Why hypnosis for surgery?

Are you scheduled to have surgery in the near future?

How would it feel to really know, when the long-anticipated day arrives, that you’ve done everything you can to prepare your body for the experience? To know that it’s primed and ready to heal as quickly, easily and completely as possible? To feel calm, relaxed and even excited about what the future holds?

There’s no getting away from it, surgery can be stressful. As much as we try to focus on the long-term benefits, it’s completely normal to feel a bit nervous. And you may have additional stressors; concerns about how the family will cope while you are recuperating, anxiety about pain and/or recovery times and perhaps even a needle phobia or other unwanted complication to deal with.

• • Just as athletes use hypnotherapy to rehearse winning a gold medal, so we can prepare both the subconscious mind and the body for a medical procedure. The more familiar an experience feels, the less stressful it is.
  • Patients who are already relaxed tend to require less chemical anaesthesia, reducing recovery time.
  • Hypnotherapy is known to be effective in supporting immune function thus reducing the risk of infection.
  • 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.
  • Hypnosis is highly effective in the management and control of pain.
  • Hypnotherapy helps nurture a positive mindset, which is known to be beneficial to health and wellbeing.

We have known for decades that chronic or long-term stress suppresses our immune system [1]. This in turn inhibits the body’s natural healing processes – the last things we want to do during surgery.

Research has shown that patients who experience anxiety before an invasive medical procedure go on to show significantly higher levels of fatigue, tension and pain, even three months after surgery [2]. Meanwhile, people who expressed higher levels of worry before undergoing minor surgery went on to record greater changes in heart rate and blood pressure, proved more difficult to anaesthetise and were more likely to report headaches, vomiting and/or pain afterwards [3].

Just arriving at hospital can be enough to induce stress. ‘White coat syndrome’ (raised blood pressure in clinical environments) is real [4], and research has shown that standard pre-op procedures cause a significant spike in the stress hormone cortisol [5]. Cortisol is released (along with adrenaline) when our sympathetic nervous system is activated; this is the well-known ‘fight or flight’ response that gives us the mental and physical strength we need in life-threatening situations.

Since our logical mind steps in to prevent us fighting off the nursing staff or running away, these hormones continue to course unchecked through our system. As a result, despite all our best efforts we are often pretty ‘wired’ by the time the anaesthetist appears!

And of course, the more stressed we are, the more chemical anaesthetic is required to lower our vital functions to the appropriate level for surgery. And the more anaesthetic we need, the more our body has to contend with before it can start the healing process  – and the longer it takes to recover.

In the same way that stress and fear activate the sympathetic branch of our autonomic nervous system, feeling calm and relaxed stimulates its opposite: our parasympathetic nervous system, sometimes referred to as the ‘rest and digest’ response.

It’s normal and healthy for us to shift between these two responses, as long as we also return regularly to the balanced state known as ‘homeostasis’. It is homeostasis that provides optimal conditions for digestion, immunity – and healing.

Hypnotic trance is a state of deep physical and mental relaxation [6] which activates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps us return to homeostasis. This is just as much the case when we are facing surgery [7] as it is in any other stressful situation.

Imagining (sometimes called visualising) the desired outcome of a situation reduces anxiety, [8] while worrying about what might go wrong increases it. When visualisation is reinforced by hypnotic suggestion it becomes even more effective [9].

Our body’s ability to heal itself is one of life’s greatest marvels.

Modern medicine is incredible, especially when dealing with the ‘mechanics’ of the body. However, when it comes to the actual process of tissue regeneration, even the best doctors in the world can do no more than provide optimum conditions for the body to heal itself.

Think about what happens when you cut your finger: as long as you keep the wound clean and maintain contact between the two sides, the wound will ‘magically’ start to rebuild and repair itself until you can’t even see the join. And it does this over and over again throughout our lifetime.

Healing – like breathing, heart rate, digestion, our immune response, etc – is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. For most of us, our breath is the only one of these functions that we can also control intentionally.

Hypnosis gives us direct access to our subconscious mind, effectively ‘turbo-charging’ the mind/body connection. This means that, as well as returning the body to homoeostasis and reducing stress, it can also help reduce the required dosage of chemical anaesthesia, minimise blood loss during surgery, optimise the immune response [10], control and manage pain [11] and accelerate the natural healing process.