Hot flashes are a very common symptom during menopause.
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The frequency and severity of menopausal hot flashes could be reduced by more than half through the use of hypnotic audio recordings, which can be listened to in the comfort of home.
Up to 80 percent of women experience menopausal hot flashes – sudden feelings of overheating that can cause excessive sweating, discomfort, anxiety and trouble sleeping – due to the dramatic drop in estrogen around this time. Dietary changes, hormone replacement therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help, but they are often impractical and don’t work for everyone.
“Many people believe that there is a connection between the mind and body and that through mental processes we can influence our bodies and our physiology,” says Gary Elkins of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “This hypnotherapy demonstration shows how strong and powerful this mind-body connection is.”
Clinically administered hypnosis has been shown to improve hot flash symptoms, surpassing the effect of CBT, but people need a more convenient option, says Elkins. Now he and his colleagues have developed a six-week at-home program that involves listening to 20-minute voice recordings every day with the aim of inducing hypnotic relaxation and eliciting images of freshness.
To test it, they asked 250 postmenopausal women, with an average age of 56, who suffered from at least four hot flashes per day, to follow either their hypnosis program or a sham program providing 20 minutes of white noise.
Six weeks later, participants in the hypnosis group reported hot flash scores – a measure of their frequency and severity – that were on average 53% lower than at the start. Those in the fictitious group also benefited from their program, but to a lesser extent, with a reduction of 41 percent. This is likely due to the placebo effect, says Elkins.
After 12 weeks, once the intervention period ended, both groups continued to see improvements from their baseline scores, with the hypnosis group reporting an overall improvement of 61 percent. This is compared to an overall improvement of 44 percent in the sham group at 12 weeks. The women may have continued to listen to the recordings voluntarily or performed their own hypnosis based on what they had learned, Elkins says.
This supports home hypnosis as a practical, inexpensive – or free – intervention for hot flashes around the time of menopause, he says. It’s not clear exactly how it works, but research suggests that it allows the brain to change its connections and rewire itself, which can help us cope with the variety of experiences that life throws at us. This may also explain why hypnosis is often effective in relieving pain and anxiety.
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