Research

Hypnosis has been used effectively for lessening chronic pain, childbirth pain, and procedural discomfort. It is used to treat addictions, anxiety, phobias, and to help healing for trauma. 

Brain scans of 57 people during hypnosis found a decrease in activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate (Jiang et al., 2017). The focus of hypnosis removes background worry. They found an increase in connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula. This is where the brain processes what is happening in the body. They saw reduced connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the default mode network resulting in less awareness of actions. When focused on a task, you don’t have to think about the task, you just complete it.  

A meta-analysis of 85 experimental hypnosis trials found that hypnosis is a safe and recommended alternative to medication for acute pain such as childbirth or medical procedures, especially for those who are not good candidates for medication. Hypnotic induction results in less attention paid to perceptual information and thus has an important role in pain reduction (Thompson et al., 2019). Hypnosis is also effective in guiding those with trauma and dissociation to a healing pathway (Gold et al. 2020).