Greasy Shute
Hypnotherapy is a type of therapy that’s used to treat a wide range of mental health problems, from anxiety and eating behaviours to phobias and smoking.
It works by changine beliefs at a subconscious level which then changes our behaviours in everyday life. But what happens to our brains when we have hypnotherapy?
Hypnotherapists believe that problems aren’t caused by situations themselves, but by how we respond to them in our thoughts. This then affects our feelings and actions.
Situations affect thoughts, which then affect feelings and actions. The way we think about a situation can affect how we feel and how we act.
For example, if someone you know does not return your calkl in a timely manor, what reaction do you give?
You might think that they ignored you because they don’t like you, which might make you feel rejected. So you might be tempted not to ring them and wait for them to ring you before you contact them again.
This could breed more bad feeling between you both and more “rejections”, until eventually you believe that you must be unlikeable. If this happened with enough people, you could start to withdraw socially.
But how well did you interpret the situation in the first place?
Common errors in thinking style
Emotional reasoning – e.g. I feel guilty so I must be guilty
Jumping to conclusions – e.g. if I go into work when I’m feeling low, I’ll only feel worse
All-or-nothing thinking – e.g. if I’ve not done it perfectly, then it’s absolutely useless
Mental filtering – e.g. noticing my failures more than my successes
Over generalising – e.g. nothing ever goes well in my life
Labelling – e.g. I’m a loser
hypnotherapy aims to break negative vicious cycles by identifying unhelpful ways of reacting that creep into our thinking and by using hypnosis helping the client to change our thinking at the subconscious level.
“Emotional reasoning is a very common error in people’s thinking,” explains Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist from Kings College London. “That’s when you think something must be true because of how you feel.”
hypnotherapy tries to replace these negative thinking styles with more useful or realistic ones.
This can be a challenge for people with mental health disorders, as their thinking styles can be well-established.
How do we break negative thinking styles?
Some psychological theories suggest that we learn these negative thinking patterns through a process called negative reinforcement.
Spider
Graded exposure can help people confront their phobias
For example, if you have a fear of spiders, by avoiding them you learn that your anxiety levels can be reduced. So you’re rewarded in the short term with less anxiety but this reinforces the fear.
To unlearn these patterns, people with phobias and anxiety disorders often use a hypnotherapy technique called graded exposure. By gradually confronting what frightens them and observing that nothing bad actually happens, it’s possible to slowly retrain their brains to not fear it.