For many years, menopause has been a subject that we don’t know about, we don’t share our experience and we don’t talk about it. Words that spring to mind include wizened, shrivelled, miserable, old, challenging, difficult, misunderstood, emotional, grumpiness and hot!! A pretty negative bunch of words! But that thankfully is being challenged and changed.
In my hypnotherapy practice, I focus on teaching coping skills to deal with life transitions. I specialise in helping people – and especially women – manage the transitions of middle-age. I show women how they can use hypnosis for menopause and learn self-hypnosis for hot flashes.
These days middle-age can be one of the most stressful times of a woman’s life. We may well have elderly parents who are beginning to suffer health issues and need our support. Our children are likely to be going through the tumultuous teenage years, taking stressful public exams, or equally stressfully, not being able to take exams, and leaving home for the first time. Not to mention the anxiety and stress of our jobs. And to top it all, we hit the perimenopause and our hormones throw in a whole bunch of additional problems for us to manage!
Hypnotherapy can help with the physical symptoms, such as hot flushes and night sweats, as well as with the mental aspects of menopause, the stress and unwarranted anxiety that it can cause.
One of my clients described how the menopause made her feel:”Anxious, with a constant feeling of nerves and stress, then a sudden burst of feeling very angry for no real reason”. Not a pleasant way to live. Yet this is the type of thing that women have just ‘put up with’ because they feel they would be wasting a doctor’s time. Because, after all, it isn’t really ‘ill’ is it?
This is exactly the type of thing that hypnotherapy can do so much to help with and the evidence for the benefits with all kinds of perimenopausal symptoms is very strong. The idea that you can change your experience of the physical symptoms of the perimenopause simply by listening to someone talk seems to stretch our credulity, yet in a nutshell, that is what we are doing when we practise hypnosis.
First of all, let me explain that hypnotherapy bears little resemblance to the stage hypnosis tricks that many of us have enjoyed, possibly in a bar while on holiday, or in TV dramas. As a hypnotherapist, I always explain that am not taking control of your mind, nor will you ever be asked to do something that you don’t wish to.
Instead, hypnotherapy enables us to access those parts of our brain that are able to achieve remarkable changes in our body. Think about the placebo effect for a moment: this describes the brain’s ability to heal disease or make lasting changes to our body’s structure and functioning. When we practise hypnosis, it is like we can supercharge the placebo response to achieve all kinds of changes in our body and our brain. And while we are reaping these rewards, we feel calm, relaxed and peaceful.
Researchers have looked at whether hypnosis can help one of the main symptoms of menopause – the hot flushes. Women taking part in the study were randomly allocated to one of two groups, one group had five weekly sessions of hypnosis, the other had five weekly sessions of talking to a therapist about their symptoms. The women were asked to keep diaries to record when they had flushes and how much they interfered with their daily life and they wore sensors that regularly measured skin temperature.
The results showed that hypnosis sessions reduced hot flushes by as much as 80 per cent, and the women in this group also experienced improvements in quality of life and symptoms of anxiety and depression. This was a statistically significant improvement over the control group. The benefits also lasted for up to three months when the women were followed up. The women experienced fewer flushes and the ones they did have were of lower intensity. One important factor to remember is that almost all women can try hypnosis for help with symptoms, regardless of any medication or medical history of cancer – the only possible side effects are a greater feeling of calm and relaxation overall!
The benefits of hypnotherapy for reducing stress and anxiety have been recognised for many years by the medical and professional bodies, with a growing number of researchers demonstrating its success. It is important to say that the skills you gain when you see a hypnotherapist don’t only benefit you for the few weeks that you are attending therapy, these are lifelong skills that will also help you deal with any future stressful events you may encounter.
