Dental hypnosis

• • Just as athletes use hypnotherapy to rehearse winning a gold medal, so we can prepare both the subconscious mind and the body for a visit to the dentist. The more familiar an experience feels, the less stressful it is.
  • Hypnosis is highly effective in the management and control of pain.
  • Hypnosis is a powerful and successful method for bypassing fear and releasing phobias.
  • The deep relaxation of hypnotic trance optimises conditions for activating the body’s own natural healing processes.
  • Visualising one’s body repairing and restoring itself helps the process happen more quickly, comfortably and completely.
  • Hypnotherapy is known to be effective in supporting immune function thus reducing the risk of infection.
  • Hypnotherapy helps nurture a positive mindset, which is known to be beneficial to health and wellbeing.

Our imagination is the key to everything we think, feel and do in life. And our subsconscious mind controls the messages our imagination sends us.

Just as it uses our imagination to remind us how much we enjoy the pleasant things in life, so our subconscious steps in to stop us doing things that it believes are dangerous – like poking a sleeping bear or putting our hand on a hot stove.

And when we’ve had a distressing or scary experience in the past – especially if we were unable to talk about it properly at the time – our subconscious mind will be on the lookout to prevent it from happening again.

When it comes to sleeping bears and hot stoves, this can be very useful. Less so, however, when it applies to things that we need to do, like going to the dentst!

Perhaps you had an unpleasant experience with an unsympathetic dentist as a child. Perhaps you heard someone you trusted say that they hated having their teeth checked. Perhaps you once saw a scene in a film that suggested the dentist’s chair was not a safe place to be. Whatever the reason, your subconscious took the message on board that it needed to keep you away from dentists.

Hypnosis gives us direct access to our subconscious mind, effectively letting us use imagination to hack our own nervous system.

A 2019 research study into hypnotherapy and phobia concluded that ‘hypnosis is a powerful and successful method for inhibiting … fear’ [1]. In other words, it gives us a practical and effective way to bypass that old belief.

And in 2022 a detailed analysis of 19 different studies, carried out over more than 40 years, into ways of ‘reducing dental anxiety and fear avoidance in adults’ found that ‘hypnosis can … be regarded as powerful and successful method for anxiety reduction’ [2]. A further meta-analysis published in 2024, reviewing 173 randomised controlled trials, reached the same conclusion [3]. And a 2025 review drawing together 12 of these systematic reviews and meta-analyses found the strongest evidence for procedures carried out under local anaesthetic, such as extractions, with several studies reporting less need for sedation, lower postoperative pain and reduced use of painkillers [4].

Imagining (or, if your mind works that way, visualising) the desired outcome from a situation has been shown to reduce anxiety [5]. When this is reinforced by hypnotic suggestion it becomes even more effective [6].

And then there are the physical benefits of hypnosis.

Hypnotic trance is a state of deep physical and mental relaxation [7] which helps our nervous system return to homeostasis (balance) after a stressful experience. This is just as much the case when we are facing a dental procedure as it is in any other stressful situation [8].

It also optimises the immune response [9], ‘offers a possible alternative to conventional pain medications’ specifically for acute dental and maxillofacial pain [10, 11] and accelerates the natural healing process.