Sept. 20, 2024 – There’s an unexpected treatment for hot flashes and other menopause symptoms that’s getting more popular: clinical hypnosis.
Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention that works through disassociating, or putting aside your conscious awareness of things that would ordinarily be in your consciousness, said David Spiegel, MD, a psychiatrist with Stanford Medical School.
“It increases your cognitive flexibility – a way to approach an old problem from a new point of view and just let go of your older ways of thinking about it,” he said.
Usually around age 50, women have menopause, which is the end of their menstrual cycles. Estrogen levels drop, and hot flashes can happen 12 to 15 times per day, said Gary Elkins, PhD, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Baylor University.
Both clinical hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy, a common form of talk therapy, have been shown to work as non-hormonal treatments for hot flashes, particularly for women who are unable to take hormones for health reasons, such as having a history with an estrogen-sensitive cancer (like breast cancer), according to research published by the Menopause Society in 2023.
A new review presented at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Menopause Society in Chicago last week analyzed 23 studies from 1996 to 2022 and compared how well clinical hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy worked as treatments for hot flashes and other menopause symptoms. Researchers found that clinical hypnosis is better at helping make hot flashes less frequent and less intense, even reducing symptoms by 60%. Findings on cognitive behavioral therapy, on the other hand, showed only slight hot flash reduction, though it helped reduce daily stress linked with hot flashes.
Hypnosis can address the “perfect storm” of mental and physical issues that come with menopause symptoms, explained Spiegel, who created a popular self-hypnosis app called Reveri. “You're having a reduction in your levels of estrogen and progesterone, but it's also a reminder that you're going into a different stage of life where you're no longer fertile, you're getting older,” he said. “[With hypnosis], you can disassociate pain and your awareness of things that ordinarily would impede your consciousness and make you miserable.”
A hypnosis session can help you separate psychological discomfort from physical discomfort, Spiegel said. “Typically, people in hypnosis dealing with menopause will imagine they're floating in a lake, feeling cool, tingling, numbness,” he said. “They can literally change how hot they feel. They can change the hot flash and imagine themselves cool, comfortable. If they're worried about something, picture it on an imaginary screen. Just picture it, but not feel it.”
Hypnosis for Sleep
Hot flashes that happen at night are called night sweats and can hinder your sleep. Hypnotherapy can help reduce both hot flashes and night sweats, to the point where sleep is not interrupted, Elkins said. “While sleep improves with the hypnotherapy intervention, it also involves general relaxation,” said Elkins, who is the director of the Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory at Baylor University. “As women practice self-hypnosis at night, they're entering a more calm and relaxed state, which also may facilitate good sleep or improve sleep duration and sleep quality.”
Our subconscious mind influences our sleep patterns largely through experiences vs. words or thoughts, according to Emilie Leyes, a certified hypnotherapist based in Philadelphia. This explains why simply reciting the words “I’m relaxed,” when you’re stressed, is often less effective than a few deep breaths or a warm hug from a family member or friend, said Leyes, who hosts a brain training podcast for mindset transformation called How to Like Your Life.
“In a similar way, hypnosis, which directly accesses the subconscious, allows us to offer our minds new, powerful experiences to reduce our stress, improve our mood, and increase our access to positive emotions,” she said. “Repeatedly exposing ourselves to these positive experiences in our minds can increase our capacity to feel good, and impact how we feel in our everyday lives.”
Your First Hypnosis Session
A hypnosis session always begins with deep relaxation, which can help your mind and body grow accustomed to what it’s like to feel calm, said Leyes. “By giving the brain and body experiences of safety, relaxation, and inner peace, we can more easily let go of our stressful thoughts of the day and drift off to sleep with ease at night.”
You will often start by sitting or lying in a comfortable position, and then the hypnotic induction begins with a focus of attention, according to Elkins. The person concentrates, with their eyelids closed, and then are given suggestions for deepening their relaxed state. “Usually that's a safe, pleasant place, such as walking through the mountains or being near a beach,” he said. “And within that, suggestions are given that target the mechanism that underlies the symptoms [such as hot flashes].”
Spiegel usually starts off with a neutral test that can help measure how hypnotizable a person is on a zero-to-10 scale. For example, instructing the client to imagine that their hand is floating in the air. If they pull their hand down and it floats back up, the client finds they can “actually dissociate the psychological from the physiological aspects of their experience – their left hand feels different from their right hand,” Spiegel said. “I use that as an example for them to say, ‘look how you can change how your body feels. Now, let's use it to help you with your anxiety with your menopausal symptoms.’”
