Hypnotherapy for Long COVID recovery is all about helping you to get on top of challenges like your:
- fatigue
- brain fog
- anxiety (‘will I ever get better?’)
- sleep problems
- nervous system being out of whack years later (for example, your body's stress-response system is stuck, leaving you in a chronic state of over activation (hyper-vigilance), or under-activation (you’ve shutdown). This basically means you can’t process stress
- feeling of helplessness: that you’ve no power or resilience.
What Is Hypnotherapy for Long COVID recovery?
There’s two parts to this.
Firstly, what is hypnotherapy.
Secondly, how hypnotherapy can help.
Simply put hypnotherapy is using hypnosis to dial down your stresses and strains.
It’s actually a state of mind you’ve experienced thousands of times in your life already.
All you do is replace the word ‘hypnosis’ with ‘focused attention’ and you’ll understand. Here are some examples:
1. You day dream. You’ve focused your attention on your thoughts.
2. You drive somewhere, pull up and don’t remember the journey. You don’t say remember passing a filling station, or a shop. You’ve simply focused your attention on driving, not sight seeing.
3. It’s day time. You start reading a book. You look up and it’s now dark. Where’s the time gone? You’ve focused your attention on the book’s story over and above the change in light. Yet again self hypnosis.
4. When you play sport and you’re ‘in the zone.’ For example, playing tennis. You’re not bothered about your opponent, the next, the crowd, the umpire, even winning the point. You just want to hit the ball as sweetly and cleanly as possible. That’s focused attention - hypnosis.
5. Similar to 3. It’s day time. You start watching a box set. You look up and it’s now dark. Where’s the time gone? You’ve focused your attention on the action over and above the change in light. That’s self hypnosis.
In other words your conscious awareness of your surroundings versus an inner awareness is on a continuum, so that, when you’re in one of these states, your focus is predominantly internal, but you don’t lose all outer awareness.
In effect, what we’re looking at is a focused, relaxed state of attention. What it’s NOT is mind control.
You remain aware and in control. And using this process you can help influence your stress responses, habits, emotional regulation, and physical tension.
How hypnotherapy supports long COVID recovery
Reducing Stress and Nervous System Overload. This is where we work together to dial down your chronic nervous system activation. Calm you down in other words. We’re using hypnotherapy to develop greater relaxation responses.
Improving Sleep. Hypnotherapy helps calm your racing thoughts - ‘Will I here get better?’ And help you improve your bedtime routine - especially social media scrolling.
Supporting Fatigue Management. We focus on carefully managing your pacing, reducing emotional exhaustion (feeling you’re not achieving enough or feeling this will never end) and managing your frustration and fear around your symptoms.
Brain fog and cognitive confidence. Brain fog is a non-technical term for your mental exhaustion, fuzzy thinking and poor focus.
Typically it’s because:
- you can’t sleep
- you’re stressed
- you’re not eating properly
- you’ve trouble concentrating, forget words, feel your thinking is sluggish
- memory gaps appear - forgetfulness and struggling to hold short-term information
- everything feels too much. You’re overwhelmed by simple routine tasks.
What we’d work on is your confidence and belief. All of the above may be true. But you can be less bothered by them. Feel better placed to crack on with life.
Anxiety, fear, and health trauma. With your Long COVID you might have developed
- A fear of setbacks
- A hyper-vigilance about symptoms
- A health anxiety after infection.
And, like the point above, we can work together on processing (it doesn’t have to define you) and your resilience (feeling confident to get on).
Hypnotherapy for Long COVID recovery. Summing up.
If you feel that your Long COVID leaves you in a state of constant worry about if/when your symptoms will flare-up, that you’re “stuck” in recovery and you’re constantly anxious and can’t sleep, hypnotherapy can give you a good chance to ‘dial down’ all the noise in your head and be more comfortable with yourself.
Basically it’s an acceptance that recovery is a roller coaster and that calming your nervous system helps support your healing and improves your quality of life.
Can my hypnotherapy for Long COVID recovery help you?
If you’d like to chat about how we could work together to give your Long COVID less meaning feel free to email me at jamesthomas@thegentlemind.co.uk or call 07787563099.
All my work is face-to-face at my rooms in Leeds, York and Harrogate.
