Can hypnotherapy cure anxiety?

           If your life is being controlled by anxiety or limited by a phobia, you'll be desperate to do something about it this may lead you to ask can hypnotherapy cure anxiety? This is a really important question. Other questions like what is hypnotherapy? What's good about it and what's bad. Is hypnotherapy effective for the type of anxiety that I have? What does the scientific evidence say about the effectiveness of hypnotherapy for anxiety? How do I tell if my hypnotherapist is good? Would a different therapy be better for me? So, let's start with what is hypnotherapy? Simply put, hypnotherapy is a therapy facilitated by hypnosis. It uses focused attention relaxation and suggestion to try to address specific problems like anxiety or phobias. But a key component of hypnotherapy which is often overlooked is the therapy part of hypnotherapy which uses techniques that are also used in more conventional psychological therapies and these techniques may actually be more important than the hypnosis itself.

One of these important therapeutic techniques is exposure therapy or systematic desensitization which involves being gradually and gently exposed to what it is that you fear or worry about. In the case of social anxiety this could be talking to strangers or maybe being exposed to a spider blood or balloon if it's a phobia. This leads me to what's good about hypnotherapy. Being exposed to what you fear is really hard, but hypnotherapy can get you in a really relaxed state which makes exposure therapy or desensitization much easier. The positive suggestions given during hypnosis may also help but this will be dependent on how suggestible the individual is, which can vary considerably.

Another encouraging thing about hypnotherapy is that evidence is emerging that when hypnosis is combined with CBT it can enhance the effectiveness of CBT as shown in this meta-analysis study. Now here is the bad. Some hypnotherapists focus too much on the hypnosis and not enough on the therapeutic benefits of exposure therapy and desensitization. They think that reading a hypnosis script and maybe some imaginary exposure is all that is needed but, in many cases, it is not enough to cure an anxiety disorder or even phobia. Let me give you an example. A friend of mine with a needle phobia went to see a hypnotherapist. Curious about his approach I asked her did the therapy involve exposure to any needles or anything sharp. She said no, I have a needle phobia why would I want to do that. She probably left the hypnotherapy session feeling very relaxed and maybe the hypnotherapist considered her cured but she still had a needle phobia and was several hundred pounds poorer. So for the bad I would say some therapists declare success without evidence and follow-up and some therapists focus only on hypnosis and not essential parts of therapy like desensitization. Also on the bad side is marketing. The hypnosis industry is one of the worst for exaggerated claims like cure panic attacks in minutes, cure social anxiety with these advanced hypnosis techniques. You rarely see this sort of claims from mainstream therapies like counselling or CBT which have a lot more empirical evidence for being effective.

However occasionally hypnotherapy does seem to get some spectacular results. I myself became interested in hypnotherapy because I had a nervous throat clearing habit for over a year. I bought a book on self-hypnosis, did one self-hypnosis session and my habit disappeared overnight. Also, back in my 20s I went to see a hypnotherapist for severe insomnia and slept like a baby for a long time afterwards. This led me to train as a hypnotherapist and after curing a number of people of their phobias I thought I'd learnt some sort of magic, but the training organization I used was very good and made it clear that hypnotherapy has limitations and is not suitable for all mental health problems. So I knew both my own limitations and the limitations of hypnotherapy. Therefore I did further training in other therapies to fill some of these gaps but some hypnotherapists take on clients beyond their training or ability and this can be risky. Another problem is that in many countries the hypnotherapy industry is not regulated and there are many different bodies claiming to represent the industry and there is nothing stopping anyone setting themselves up as a hypnotherapy school and then given themselves the area of respectability by setting up yet another governing body. As a result, the quality of the training can vary massively. But what does the scientific evidence say about your specific anxiety disorder or phobia? When it comes to evidence, systematic reviews and meta-analysis are the most meaningful. The next level down is randomized controlled trials and the lowest level of evidence is individual case studies.

For OCD, I could find no systematic reviews meta-analysis or randomized controlled trials where hypnosis alone is used. The only evidence I found was individual case studies which may be down to highly suggestible individuals. This systematic review examined various randomized control trials for hypnosis. For a number of different anxiety problems for phobias, one trial found that hypnosis was no better than systematic desensitization which reinforces what I said earlier about the desensitization being more important than the hypnosis. However another trial did find that a group treated with CBT plus hypnosis did better than a group treated with CBT alone. A trial treating performance-related social anxiety did find that hypnosis performed significantly better than a control group. That's a group that has not had any recognized treatment. For generalized anxiety or unspecified anxiety one trial found that hypnosis was better than music relaxation or no treatment at all, but another trial found that it was no better than meditation and another that it was no better than no treatment at all.

 For panic disorder and PTSD, I found this review, which stated there was insufficient evidence to support the efficacy of hypnosis in chronic anxiety disorders but crucially it also said specific further studies are needed to identify some potential profiles predictive of response to hypnosis in these conditions. So, again it suggests that some people may be able to benefit from hypnosis and this I believe is down to a person's suggestibility which can vary hugely between individuals and it's what is harnessed in stage hypnosis, which I might cover in a future video so make sure you subscribe if you do decide to seek hypnotherapy. Here's what to look out for in a good therapist. A good therapist does not make exaggerated claims, uses desensitization, not just reads you a script, tests that your problem has been resolved or improved, does not take you on for more complex anxiety disorders like OCD and GAD, unless they have other training. if you would like to know what other options are available for anxiety or how effective they are check out my video which looks at the pros cons and evidence of different therapies for anxiety.