Hypnosis for Infertility Support
Infertility is a condition that affects millions of women and men around the world. In fact, nearly 10% of women have difficulty getting pregnant or staying pregnant. Infertility affects 1 in 8 couples, and 11.9% of women receive infertility services in their lifetime [1]
For many couples who are facing the psychological and physiological challenges of infertility, hypnotherapy provides a welcomed relief. The benefits are tremendously helpful for the women and men affected by this condition.
The Psychological Impact
While the causes of infertility can often times be physiological, the resulting heartache from the inability to conceive a child can be unimaginable. In a study conducted at a fertility clinic, 50% of women and 15% of men said that infertility is the most upsetting experience of their lives. Antoher study showed that women with infertility feel as anxious and depressed as those diagnosed with HIV, cancer, hypertension, and those recovering from a heart attack.
Individuals who struggle to conceive experience a wide range of emotions including grief, depression, anger, anxiety and frustration. In Camille Prestons Ted Talk “A Journey Through Infertility” she describes her own personal experience with infertility as “buying perhaps one of the most expensive tickets to the worlds largest and most hormonal emotional rollercoaster.” In addition to being extremely expensive, the impact of not successfully conceiving a child can greatly impact happiness, self-esteem, self-confidence, and can even create a sense of devastation and loss.
Often times traditional medical interventions cause additional stress, grief, and anxiety for patients. The medications administered during fertility treatments have been linked to extreme psychological side effects that result in loss of sleep, stress, mood swings, and even mania.
How does Hypnosis Help with the Psychological Impact?
Hypnotherapy is a safe, effective, and therapeutic technique which helps to alleviate the negative psychological impact of infertility, and increase feelings of positivity, optimism, and well being. By reducing or eliminating some side effects, hypnotherapy can make treatments and/or procedures more manageable. By bringing clients into a deep state of relaxation, a skilled hypnotherapist can help the client cope with the difficult emotions, process grief and sadness, let go of blame and anger, and reframe negative thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in a gentle and unique way. Hypnotherapy can provide relief, comfort, peace, and hope to women and men who suffer from the inability to conceive a child.
How Does It Work?
Hypnotherapy utilizes relaxation, focused inward concentration, and specific change techniques to create change within the subconscious mind. You can think of the subconscious as the part of your mind that controls your emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and habits. The process of hypnosis will typically begin with progressive relaxation which is excellent at relaxing both the mind and the body. The process of a hypnotherapy session can include:
Relaxation – Hypnotherapy allows the client to enter a deep state of relaxation. Alice Doma directs the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health in Boston. She states “I suspect that some women are more reproductively sensitive to stress than other women.” Guiding a man or woman into a deep state of relaxation can sometimes be one of the most beneficial aspects of a hypnotherapy session. This is especially true for clients who are presenting symptoms of extreme stress, fear, panic, anger, or anxiety. Often times clients have difficulty managing their emotions despite their best efforts to do so using more conventional/traditional therapy. The act of guiding clients into this unique state of relaxation is often enough to produce remarkably positive shifts in mood, thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Inward Concentration – By becoming completely relaxed, the client obtains a state of concentrated inward focus without distraction from the critical faculty of the mind. The critical faculty of the mind is the part of the mind that is always analyzing, criticizing, and judging. The critical mind acts as a gatekeeper to the subconscious which is where all of our thoughts feelings and behaviors are stored. In hypnosis, we essentially send the critical faculty of the mind on a nice vacation to the beach. By doing this, we establish a more direct connection to the subconscious. At this stage, a skilled hypnotherapist can utilize a variety of change techniques to guide clients to access their own inner resources to implement positive changes. Because the client is utilizing their own resources, we believe that all hypnosis is self hypnosis. The hypnotherapist acts as an expert guide, helping the client to discover the tools they need to solve the problem on their own. Once a client has discovered these tools and resources, they are able to create the positive change they want to see in their lives without conscious effort.
Reprogramming beliefs - The subconscious is responsible for 90% of what we think, feel, and believe. It acts as a filter through which we experience life. By using hypnosis, we can reprogram limiting beliefs, negative thought processes, and harmful behaviors by seeing them in a different light. We are able to integrate new, positive, supportive thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that are in line with how we want to feel.
Visualization – “To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there.” Visualization is an extremely powerful tool for creating positive change. Visualization allows us to materialize positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in our lives. It can give us amazing clarity and can help us sort out emotions like grief, fear, and doubt. When we visualize, we can generate powerful thoughts, feelings, and pictures. By creating these thoughts, feelings, and pictures in our mind, they become the mental blueprint for materializing what we want in our lives. This mental blueprint shapes our subconscious mind so that the positive changes occur in our conscious minds automatically.
