It’s a common misconception to imagine “hypnotherapy” like a scene in which hypnotists make individuals on stage do silly things beyond their control. However, as a physiotherapist, I was amazed at the impact hypnotherapy had on patient’s pain levels.

Then, when I tore my ACL knee ligament, I was desperate to get better quickly and I wanted to take as little medication for pain as possible to avoid the side effects. I decided to try a hypnotherapy audio download for pain and played it every night. I was amazed at how it helped me sleep much better (without any pain medication before bed). I was doing my physiotherapy exercises in the morning while listening to the hypnotherapy and it helped too. Whether it was a “placebo effect” or not, the point was that I was getting better with very little pain and only had a few episodes where I needed pain medication because I overdid it with my physio exercises.

There is definitely something in the “mind-body connection” and I realized how powerful tapping into this can be if you are suffering from long term illness, chronic pain, and inflammation. I found that adding an anti-inflammatory diet also helped as well as getting lots of sleep and staying hydrated.

So, while you may or may not be able to “heal” yourself from a condition, you can certainly make the symptoms much better by changing how your body and mind tolerate and control the pain.