Can You Hypnotize the Pain Away?
Studies are promising — though why it works remains a mystery
Early in Mark Jensen’s career as a rehabilitation medicine specialist, he kept running into an issue with his patients. It was the ’90s and he was studying pain management through the use of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which can help people with chronic pain learn to change their awareness of and develop skills to cope with their persistent discomforts. This method showed some promising, though modest, results: Jensen’s patients confirmed they were better able to manage their reactions to the pain, but the problem was, the pain was still there. Wasn’t there something that could actually make it go away?
“I would have to say to them, ‘Actually, there doesn’t seem to be a lot we can do about the pain itself,’” says Jensen, now a professor and the vice chair of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Washington. “‘It’s really your reaction to the pain that we need to focus on.’”
Like anxiety, pain is not simply a physical sensation, but an experience created by the brain in reaction to environmental cues. If your brain thinks your body is in danger or injured, it will create the experience of pain to alert you. To counter this, Jensen and other pain specialists have found that the best plan of attack aside from…