More on Visualization - Hypnotherapy provides us with a unique opportunity to utilize the power of visualization when we are in a very relaxed and creative state of mind. Scientifically, this is known as the theta brain wave start. In theta. our problem solving, learning, and healing abilities are at their greatest. In this state, clients are able to utilize their own internal resources to improve their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Different visualization processes can also help clients let go of grief, and this is especially helpful for couples who are told they have no chance of conceiving a child.
Positive Hypno-Affirmations – Because hypnotherapy allows us to drop down into the theta brain wave state and communicate directly with the subconscious, the use of positive affirmations while in hypnosis is especially effective. In theta, we are more open to the positive suggestions that are in alignment with how we want to think, feel, and behave. You can think of hypno-affirmations like positive affirmations on steroids. Hypno-affirmations can replace negativity, fear, and doubt, with a more positive, healthy outlook. After the session, clients take on these positive feelings about themselves and/or their situation without effort.
The process of hypnosis allows clients to (quite literally) close their eyes and get free. These gentle and effective techniques result in changes that occur easy and effortlessly. By facilitating this process, we are able to help women and men to take back control, reduce stress, cope with fear and grief, and re-establish positive feelings about themselves and their fertility journey.
What About the Physiological Impact?
Hypnotherapy has proven to have positive benefits for a number of the physiological issues surrounding infertility, some of which include:
Overall Physical Wellness: Women with infertility can improve their chances of pregnancy by improving their overall physical wellness. The same is true for men. Hypnosis can promote general wellness by helping men and women lose weight, quit smoking, reduce blood pressure, exercise, and eat a healthy diet. Improving these factors will contribute to better overall health and wellness, which can increase the likelihood of pregnancy.
Reducing Alcohol Intake: Alcohol use can lower testosterone levels, cause erectile dysfunction, and decrease sperm production. Reducing the intake of alcohol can increase the likelihood that a man can produce viable sperm.
Reducing Physical Stress: When stress impacts the mind, it will certainly impact the body. In stressful situations, the body creates cortisol which pushes metabolism into high gear. Sustained levels of this can cause weight gain, high blood pressure, and other health problems. The body and mind form a strong connection, and emotional distress can manifest in the body in a number of unwanted ways. When the stress response is activated, it negatively affects both our central nervous systems and our endocrine systems. Over time, this can have a greater and greater negative impact on a woman’s ability to conceive. Stress can lower a man’s sperm count which can also contribute to challenges conceiving a child. [2] By reducing levels of stress in the mind, hypnotherapy helps to counteract the negative effects that stress can have in the body.
Balancing Hormones: When the body is under stress, it uses the pregnancy hormone progesterone to make the stress hormone cortisol. Progesterone deficiency is a factor in infertility. By alleviating the stress in the body, a woman can more easily balance her endocrine system and increase the chances of a successful pregnancy.
Hypnotherapy and IVF Treatments
Perhaps one of the most exciting studies on hypnosis and IVF was done in 2006 and indicated a positive correlation between hypnotherapy and successful IVF treatments. “We gave hypnosis to a group of our patients during the most stressful part of IVF treatment – the transferring of embryos into the uterus. It’s a crucial point of the treatment, and the point in which the embryo comes in contact with the womb of the woman. It all builds up to that special moment, which is not very painful but is very stressful” said Professor Levitas. The studies showed that patients that were in hypnosis at the time of embryo transfer yielded pregnancy rates that were double those of the controls. [3]
Why would hypnosis yield higher pregnancy rates? According to Prof Levitas “Studies have been done before which claim that during this short period, there’s so much stress in the woman’s body that it may induce contractions, albeit tiny ones, which may interrupt or even expel the embryos from the uterus at the same moment we’re introducing them…hypnosis has been known for many years for producing central relaxation and has even been used before surgical interventions to calm patients.”
Another theory suggests that powerful visualization may play a part in the successful implantation of the embryo.
This study shows extremely promising results for women who are undergoing IVF treatments. With minimal insurance coverage for infertility, couples can expect to pay anywhere between $10,000-$15,000 for IVF treatments with no guarantees. Currently only 16 states in the US have infertility insurance laws. Given the results of this study, hypnosis should be considered as an inexpensive, non-invasive complementary therapy to IVF.
How Effective Is It?
