Reducing high sensitivity traits with hypnosis

Edwin Selij
April 30, 2018

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)
  • Experiencing 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 note, however, that if children grow up in a stressful environment—such as with depressed parents or an alcoholic parent—this can cause them to seek refuge in a kind of fantasy world. As a result, they also develop a greater susceptibility to suggestion and, consequently, a more vivid 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 to treat anxiety. Nearly every phobia that exists can be treated with hypnosis. Several techniques are used for this purpose, but the most important technique involves confronting your fear in small steps under the guidance of a hypnotherapist.

Hypnosis treatments may vary depending on your beliefs and fears. Sometimes, simply repeating hypnotic suggestions is enough.

High sensitivity and depression

Precisely because you’re so sensitive to the moods around you and the stress of others, you may be more prone to depressive symptoms than people who are less sensitive. Fortunately, hypnosis also helps in treating depressive symptoms. This is mainly achieved by shifting the focus from the negative to the positive aspects of your life and by giving you the tools to eliminate the negative and 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 isn’t just highly sensitive to the mood around them. They may also be more sensitive to substances in their environment. Highly sensitive people are more likely to suffer from allergies than people who aren’t 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 among highly sensitive people than among those without this sensitivity.

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 several ways. For example, through techniques that improve sleep, giving you more energy to process all those stimuli. Or, conversely, through techniques that filter out some of the stimuli.

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 certainly help with nightmares as well . Did you know, for example, that tired people are more likely to have nightmares? Okay, maybe that leads us into the chicken-and-egg dilemma, but getting a good night’s rest can already help prevent nightmares.

In addition, hypnosis can also help reduce nightmares in other ways.

High sensitivity and abnormal events

Lights that start to flicker, seeing ghosts—these are experiences that some highly sensitive people have, but is that something that bothers you? If, for example, you’re 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), a technique that is very similar to hypnosis and is 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.

Would you like to learn more about how hypnosis works, how you can use it yourself, or even how you can help others with hypnosis? Then come to an event hosted by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands. Check out our calendar for upcoming seminars and workshops and sign up!

Sources:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/sbp/sbp/2014/00000042/00000009/art00008

http://cogprints.org/4846/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1543115005000542