What is Hypnotherapy and How Can It Help Us?

Thoughts are always waiting to come out of our minds. The things that hurt us, like our fears, worries, pains, and bad habits, usually come from having these thoughts that aren't dealt with.

At this point, hypnotherapy can help people who are trying to find a way out! Dr. David Spiegel talks about what hypnosis is and how it can help people.

Hypnotherapy is a way to help people that uses hypnosis to get to their mind and help them focus and calm down. As well as helping people deal with worry and anxiety, hypnotherapy can also be used to treat mental illnesses like PTSD and ease pain and sleep problems.

Freud was the first person to use hypnosis in psychotherapy to help people get over the effects of stressful events they went through as children. The main idea behind this treatment is to first figure out what's making us feel bad and then change those things.

People who do hypnosis with a professional get better results, but we can also use hypnosis on our own to deal with pain or stress.

To find out what happens in the brain during hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel is using tomography and MRI in his research. He comes to the conclusion that three things took place at the end of this study.

There is less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex when a person is hypnotised. This is part of the brain's salience network, which is also known as the attention network.

When we turn our heads and hear a loud noise outside, this awareness network kicks in to let us know that something is wrong and we need to pay attention.

During hypnosis, this system's activity drops. This makes it easier for us to focus because our brains take our mind off of what's going on.

Second, hypnotherapy makes the left dorsal lateral profrontal cortex in our brains more functionally connected to each other. This part of the brain is connected to the insula, which is a way for the mind and body to talk to each other.

It gives us power over our bodies in general and helps us understand what's going on inside them. This system makes the link between the body and the brain stronger during hypnosis.

Third, the brain's default mode network stops working when a person is hypnotised. It's a system that turns on when we're not using it. "Who am I?" we ask ourselves. "What do people think of me?"

When we ask questions and think about things is controlled by the default mode network. You can get away from your thinking about who you are and who you should be when this network isn't working during hypnosis.

---