Last weekend we hosted a Meetup here at GMH. It was the first of an eight part series discussing some of the founding principles of hypnosis. Charles Tebbetts, a hypnotist and instructor in the 1970’s, wrote out his observations in the “Rules of the Mind”, eight rules that define how the subconscious mind interacts with you and the outside world.
At the Meetup, we discussed the first rule. “Every thought causes a physical reaction.”
According to Tebbetts, your thoughts can affect all of the functions of your body. For example, Worry thoughts trigger changes in the stomach that in time can lead to ulcers. Anger thoughts stimulate your adrenal glands and the increased adrenaline in the blood stream causes many body changes. Anxiety and Fear thoughts affect your pulse rate.
Ideas that have strong emotional content almost always reach the subconscious mind, because it is the feeling mind. Once accepted, these ideas continue to produce the same body reactions over and over again. In order to eliminate or change these chronic negative bodily reactions we must reach the subconscious mind and change the idea responsible for the reaction. This is easily done with hypnosis and autosuggestion.
Think about how you have noticed this rule in action in your life, whether it was thinking about a happy moment from your past and feeling those happy feelings again, or recalling a sad event and wiping away some tears, and even thinking about a situation that makes you anxious and feeling your chest tighten up and your heart speed up.
There is a fundamental connection between our minds and our bodies. We are essentially machines run by computers. The computers, our brain, sends signals to the machine, our bodies, telling it what to do. We think of this relationship most often in terms of physical events, such as touching something sharp or hot and pulling our hand away. By noticing the effect that our thoughts have on our physical reactions, we open up the door for new and more efficient ways of reducing unpleasant feelings, like chronic pain.
During our discussion, the topic of pain came up more than a few times, probably since pain is a universal experience. We talked about how our thoughts affect our experience of pain, and if we can use our thoughts to decrease the amount of pain we feel. The answer is a definite “YES!”
Pain Is Mandatory...
Pain is a part of life. It sounds like a cliche, but in reality, pain is an important signal that your body uses to alert you of harm happening to your body. Pain tells us that something is wrong and we need to stop whatever we are doing and address it.
Here is what happens when you prick your finger on something sharp.
You prick your finger on something sharp. This causes tissue damage, which is registered by microscopic pain receptors (nociceptors) in your skin. Each pain receptor forms one end of a nerve cell. The other end is connected to the spinal cord by a long nerve fiber or axon. When the pain receptor is activated, it sends an electrical signal up the nerve fiber.
The nerve fiber is bundled together with many others to form a peripheral nerve. The electrical signal passes up the nerve cell within the peripheral nerve to reach the spinal cord in the back.
Within the spinal cord, the electrical signals are transmitted from one neuron to another across synapses (junctions, or tiny gaps, between two nerve cells) using chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. The signals are then passed up the spinal cord to the brain.
In the brain, the signals pass to the thalamus. This is a sorting station that relays the signals to different parts of the brain. Signals are sent to the somatosensory cortex (responsible for physical sensation), the frontal cortex (in charge of thinking), and the limbic system (linked to emotions).
The end result is that you feel a sensation of pain in your finger, think ‘Ouch!’, and react emotionally to the pain by feeling scared or alarmed, annoyed, irritated, or something else.
However, even before you were consciously aware of the injury, you probably jerked your hand away. In sudden strong pain like pricking your finger, a reflex response occurs within the spinal cord. Motor neurons (responsible for movement of muscles) are activated and the muscles of your arm contract, moving your hand away from the sharp object. This occurs in a fraction of a second before the signal has been relayed to the brain. So you have pulled your finger away before even becoming aware of the pain.
Types of Pain
Pain is classified into several types depending on what causes it, how long it lasts, how it feels, and where (and how) it occurs. The description above is an example of acute pain.
Nociceptive pain
Nociceptive pain is caused by any injury to body tissues. For example, a cut, burn or broken bone are all classified as nociceptive pain. Pain after surgery and cancer pain are other forms of nociceptive pain. This type of pain can be aching, sharp or throbbing. Nociceptive pain can be constant or intermittent and may be worsened by movement or by coughing, depending on where the pain is located.
