Hi,
Thanks to everyone that already downloaded our updated Painkillr App.
Over 500 of you have done that, or shared it with others, in the last 48hrs.
If you want to check it out, play with it or share it please, Already we have had several users tell us they have eliminated their chronic pain!
Others have experienced significant relief and gained a sense of control over their condition.
As promised, as a thank you for helping us, for the next five days we will share with you our top tips for overcoming pain. Including:
Day 1: Understanding pain.
Day 2: The things to stop doing that maintain chronic pain.
Day 3: The things to start doing that will relieve chronic pain.
Day 4: The self-hypnosis mindset.
Day 5: Cultivating your approach.
Our aim is to provide you with a deep understanding of exactly what chronic pain is, and clear guidance on how to lift it.
At the end of these five days you will have the keys to help yourself, and others unlock and let go of useless and unnecessary pain.
This will also help you better understand The Arrow Technique that sits at the heart of Originally developed as a means to provide rapid relief to those suffering with chronic pain conditions, the technique has since shown itself to be a wonderful utility tool.
It can be used effectively not just for removing physical pain, but also for provoking change in those with a variety of emotional and psychological conditions.
Of course appropriate and competent physical evaluation should always be undertaken, before trying to eliminate pain, because pain can be a signal that something is wrong.
Before attempting to relieve your own or others pain, ask if the pain is of any use to you.
Ask, if you were free of the pain, would that be detrimental to you in any way.
If the answer to these questions is no, then you may wish to engage in strategies that help relieve or eliminate pain.
To begin that process today, what follows is some information that will help you understand pain.
We highlight the scientific research suggesting we can change our experience of pain, and give you a sense of control.
Tomorrow we will back this up with helpful advice about the things anyone in pain can stop doing that will help.
The Problem of Chronic Pain. Chronic pain, whether physical or emotional, remains a significant burden for both individuals and society.
Standard medical treatment for chronic pain is often inadequate, and it is common for frustrated patients to seek costly treatments from multiple health care professionals, often without significant relief.
Growing awareness of the limitations of currently available pain treatments make the use of suggestion-based techniques and self-hypnosis an attractive component of pain treatment.
The empirical support for hypnosis for chronic pain management has flourished over the past two decades.
Clinical trials show that hypnosis, and also self-hypnosis, are effective for reducing chronic pain, although outcomes vary between individuals.
(1) The findings from these clinical trials also show that hypnotic treatments have a number of positive effects beyond pain control.
(2) They can be significantly less expensive than standard approaches
(3) Despite this many hypnotherapists, as well as practitioners of other therapeutic approaches, do not have a clear approach to dealing with stubborn pain conditions.
We want to help change that. It is likely that at some point each of us will either be in pain, or be in a position where we would like to help someone else stop suffering.
We believe it is within the range of the human experience to reduce some of that suffering.
You just need to know how. The nature of the techniques ideas we will share in the next five days means that being a complete beginner in this effort does not put you at any disadvantage; the techniques are easy to learn and apply.
It is not certainly necessary to be a hypnotherapist to use them.
We encourage everyone who wishes to to familiarise themselves with these principles to do so. What is pain? Obviously we all know what pain is. However if we are to help alleviate it, it is useful if we can first define or describe pain.
This allows us to examine what makes it up and target our intervention accordingly. The clinical psychologist and renowned expert in chronic pain Dr. Bruce Eimer defines it this way.
Pain is a subjective experience, that normally feels unpleasant, like something in the body has been, or is being damaged or destroyed; that feels like a threat to or interference with one’s ongoing functionality and health; and that is associated with negative emotions, such as fear, anxiety, anger or depression.
(4) This definition acknowledges that pain contains several elements
1. Bodily sensation, with qualities like those experienced during or after tissue-damaging stimulation.
2. An experienced threat or interference with functionality associated with this sensation.
3.An emotional feeling of unpleasantness or other negative emotions. In other words, pain has a sensory / physical component and an affective / emotional component.
