Stress

Stress is a reaction to unconscious beliefs about how the world works and how to function in it. During PMS, women are slightly more sensitive to this stress than at other times of the month.

So then when your client is nice and relaxed, you can get to work changing beliefs that stress her out.

In the preliminary interview, you can already do a little research on what she thinks is the reason for the stress. That can already give you a handy entry point for suggestions to help her feel stronger, for example, if that is the problem.

For example, you can tell her to repeat certain suggestions, such as:

"I'm good enough."

"I get to feel the way I feel."

"I am loved."

These are just examples. Depending on the problem she has, you can also give other suggestions (or affirmations) that she can repeat.

If you then ask if this solved it and she feels it didn't, you can use other techniques as well.

Like regression. With regression, you go back to the first moment when the woman had a certain negative feeling. The same feeling when she suffers from an emotional symptom of premenstrual syndrome.

This is often a childhood moment because that is the time in life when people set the "rules" for life. Or figure out what they are.

Sometimes those rules can be prohibitive and then they stress you out. With regression, you help the woman reinterpret this moment with the knowledge she has now, as an adult. This can help to give the "rule" and update and therefore you change the belief[7].

This will change the emotional response to similar situations and reduce the stress caused by PMS.

This technique can also work for anxiety.

Sometimes, however, even more than just a new interpretation is needed. In that case, the woman can also start the conversation with the inner child. The girl she was at the time she received a limiting belief.

You then help the woman to still give the child what it needed. This often involves love, acceptance and/or safety. In doing so, you also help the woman make it clear to the inner child that life is different now and that certain behaviors she used as protection are no longer necessary.

So she doesn't have to worry so much anymore either.

This often helps very well with anxiety and stress.

The last few techniques are the more advanced techniques, though. Regression does get taught in the first year of Hypnosis Institute Netherlands training courses, but only after simpler techniques.

Are you someone who works with women and wants to help women feel better? Then knowledge of hypnotherapy can be incredibly useful as an added value.

Want to learn more about hypnosis? Then come to the free online master class.

Or register directly for one of our seminars or trainings. Trainings are delivered live online from a professional studio and with plenty of 1-on-1 assistance so you can absorb the material well.

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