Listening to hypnosis techniques can reduce hot flushes, research suggests

Listening to hypnosis techniques can reduce the severity and number of hot flushes menopausal women experience, research suggests.

A new study found that 20 minutes per day of recorded hypnosis – where women are encouraged into a hypnotic state and picture scenarios where they feel cool – reduces symptoms, such as sudden feelings of warmth, sweating or heart palpitations.

Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, researchers including from Baylor University in Texas said the findings were clinically significant.

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%) than those in the white noise group (baseline score of 94.6 compared with six-week score of 55.9, a 40.9% reduction).

The genuine hypnosis group also reported a significantly greater reduction in how much hot flushes interfered with daily life (a 49.3% decrease) compared with the control group (a 37.4% decrease).

They also experienced greater perceived benefits from their technique (90.3% versus 64.3%).

The researchers said the findings showed that “hypnosis intervention for hot flushes is a safe and effective option for women”.