They are often intertwined within the experience of pain. One of the keys to relieving pain is to disentangle these two components: the sensory / physical from the affective / emotional. Pain may be mandatory, but suffering, or some portion of it, is it seems optional. Without the emotional element reduced, what is left of the sensation simply does not hurt as much This definition of pain does not require you or anyone else to objectively demonstrate it.
It places importance on the felt experience of the person in pain.
It does not require that an association be made between the unpleasant sensation and tissue damage. Your experience of pain is validated by you, and can be verified by you, even in the absence of tissue damage. This makes 'emotional pain' a useful term. Also it does not eliminate the possibility that the pain is because of tissue damage.
It does not over-emphasise physical factors, at the expense of psychological ones. Pain is neither all in ones head, nor all in ones body. The important thing to understand is that our experience of pain has a large subjective component to it, and it is this which you are able to learn to modify.
The next important step is to understand the difference between acute pain and chronic pain. Acute Pain This is pain that is of recent origin. The immediate pain when you stub your toe or burn yourself is acute.
The new pain from a recent injury is acute. With appropriate care and treatment acute pain is supposed to subside. Acute pain keeps us from destroying ourselves. It is 'useful' pain. When pain lasts beyond that time. Beyond its usefulness, it is considered to be chronic pain.
Chronic Pain This is persistent pain that has outlived it’s usefulness. It has lasted past the point of needing to alerted to a danger, threat or injury needing to be tended to, corrected or escaped.
It is pain that has not responded to appropriate care. It is unrelenting and unremitting. It is often out of proportion in its intensity and disruption. Types of chronic pain include: - recurrent headaches (migraine); - lower back pain; - arm, wrist and hand pain associated with carpal tunnel syndrome; - facial and jaw pain often associated with TMJ; - the burning, shooting leg pain of sciatica; - persistent neck and shoulder pain; - the continual, intense burning pain and hypersensitivity of the skin, muscle and nerves; - pain associated with osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis; - the multitude of symptoms associated with fibromyalgia; - the ringing of tinnitus; - the cramping of IBS - the soreness of unexplained pelvic pain. It is also the pain of protracted experiences of: - sadness - grief; - heartbreak; - loss; - bitterness; - embarrassment; - shame; and many other kinds of emotional hurt. Hypnosis and pain control -
The science is encouraging! Hypnosis is a tool that offers considerable leverage in changing behaviours and experiences related to pain.
(4) Tales of seemingly miraculous relief of pain have been associated with hypnosis from antiquity to the present time. A meta-analysis of controlled trials of hypnotic analgesia indicates that hypnosis can provide significant relief for 75% of the population.
(5) The effect is largest for those who are highly suggestible, but is also relatively large for moderately suggestible people. Because hypnotic pain control includes a placebo element, almost everyone can experience a reduction in pain through suggestive techniques. As already noted, as well as a biological element, the experience of pain includes subjective and cognitive components that lend themselves to hypnotic modification.
Pain has a 'sensory / physical component', and an 'affective / emotional component.' The sensory component pertains to the intensity of the pain experience. The affective, concerns the unpleasantness of the pain. That is the individual's subjective level of distress, which may be driven by conditions that fluctuate over time.
Hypnotic suggestions can affect both components. Self-Hypnosis and pain control. Self-hypnosis can be defined as self-induction into the hypnotic process produced by self- generated suggestions. (6) Self-hypnosis doesn't require the presence of a hypnotist to guide your thoughts and deliver suggestions.
You do it yourself. This puts you in control of your own hypnotic experience, and allows you to have responsibility for your own well-being. More studies have explored the effects of self-hypnosis on pain than any other application using self-hypnosis. Four studies found that self-hypnosis outperformed active controls of electromyography (EMG) feedback, cognitive restructuring, structured attention, and EMG-assessed relaxation training in reducing pain. (7,8,9,10) Two additional studies reported that self-hypnosis outperformed more “passive” control groups, including conscious sedation, empathy, standard care, or no active treatment. (11,12) Studies have also used self-hypnosis for pain management in children. (13,14) All of the eight self-hypnosis pain studies mentioned indicate that self-hypnosis is useful in reducing pain.
