Stress and Hypnosis
Did you know your brain is brilliant at keeping you safe from sabre tooth cats? You have an amazing fast-response system that puts you on high alert whenever danger threatens you. You might know it as the “fight or flight” response.
Your heart beats faster, filling your arms and legs with more blood and energy. Your breathing becomes faster and deeper to help provide your muscles with the oxygen they need to fight or run away. Even your pupils get bigger, so you can see a little better in low light conditions – just the time of day that big cats like to hunt!
You have a longer-term response system as well, that provides energy and motivation to get away from danger, keeping you extra alert and focused on your goals.
You don’t want to stop to admire the view while you’re running for your life!
This system makes use of a hormone called cortisol, which is present in your body even when there’s no danger and does a number of useful things like helping you wake up in the morning. When danger threatens, cortisol levels increase to keep you wide awake, and also to divert energy away from things you don’t need immediately like tissue healing, immunity, and growth to give you that extra amount of energy to deal with the danger.
When we’ve run away from the threat or fought it off as the case may be, our brains can see we’re safe and put a different system into effect, often called the “rest and digest” response. This releases hormones to help us feel calm and allows us to rest while our bodies take care of basic functions like digestion and healing that were ignored while we were on high alert.
Pretty cool huh? And if large carnivorous beasts looking for their next meal were still common, our brain would be ideally suited to our environment.
These days, however, the things we perceive as threats are far more likely to be an unexpected bill, anxiety about a loved one, or stress about your job, but we still use the “Oh no! A sabre-tooth cat!!” response to deal with them.
Our hearts still pump more blood, our breathing still increases, even our pupils still dilate. And if we keep on being worried about money or loved ones or work, because these things continue to be stressful, that long-term danger response kicks in to keep us focused.
What this means in our modern-day lives is that cortisol keeps us awake at night worrying about things.
It wants us to focus solely on the ‘danger’ so even if we try to take our mind off our problems, cortisol is sure to bring it back. Some of us may find it difficult to eat, and others of us find we crave sweet or fatty foods – cortisol wants you to have lots of energy to run away from those cats! We’re also more likely to get sick when we’re stressed as cortisol can suppress our immune systems, and injuries can take longer to heal.
The problem is made worse because with these long-term stressors because we don’t experience the same feelings of safety that trigger the “rest and digest” response. Cortisol continues to tell our bodies and brains that danger is imminent, we keep experiencing the effects of cortisol, and eventually, we enter a spiral known as chronic stress. Stress produces cortisol, which makes us feel more stressed, which produces more cortisol - and on and on. In the long term, this chronic stress can lead to heart disease and a number of chronic conditions, and can also exacerbate pre-existing conditions.
If you recognize yourself in any of this, there’s help available. There are many healing modalities that can alleviate stress, but let's talk about hypnosis here.
Hypnosis in clinical practice is most often coupled with physical relaxation, which is a great first step in convincing your mind that you can stop running away from the sabre-tooth cats. By helping you to achieve deep physical relaxation, we trigger the “rest and digest” response that will help to rebalance the “fight or flight” response your body is experiencing.
I like to say to my clients that human beings get better at everything with practice, and unfortunately, cortisol has probably given you lots of practice in worrying about things. One client told me that she feels she’s ”earned a Ph.D. in anxiety.” Hypnosis is a great tool to help the mind relearn how to be calm, how to shrug off minor upsets and turn down the dial on the stress response so that when life throws you a curveball, you can handle it without risking your health.
With the help of your hypnotist, you can change thought patterns that can lead to stress and anxiety, and build healthy responses that can be used in daily life to deal with stressful events.
These two components of hypnosis, relaxing the body and creating calm in the mind, spiral on one another, much in the way the cortisol response does, but in a positive direction. As the body relaxes, the mind begins to relax, and as the mind relaxes, so too does the body. Whether you find yourself replaying old worries, or you are facing new stressors, hypnosis can empower you with the ability to overcome stress and anxiety, so you can finally achieve peace and calm.