Neuropathic pain
Neuropathic pain is caused by problems or abnormalities in the system that signals and interprets pain. The problem may be in the nerves, spinal cord, or brain.
Neuropathic pain is felt as a burning, tingling, shooting or electric sensation. One example of neuropathic pain is associated with shingles, a skin condition caused by the varicella zoster virus. The virus triggers inflammation of the nerves that can set off a constant deep aching, tingling, or burning sensation that can persist for months after the shingles rash has disappeared.
People with neuropathic pain may feel pain from stimuli that are not normally painful, such as a light touch or cold temperatures. They can also be more sensitive than normal to stimuli that are usually painful. For example, bedclothes touching the affected area could feel painful, and a pin prick could feel excessively sharp.
Psychogenic pain
This type of pain is caused or worsened by psychological factors. Often the pain has a physical cause, but the degree of pain and disability are out of proportion to what would be experienced by most people with a similar problem or injury. This does not mean that the pain is not real, even if a physical cause cannot be found. Any kind of pain can be complicated by psychological factors.
Acute pain
This is short-lived pain warning the body that damage is occurring. It is a symptom of injury or disease, and tends to disappear as the injury or disease resolves.
Chronic pain
Chronic pain, or persistent pain, can be caused by ongoing tissue damage. One example of this is arthritis. However, in some cases there is no physical cause for the pain, or the pain continues to persist long after the injury has healed. Chronic pain can be a disorder all by itself, rather than being a symptom of a separate injury or disease process.
There are a few ways that can contribute to pain becoming chronic.
Pain receptors and neurons along the pain pathway may become hypersensitive and activate too easily.
Connections between the neurons in the pathway can be altered, changing the pain signal.
The brain or spinal cord may intensify, or fail to turn down the pain signals.
Pain receptors that are normally silent (dormant) can become activated by inflammation, creating an increase in pain.
After an injury, nerves may regrow but they may not function correctly.
Chronic pain can persist for months or even years after an initial injury and can be difficult to treat. People with chronic pain may experience sleeplessness, anxiety and depression, all of which can make the problem worse.
Pain Is Mandatory… Suffering is Optional!
We already know that pain protects us in an important way. It lets us know when we are hurt, and prevents us from getting more hurt. Imagine how terrible it would be if, instead of pulling your hand off a hot stove quickly, you kept it there for a little while longer. The damage to your hand would be more severe.
When pain becomes chronic, when it goes on longer than we need it to in order to alert us of danger, then it becomes suffering. Chronic pain affects over half of all Americans. That is over 163 million people suffering with pain that persists beyond any injury or disease. Pain that has no real purpose.
Typically, people who suffer with chronic pain are treated with medications and physical therapy. And all too often these treatments are ineffective. When pain treatments are not effective, people become frustrated, which makes them more susceptible to pain. And when the pain isn’t managed, people lose their quality of life.
There are many theories of how the pain experience can be changed. One of the most popular and comprehensive is called the Gate Control Theory of Pain.
As you can imagine, there are several points in the pain pathway where the signal for pain can be modified. One of these points in the spinal cord is a ‘gate’ mechanism that either lets the pain signal through or blocks it from going any further. The gate control theory of pain was introduced by Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall in 1965.
When we feel pain, such as when we touch a hot stove, sensory receptors in our skin send a message through the nerve fibers to the spinal cord and brainstem and then onto the brain where the sensation of pain is registered. There, the information is processed and the pain is perceived.
The gate theory says that as these pain messages come into the spinal cord, before they even get to the brain, they can be amplified, turned down or even blocked out. We all remember stories of how people injured on the battlefield or in sports games don’t feel any pain from their injuries until afterwards. This has to do with the brain being busy doing other things and shutting the gate until it can pay attention to the pain messages.