This is great news. What's next? Our aim in this email was to provide you with clear information about pain, and let you know about the scientific research suggesting that you can experience relief from it using suggestive techniques. You should now have: - A clear definition of pain. - Understand the difference between acute and chronic pain. - Understand the difference between the sensory and affective components of pain. - An awareness of the scientific research about hypnosis, self-hypnosis and pain control. We believe that a clear understanding of the nature of pain, and an awareness of the evidence that hypnotic techniques can help is a strong step toward freedom from unnecessary suffering.
It helps provide a sense of control. It enables you to take responsibility for your well-being. Tomorrow you will receive information about the things to stop doing, that may be inadvertently maintaining chronic pain.
Best regards,
Anthony Jacquin
https://jacquinhypnosisacademy.com
For online hypnosis training courses.
For inspiring hypnosis quotes check our instagram @hypnosisquotes References
(1) Hypnosis for the Relief and Control of Pain. American Psychological Association, July 2, 2004
(2) Patterson, D. R., & Jensen, M. P. (2003). Hypnosis and clinical pain. Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 129, pp. 495-521.
(3) Lang, E. V., & Rosen, M. P. (2002). Cost analysis of adjunct hypnosis with sedation during outpatient interventional radiologic procedures. Radiology, 222, pp. 375-82.
(4) 2008. Eimer. Bruce. N. Hypnotise Yourself Out of Pain Now! Crown.
(4) Lynn, S. J., Kirsch, I., Barabasz, A., Cardeña, E., & Patterson, D. (2000). Hypnosis as an empirically supported clinical intervention: The state of the evidence and a look to the future. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Vol. 48, pp. 235-255.
(5) Montgomery, G. H., DuHamel, K. N., & Redd, W. H. (2000). A meta-analysis of hypnotically induced analgesia: how effective is hypnosis? International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Vol. 48, pp. 138-153.
(6) Eason, A. D., & Parris, B. A. (2019). Clinical applications of self-hypnosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 6 (3), 262–278.
(7) Jensen, M. P., Barber, J., Romano, J. M., Hanley, M. A., Raichle, K. A., Molton, et al (2009). Effects of self-hypnosis training and EMG biofeedback relaxation training on chronic pain in persons with spinal-cord injury. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 57, 239–268.
(8) Jensen, M. P., Ehde, D. M., Gertz, K. J., Stoelb, B. L., Dillworth, et al (2010). Effects of self-hypnosis training and cognitive restructuring on daily pain intensity and catastrophizing in individuals with multiple sclerosis and chronic pain. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 59, 45– 63.
(9) Lang, E. V., Benotsch, E. G., Fick, L. J., Lutgendorf, S., Berbaum, M. L., Berbaum, et al (2000). Adjunctive non-pharmacological analgesia for invasive medical procedures: A randomised trial. The Lancet, 355, 1486–1490.
(10) Tan, G., Rintala, D. H., Jensen, M. P., Fukui, T., Smith, D., & Williams, W. (2015). A randomized controlled trial of hypnosis compared with bio- feedback for adults with chronic low back pain. European Journal of Pain, 19, 271–280.
(11) Lang, E. V., Berbaum, K. S., Faintuch, et al (2006). Adjunctive self-hypnotic relaxation for outpatient procedures: A prospective randomized trial with women undergoing large core breast biopsy. Pain, 126, 155–164.
(12) Lang, E. V., Joyce, J. S., Spiegel, D., Hamilton, D., & Lee, K. K. (1996). Self-hypnotic relaxation during interventional radiological procedures: Effects on pain perception and intravenous drug use. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 44, 106–119.
(13) Liossi, C., White, P., & Hatira, P. (2006). Random- ized clinical trial of local anesthetic versus a combination of local anesthetic with self-hypnosis in the management of pediatric procedure-related pain. Health Psychology, 25, 307–315.
(14) Olness, K., MacDonald, J. T., & Uden, D. L. (1987). Comparison of self-hypnosis in the treatment of juvenile classic migraine. Pediat- rics, 79, 593–597.