If you are extremely sensitive to your environment, the feelings of people around you and the atmosphere, this is also known as high sensitivity. Someone who has characteristics of high sensitivity is referred to as a highly sensitive person. These characteristics can have a lot of impact on your daily life, which is why you may want to apply a filter to be a little less sensitive. This is something that can be done with hypnosis.
In this blog, I discuss what the characteristics of high sensitivity are and how hypnosis can influence them.
More anxiety and stress for driving
Do you know the series Stranger Things? In this series, there is a girl with psychic powers. These powers are enhanced the moment she floats in a bathtub of salt water, experiencing weightlessness.
In a study on high sensitivity and altered states of consciousness, the reactions of people who are highly sensitive and those who are not were compared when they were also in such a bath.
What turns out. People who were highly sensitive were more likely to have an abnormal state of consciousness than those who were not highly sensitive. The classification of groups was made based on whether people self-reported whether they suffered from high sensitivity and a questionnaire used to monitor symptoms. This showed that highly sensitive people suffered from the following characteristics more often than less sensitive people:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Migraines
- Allergies
- Chronic pain
- Chronic fatigue
- Optimism
- Nightmares
- Have more frequent abnormal experiences (such as seeing ghosts)
- More often a woman
- Being the eldest child or only child
- Two-handedness
- Having a rich imagination
- Seeing yourself as an introvert (especially for female high-sensitive individuals)
- Having a traumatic event in your childhood
- Sensitive to sound and/or light
In the process, high sensitivity was also more common in the family than in people without high sensitivity. This was also found in other studies on highly sensitive individuals.
The researchers do indicate that if children grow up in a stressful environment, such as with depressed parents or with an alcoholic parent, this can cause them to like to leave for a kind of fantasy world. This also causes them to develop a higher sensitivity to suggestion and thus their imagination.
The good news is, with all these characteristics of high sensitivity, hypnosis can be used to suffer less from this, although I can imagine that two-handedness is actually very useful 😉 and you don't want to have a little less of optimism.
High sensitivity and anxiety
Hypnosis is most commonly used against anxiety. Almost any phobia out there can be treated with hypnosis. Several techniques are used for this, but the most important technique is to confront your fear in increments under the guidance of a hypnotist.
Depending on your beliefs and fears, hypnosis treatments may vary. Sometimes repeating hypnotic suggestions is enough.
High sensitivity and depression
Precisely because you are so sensitive to moods around you and stress from others, you may suffer more from depressive symptoms than people who are less sensitive. Fortunately, hypnosis also helps treat depressive symptoms. This is mainly by shifting the focus from the negative to the good in your life and giving you the tools to eliminate the negative and instead move toward the positive.
Suppose you have people around you that actually make you unhappy. Then a hypnotherapist can help you figure out why you keep dealing with them and what causes you to either call them out on their behavior or be able to choose for yourself. Then that is then worked on to make this happen and for you to feel good about it.
High sensitivity and migraines
Whether you are highly sensitive or not, migraines are highly treatable with hypnosis. Watch this video for an explanation of how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=PsnIksprPTE
High sensitivity and allergies
Apparently, a person is not only highly sensitive to the mood around him/her. You may then also be more sensitive to substances around you. Highly sensitive people suffer from allergies more often than people who are not highly sensitive.
Hypnosis can also help reduce or stop allergies for some allergies. It is quite extraordinary, but apparently our psyche really does affect our body's reactions to certain substances.
If you are able to break that body's response to emotions or beliefs, you have already made tremendous gains.
High sensitivity and chronic pain
Highly sensitive women are also more likely to suffer from fibromyalgia than women who are not highly sensitive. This may explain the chronic pain that is more common in high sensitivity than in those without it.
For pain with fibromyalgia and other chronic (and even non-chronic) pain, hypnosis can help reduce pain. This is done primarily by shifting the focus from the pain to something else.
Many people who suffer from chronic pain also think a lot about the pain and the effect the pain has on their lives. For example, they think that the pain reduces their range of motion, and of course that makes you bitter.
By shifting the focus precisely to what you can still do, you also have more distraction from the pain, which can also reduce the feeling of pain.
In addition, hypnosis can reduce pain with very practical exercises. Like with a visualization of a kind of slider that allows you to soften the pain.
High sensitivity and chronic fatigue
Stimuli, stimuli and more stimuli. As a highly sensitive person, you receive much more than people who are not highly sensitive. This means that your brain is also processing many more signals and that takes energy, a lot of energy.
In fact, the brain uses the most energy of the entire body. Just think how much extra energy you then consume as a highly sensitive person.
Hypnosis can help reduce this fatigue in multiple ways. For example, through techniques that improve sleep, giving you more energy to process all those stimuli. Or through techniques that filter the stimuli somewhat.
One technique you can use for filtering stimuli is the invisible bubble. You then visualize a kind of invisible bubble and it then filters the stimuli. It is, as it were, a protective mechanism against stressed energy, for example from that intern who still has to learn everything, which then bothers you less.
You then practice these techniques with a hypnotist or learn on your own during a self-hypnosis workshop.
High sensitivity and nightmares
Precisely because as a high-sensitive person you pick up a lot of moods from people around you, you can also have more worries, and therefore more nightmares. This is incredibly annoying because it can keep you from sleeping.
Hypnosis can also certainly help with nightmares. For example, did you know that tired people are more likely to have nightmares? Okay, maybe we end up with the chicken-and-egg story then, but a good rest can already help against nightmares.
In addition, hypnosis can also help reduce nightmares in other ways.
High sensitivity and abnormal events
Lights starting to flash, seeing ghosts. These are experiences that some people who are highly sensitive have, but is it something that bothers you? For example, if you are afraid of ghosts, hypnosis can help reduce those fears.
In addition, how you deal with these types of events depends on your own beliefs. A hypnotist can help you with this so that you do not experience a burden from this. He or she does this by researching those beliefs and seeing where there is room to change those beliefs through a series of hypnosis techniques, such as visualizations and hypnotic suggestions.
A traumatic childhood experience
A traumatic experience in your childhood can affect you for the rest of your life. By processing your traumatic experience you can be less affected by it, this does not necessarily mean that you will lose your high sensitivity.
The reason why a childhood experience can affect you for the rest of your life is because you form beliefs precisely in childhood. Especially in elementary school age, events can give you beliefs about how life works. Generally this goes well, but in the case of a traumatic event, you can get just a little illogical beliefs.
Many traumas are processed through neuro linguistic programming (NLP), something very similar to hypnosis and also used by many hypnotists.
In addition, regression allows you to go back to such an impressive event to see with your current adult knowledge if your beliefs formed then still make sense. This can be a very quick way to process a traumatic experience.
Being a highly sensitive person is something that most people do not choose and something that can have a lot of impact on your life. As you have read, hypnosis can influence many characteristics of high sensitivity to be less affected by this.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works, how you can use it yourself or how you can even help other people with hypnosis? Then come to an event of the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands. Check our agenda for upcoming seminars and workshops and register!
Sources:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/sbp/sbp/2014/00000042/00000009/art00008
http://cogprints.org/4846/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1543115005000542
