Gut directed hypnotherapy and IBS

A shocking statistic is that one in five people in the UK has IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). The good news is that hypnotherapy can have a significant impact on the sometimes chronic symptoms.

Symptoms of IBS

Clients with IBS can experience a wide variety of symptoms. Some of the most common symptoms include bloating, stomach pains or cramps (usually after eating), constipation, and diarrhoea. Typically, cramping will calm down after going to the toilet. Other symptoms include tiredness, lack of energy, lack of muscle, and the body feeling out of sync. Bloating can be so significant that clients may not even be able to wear trousers.

IBS can impact the bladder too – it can irritate it – making clients need to pee more often and experience sudden urges to pee. The bladder can also feel inflamed, and you can get a loss of warning of the need to pee. Clients can get mixed feelings – they think they are full when only half full or don’t realise they are full and may have already started to pee – as the bladder is receiving mixed signals.

IBS can come and go, and it can be incredibly painful when you get it – aggravated by stress, tiredness, and foodstuff.

As well as physical symptoms, there is also a psychological impact. It doesn’t take long to associate stomach pain with eating and relieving pain with going to the toilet. The person experiences the physiological experience of eating, but also the psychological stress of eating and then being relieved by going to the toilet.

Anxiety and depression increase the risk of IBS. With gastrointestinal infection and anxiety, your risk of developing IBS is 2.74 times higher.

When visiting the GP, it can take a while to exclude super nasties like bowel cancer and other IBDs (irritable bowel diseases such as Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis). Typically, when you visit GP in the UK, you will go through a series of exclusion tests to make sure you don’t have other things going on before you are given a diagnosis of IBS. It is frustrating as it is quite a complicated experience. 

How can hypnotherapy help?

Hypnotherapy is a useful and safe option for IBS. Multiple studies have reported that hypnotherapy rebalances the client’s way of thinking, being and doing. It helps with the biological impact of IBS, strategies around social impact, and physiological impact. 

In 2017, Professor Peter Whorwell conducted a large survey on the protocol and rationale for using hypnotherapy to treat IBS. It deduced that gut-focused hypnotherapy is highly effective when conventional treatments fail. It modulates the brain's gut pathways and sensory-motor function. It helps reduce the pain, reduce the anxiety and calm the gut as a direct result. Hypnotherapy significantly improves symptoms.

Scans show that brain functioning after hypnosis turns back to results of normal functioning adults with no IBS. For 999 people out of a thousand, there is a direct result of your hypnotherapy intervention! It significantly results in severity, pain, bloating, bowel habit and life interference.

Is hypnotherapy better than other types of therapy? Supportive therapy shows about 20% improvement in the short term and long term, but gut-directed hypnotherapy shows 80% improvements short term and 90% of symptoms in the long term! After 12 sessions of hypnotherapy, patients had reduced medication, reduced anxiety, and a massive improvement in general well-being.

For more information on how you can be helped, please contact me.