Resolving movement anxiety with hypnosis

Edwin Selij
September 15, 2018

Pain and movement, it's a strange combination. Did you know that when you have surgery you recover fastest if you keep moving. Getting out of bed every day and taking a walk down the hospital hallway makes all the difference. There are many people who don't have to think about it and would rather stay in bed or sit where they are. Those people suffer from movement anxiety.

Do you suffer from movement anxiety? Then it's also a good idea to read this blog

What is movement anxiety?

Fear of movement is a strategy that people with chronic pain use to reduce their pain. By avoiding movement, people with chronic pain believe that their pain will not get worse.

People with movement anxiety are convinced that when they move it makes the pain worse, and so they are anxious to go for walks or really exercise.

For some, even going out of the house, because it requires moving, can be an anxious event. The expectation then is that the pain will become incredibly intense, preventing them from achieving their goals anyway, such as going to the supermarket 100 meters away. Something healthy people often do on foot.

This is incredibly unfortunate, because exercise does help with chronic pain in many cases.

What causes movement anxiety?

The cause of movement anxiety is often chronic pain and mentally magnifying the pain. Then you make the pain bigger in your mind than it is.

This could include pain through:

How is movement anxiety treated?

Movement anxiety is often treated with physical therapy combined with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and relaxation exercises.

A physical therapist helps people increase their range of motion through strength exercises and by assisting them with muscle stretching. This can also help reduce some muscle tension that may cause pain. This is often the case with back pain, for example.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is a therapy that focuses on your thoughts and thought processes. For example, when you need to buy food and have to get moving to do so, you can get incredibly anxious beforehand about the process of shopping. You think about the pain when you put on your shoes, when you have to grab something from the top shelf or when you have to lift your (heavy) groceries to the car, your bicycle bags or walk home with them.

With cognitive behavioral therapy, you can learn how to deal with everyday activities differently and more relaxed. Thereby, cognitive behavioral therapy can be combined with hypnosis which often improves treatment by achieving results faster.

The relaxation exercises are designed to reduce tension-related pain. Your body and mind are closely connected. You may be familiar with the feeling of your body reacting to intense emotions, which can make those emotions even more intense. Especially with anxiety, you often experience tense muscles, which in turn can cause stomachaches—and this can lead you to start noticing other areas of pain in your body.

Hypnosis can therefore play an important role in these treatments. A physical therapist can use hypnosis to help people release their blocks to movement to make it easier for treatment to succeed.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is enhanced by hypnosis.

Hypnosis techniques can be used as relaxation exercises. Like, for example, with a guided visualization where you can dream away.

Hypnosis and the treatment of movement anxiety

Fear of movement can be chronic, but it can also be short-term, such as after surgery. This is precisely the time when movement helps you heal faster so you can go home sooner.

That's why some hospitals are experimenting with self-hypnosis for pain management to speed up healing that way.

According to the 2014 study “Effectiveness of Hypnosis for Post-Operative Pain Management of Minimally Invasive Thoracoscopic Approach to Repair Pectus Excavatum: a retrospective analysis from 2014 shows that patients who had learned self-hypnosis used less morphine after surgery than patients who had not learned self-hypnosis to better manage their pain. Unfortunately, patients were not yet able to go home any sooner, but this significantly reduces the risk of morphine addiction, a problem that can affect people after surgery.

Self-hypnosis for pain can be applied in multiple ways. You can repeat hypnotic suggestions to yourself about pain and its influence on movement. To repeat the right hypnotic suggestions, you first have a conversation with the hypnosis expert. In this conversation, he finds out your beliefs about pain and movement, then gives you suggestions that respond to them.

For example, if you think, "It's best for me to lie still so everything heals properly," you get the suggestion

"Through movement your body heals functionally because in life you also have to move."

So you can get some kind of list of suggestions to repeat to yourself daily. To do this, you first put yourself into a hypnotic trans. You do this by relaxing. So you find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. You breathe evenly through your belly and relax your muscles. You close your eyes and then repeat the suggestions, or you play an mp3 of the hypnosis expert who gave you the suggestions.

Visualization against pain

Visualizations also help tremendously against chronic pain. A hypnosis expert also needs information for such visualizations. Such as what you find a relaxing color. What you find pain relieving and other information.

This information is then incorporated into the visualization. Say you find heat pain relieving then that is reflected in the visualization. A guided visualization against pain can go the following way, for example, after a whiplash.

"You lie in a warm bath and float in the lovely warm water. The water relaxes your muscles and there is one of those jets of water that can massage you wonderfully. The beauty of this bath is that you can decide where the jet of water, with wonderfully warm and relaxing water, massages you. You let the jet massage the area around and on your neck. You feel the tension ease and the pain at your neck and shoulders is massaged away by wonderful warm relaxation."

This is just an example of a guided visualization for pain.

85% of people are hypnotizable, but unfortunately so 15% of people are not hypnotizable or are very difficult to hypnotize. For these people, Virtual Reality offers a solution. With VR glasses, the visualization is played for them like a movie. In people with burns, this technique helps reduce pain medication, an ideal solution when it is difficult to get under hypnosis.

Move more with hypnosis

So hypnosis can be used to relax and thus reduce pain, but it doesn't get you moving right away.

The hypnotic suggestions help you change your beliefs, making you more likely to step in when faced with fear of movement.

In addition, you have the post-hypnotic suggestions that can influence your behavior. For example, the behavior at the time you experience more pain. For example, you just had a visualization and then the hypnosis expert often ends with a post-hypnotic suggestion, such as:

"When you move and you feel pain, feel the warm jet that relaxes your muscles at the pain and takes away the pain. Take a few deep breaths and move the energy of breathing to the pain to take it away. The oxygen takes care of your body."

Such post-hypnotic suggestion allows you to engage in pain management while moving, which ensures that you suffer less from movement anxiety.

Would you like to learn more about how hypnosis works and what you can do to help yourself or others? Then come to a hypnosis workshop or attend another event hosted by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.

Sources:

https://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(14)00510-0/abstract