An example of this would be when a child falls over and hurts her knee. If she rubs her knee, the signal from that sensation temporarily blocks the pain signal travelling from the injured knee to the brain.
Severe pain quickly gets your attention and usually produces a stronger physical response than mild pain. The location of your pain can also affect how you perceive it. For example, pain coming from the head is harder to ignore than pain coming from somewhere else in the body.
The gate control theory helps explain how the brain influences your experience of pain. But it also opens up the concept that thought can affect how we feel. Since each of our thoughts creates a physical response, it is possible to use our own thoughts to modify the path that our pain signals follow, lowering the intensity and even the frequency of chronic pain.
Charles Tebbetts believed that the mind could make you sick or keep you well. For example, he believed that a person could easily produce a headache just by imagining one. He also demonstrated the ultimate benefit of self-hypnosis when a stroke totally paralyzed him and left him unable to talk. Through self-hypnosis, he recovered and continued to teach hypnotherapy for many years afterward.
Not only can we use our imaginations to think of a safe and comfortable space to “distract” ourselves when we are experiencing pain, we can also create permanent changes in the way our brain recognizes and reacts to chronic pain.
The Role of Hypnosis
Pain contributes to many problems in our lives. Physicians and patients both constantly search for pain relief methods, sometimes missing out on treating other contributing factors such as anxiety and depression.
Hypnosis is one of the most effective and under-utilized tools for helping patients manage chronic pain. The results of hypnosis are immediate, there are no harmful side effects, and the patient is in control of when and where they use it. Hypnosis should be one of the very first treatment options made available to anyone suffering from chronic pain, offering an individual control over pain, emotions and ultimately, their recovery.
You may ask, why hypnosis? Hypnosis is a mind-body therapy that can harness the mind’s ability to influence the body’s physiological and neurological activity. So if a patient is able to change the mind and change the thought, they can change how the brain is wired - which in turn changes their body’s response.
In the 2009 article, “Hypnotherapy for the Management of Chronic Pain” Gary Elkins, Mark P. Jensen, and David R. Patterson look at the effectiveness of using hypnosis as pain management.
This article reviews controlled trials of hypnosis for the treatment of chronic pain. Thirteen studies, excluding studies of headaches, were identified that compared outcomes from hypnosis for the treatment of chronic pain to either baseline data or a control condition. The findings indicate that hypnosis interventions consistently produce significant decreases in pain associated with a variety of chronic-pain problems. Also, hypnosis was generally found to be more effective than non-hypnotic interventions such as attention, physical therapy, and education.
The article goes on to describe that the focus of hypnosis in the treatment of chronic pain also often involves teaching the patient self-hypnosis or providing recordings of hypnosis sessions that can be used to reduce pain on a daily basis outside the sessions. “In our experience, some patients experience an immediate reduction in pain severity following hypnosis treatment, whereas others can obtain reduction in pain with repeated practice of self-hypnosis or hypnosis sessions.”
You can read the full article here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2752362/
Since the publication of this article, several other studies have been conducted that continue to support the effectiveness of hypnosis in the management of many types of chronic pain, including fibromyalgia, cancer, burns, arthritis, sickle cell disease, back pain, headaches, and more.
But Wait, There’s More…
Not only is hypnosis a powerful and effective way to manage pain, it is also a powerful and effective way to manage the psychological factors that contribute to the experience of pain. Hypnosis is used to reduce stress, eliminate anxiety, decrease anger and fear, ease depression, and create an overall sense of calm and well-being. We know that stress, anger, fear, anxiety and depression can increase the amount of pain we experience. By managing these psychological contributors to pain, we can better manage our experience of pain, heal faster, and improve your quality of life.∎
Karen Gray is a Certified Hypnotist, a Registered Nurse, and the director of Green Mountain Hypnosis in Lebanon, New Hampshire. For more information on how you can use hypnosis to change your life, you can visit www.greenmountainhypnosis.com, contact Karen at karengray@greenmountainhypnosis.com, or call (802) 566-0464.