Stress management with (self) hypnosis: practical tips
Do you often feel like a hamster running hard at the wheel? Do you fear that you are turning into the hamster who at some point remains in the wheel but the wheel keeps spinning? That you could go down with the stress of everyday life? In this article I discuss stress in life and how you can deal with it to prevent worse symptoms
Beliefs and stress
I often talk about beliefs because they influence our actions and decisions. Our beliefs create our reality. The differences in beliefs between people also determine how susceptible you are to stress. Everyone has someone in their circle of friends who’s always late or, conversely, someone who’s always right on time.
A person’s belief about the importance of being on time is a determining factor here, but in the same way, other beliefs determine how you do your work and how perfectionistic or efficient you want to be in doing it.
These beliefs can sometimes cause stress if they are unreasonable. For example, if you expect yourself to always have to work the hardest out of everyone you may experience stress symptoms.
If you always expect everything to go flawlessly, it can cause you to feel stressed, especially if you also have to give a presentation in front of a group.
To avoid long-term stress and all the resulting disadvantages, it is important to have strategies to properly handle stressful moments.
Prolonged stress weakens your immune system stress actually shuts down the immune system. Now normally this is not a problem because a stress moment is over within an hour. Only with prolonged stress, your immune system is also weakened for a long time. This makes you more susceptible to a cold or flu.
A scientific study has shown that self-hypnosis and relaxation exercises can reduce the perception of stress. This study was conducted among students and found that those who did not practice self-hypnosis experienced more stress than the students who did practice it. Self-hypnosis therefore appears to be an effective technique for managing stress. This was particularly evident during exam periods in the study. In some cases, the immune system was even less compromised during the exam period among those who practiced self-hypnosis to cope with exam stress compared to those who did not.
In addition to a weakened immune system, prolonged stress can cause you to develop depression or even burnout, which can prevent you from doing your job properly and from enjoying your life.
Beliefs that cause stress
The first step to reducing your stress with hypnosis is to determine what beliefs are actually stressing you out. You do this by asking yourself questions about your moments of stress.
- What ideas make you work too long?
- What beliefs make you care about what others think?
- What idea keeps you from taking a break?
- What belief causes you to lie awake at night?
By finding your beliefs that are causing stress with these questions, you can begin to rethink. You then begin the mental change that makes you less likely to become stressed. You do this initially by further exploring your beliefs and also finding the importance of that belief to you.
- Why do I have this conviction?
- Is this belief really that important?
Then you can contrast beliefs with your own that cause you stress. So you can contrast a less stressful belief with your own stressful belief.
Reversing beliefs with self-hypnosis
If you read my blogs more often, it is now becoming a bit predictable, but every hypnosis session begins with relaxation. So sit back in your favorite chair, lie down on your couch or on your bed, and focus initially on your breathing. Focus on your body and on your inner world. When you are properly relaxed begin repeating the new beliefs you want to have.
You get to reprogram your own beliefs, so to speak.
In addition, you can visualize how to deal with mistakes. Ultimately, in some cases, life is a string of mistakes. It is not for nothing that you learn as a child that after falling you have to get up again, because in the end you fall much more often, even if figuratively, and have to get back up again and again.
The best part, of course, is when you can avoid that trap. Have you noticed that as a child you walked or biked much more steadily when you were relaxed and less afraid of falling? Perhaps because you were less afraid of the thought of falling?
For example, you can visualize how you learn from mistakes so that the next time you face a similar situation, you handle all the factors better. For example, you can visualize yourself sailing a canoe on a river. A tricky turn comes up and you might take it jerkily at first, but by the next turn everything goes much more smoothly.
Another technique is to breathe out beliefs and thoughts that stress you out and breathe back in relaxed air full of positive energy. You can then imagine breathing out all your stress and breathing in positive energy.
Depression caused by stress and hypnosis
Prolonged stress can also lead to depression. Recently, there has been an increasing number of studies on the effect of hypnosis on depression. The idea that hypnosis might help with depression came to one researcher during a dinner where a physician specializing in medication explained that most medications are no more effective than a placebo in treating depression.
If a placebo can already work against depression, it means that in some cases depression really is a mental problem. Hypnosis is the way to address mental problems. Then again, research shows that just 1 hypnosis session can reduce depression and even make it disappear altogether.
Research shows that even a single hypnosis session can significantly reduce symptoms of depression. In this study, participants were observed for 2 weeks and received one hypnosis session on the8th day. Subsequently, their symptoms were found to have decreased.
So reducing depression can be done with as little as 1 hypnosis session.
Burnout due to stress and hypnosis
Prolonged stress can also lead to burnout. Burnout is particularly common in caregiving professions, such as doctors, nurses, and teachers. People who care for family and friends—so-called informal caregivers—also experience burnout relatively often. Over time, you may find it difficult to empathize with your patients, or you may have done so to such an extent that it all becomes too much for you.
It is therefore important for healthcare providers to set boundaries, maintain resilience, and be mentally strong. By using hypnosis, you can mentally protect yourself from the negative energy you may encounter while providing care. For example, research has shown that you can be influenced by the mood of those around you. So, if you walk into a room with a positive atmosphere, you’ll feel cheerful, but if the mood is depressed, you might also feel down.
With hypnotherapy, you can determine when you have enough compassion so that you are not completely swept up in the worries and agonies of your patient or students. By doing so, you avoid actually becoming totally insensitive and not empathizing at all as you suffer from overwork or even continue to work during burnout. You also prevent the mood in the room from igniting you and taking the dip home with you.
Self-hypnosis to let go
One way to reduce stress caused by emotions and compassion is to distance yourself from the outside world and focus on your inner self. You use self-hypnosis for this. Initially, you relax by taking several deep breaths. Then you go back to basics for a moment. Instead of focusing on your surroundings, you focus on yourself. What do you feel?
Another way to deal with stress is to see thoughts as clouds during self-hypnosis to make them come and go more easily. That way, you prevent your thoughts from affecting your emotions.
In addition, you can gain strength from your session by reliving positive moments from your work during self-hypnosis. You can determine for yourself why that moment was so positive now and how you can see those elements even in situations that don't seem so positive at first.
Setting boundaries can be taken almost literally. For example, you can set a boundary to which negative energy can come. You do this by visualizing a bubble around you that contains your positive energy and excludes the negative energy. In this way you can sympathize with people for whom you care, but remain aware that you have your own energy and do not let the emotion of the other ignite you.
These are just a few of the hypnosis and self-hypnosis techniques that can help reduce and prevent stress. If you’d like to learn more about how you can help yourself and others with hypnosis , check out the courses and events offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.
Also pin this handy infographic:
Sources:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207144.2013.810485
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00029157.2013.741026?journalCode=ujhy20
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ch.382/abstract