In Close Your Eyes, Get Free, Grace Smith shares the results of her study on the power of hypnosis. Over one hundred people participated and thirty-five completed it from beginning to end. The study included listening to the same hypnosis recording once per day for seven days in a row. Participants participated in a survey at the beginning and end of the study. The results were astounding.
The biggest increases showed that on average, participants were 32% happier. At the same time, participants felt 58.8% less depressed, and 54.5 % less angry.
And what about stress? Perhaps the most notable change is that the overall stress levels dropped by 45.5%! For couples battling the emotional challenges associated with infertility, these numbers offer great hope. Hypnotherapy is proven extremely effective at reversing negative thought patterns and reducing stress.
More research shows:
A study done in 2013 followed couples with “unexplained” reproductive failure. The couples were followed for a period of 28 years. Couples that received hypnotherapy to treat general stress as well as marital stress had a pregnancy success rate of 72%. Researchers concluded that unexplained reproductive failure is reversible when stress is alleviated with hypnosis.[4]
A visualization study looked at brain patterns in athletes and found that the patterns that were activated while they were engaged in a physical activity were also activated when they only imagined doing the action. By visualizing an action, the body and mind respond as though it is actually happening. In fact, another study showed that people who carried out virtual workouts experienced a 13.5% muscle increase! Talk about a mind/body connection!
As previously mentioned, a study was conducted in 2006 on the impact of hypnosis during IVF. 98 procedures were done while the client was under hypnosis versus 96 procedures that were done without hypnosis. The group using hypnosis saw an implantation rate of 28% versus the 14% implantation rate of those without hypnosis. Researchers concluded that the use of hypnosis during embryo transfer may significantly improve pregnancy and implantation rates.[3]
In 1999 1156 women having in vitro fertilization received psychological support, including hypnotherapy. They had a higher rate of pregnancy (56%) than those who did not (42%).[5]
Hypnotherapy can be effective in just one single session. Often times however, a series of sessions is required to see the desired results. Just as you wouldn’t head to the gym and expect to be fit after one workout, you shouldn’t expect hypnotherapy to be a “one and done” type of treatment. The number of sessions required to achieve results depends not only on the individual, but also on their willingness to reinforce the positive changes with self-hypnosis. It is important for clients to learn self-hypnosis which will allow them to reinforce the work they do in hypnotherapy sessions on their own.
Self-hypnosis is a process which is similar to a regular hypnosis session. A client learns to relax themselves, and then uses techniques like visualization and positive suggestion to create and reinforce positive changes in their lives. In order to have the best chance at creating a positive change, it is imperative that women and men regularly do their own self-hypnosis. Similar to working out, if you don’t use it, you lose it.
When to Begin
If you’re interested in experiencing the benefits of hypnotherapy for yourself, there is no time better than right now. Ideally, individuals would begin receiving hypnotherapy even before they attempt to conceive. Addressing psychological factors such as depression, anxiety, and stress can play a big part in preparing the body and mind for childbirth, and can prepare women and men with a positive outlook for the journey ahead.
Many couples also find that hypnotherapy is beneficial for working through problems in the relationship, and can strengthen the couples ability to support each other through the fertility journey. Our expectations play a major roll in how we feel and experience something, and hypnotherapy can help to establish a healthy expectation for the future.
For those struggling with infertility, the journey can be a difficult one. I hope that the information provided here is shared, and that it inspires anyone affected by infertility to explore the benefits of hypnotherapy for themselves. If you, yourself, are on your own fertility journey, know that the psychological and physiological benefits of hypnotherapy can support you in wonderful, proven, powerful ways. There is no substitute for experiencing the benefits of hypnotherapy first hand. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. If you’re ready to change the way you experience this journey, I encourage you to give yourself this gift and book a session today.
Written by Danielle Lewis www.daniellelewis.com
[1] 2006-2010 National Survey of Family Growth, CDC
[2] MayoClinic on Male Infertility
[3]. Eliahu Levitas, et. al’” Impact of Hypnosis during Embryo Transfer on the Outcome of In Vitro Fertilization Embryo Transfer: A case-control Study, Fertility & Sterility, 85-5 (2006)
[4] Vyas, R., Adwanikar, G., Hathi, L., & Vyas, B. (2013). Psychotherapeutic intervention with hypnosis in 554 couples with reproductive failure. Journal of the Indian Medical Association, 111(3), 167-9, 173.
[5] Poehl, M., Bichler, K., Wicke, V., Domer, V., & Feichtinger, W. (1999). Psychotherapeutic counseling and pregnancy rates in in vitro fertilization. Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics, 16(6), 302-5.