New research suggests that listening to hypnosis techniques can significantly reduce the severity and number of hot flushes experienced by menopausal women.
A study published in Jama Network Open found that just 20 minutes per day of recorded hypnosis, where women visualise cool scenarios, effectively lessens symptoms such as sudden warmth, sweating, or heart palpitations.
Researchers from Baylor University in Texas underscored the clinical significance of these findings.
They concluded that “self-administered clinical hypnosis was shown to be an effective, clinically significant intervention for the treatment of hot flashes due to its efficacy in reducing hot flash scores (ie, frequency and severity) by more than half and yielding improvements in participants’ perception of their quality of life”.
During the randomised controlled trial, 250 women were split into two groups.
All the women were postmenopausal and were having a minimum of four daily or 28 weekly hot flushes at the start of the study.
Women were asked to write down every time they experienced a hot flush and its severity (mild, moderate, severe or very severe).
In the hypnosis group, women were asked to listen to daily 20-minute audio-recorded hypnosis sessions for six weeks.
These recordings included hypnotic relaxation techniques and also inspired mental imagery of feeling cool.
The other group acted as the control group and listened to white noise that was still labelled as hypnosis – this acted as a “sham” intervention.
The results showed that women in the genuine hypnosis group experienced significantly greater reductions in hot flush scores and daily interference from hot flushes at week six compared with the other group.
Overall, improvement in average hot flush scores was bigger for those given genuine hypnosis (baseline score of 88.7 compared with a six-week score of 41.3, so a reduction of 53.4 per cent) than those in the white noise group (baseline score of 94.6 compared with six-week score of 55.9, a 40.9 per cent reduction).
The genuine hypnosis group also reported a significantly greater reduction in how much hot flushes interfered with daily life (a 49.3 per cent decrease) compared with the control group (a 37.4 per cent decrease).
They also experienced greater perceived benefits from their technique (90.3 per cent versus 64.3 per cent).
The researchers said the findings showed that “hypnosis intervention for hot flushes is a safe and effective option for women”.
