Treating Hypertension With Hypnotherapy

High blood pressure or hypertension is a condition that afflicts a significant proportion of adults in the western world. It is recommended that everyone should regularly have their blood pressure checked once they reach middle age.

Blood Pressure

The heart is a muscle designed to pump blood around the body to the various muscles and organs. The working of the heart muscle in this way generates pressure. The pressure of the blood flow in your body depends on how forcefully your heart is doing this and how relaxed and healthy your arteries are since it is through the arteries that blood is carried around the body.

Normal blood pressure is considered to be 120/80. The first figure denotes the pressure in the arteries when the heart beats, and the second figure indicates pressure in the arteries between beats. A person is considered to need medical treatment when the first figure (systolic pressure) is above 160 and/or the second figure (diastolic pressure) is regularly above 100.

Treating Hypertension

For the vast majority of people diagnosed with high blood pressure, the cause is unknown. For a small percentage, hypertension is related to another health condition. There are certain lifestyle changes your doctor will probably want you to make if you are diagnosed with hypertension. These might include dietary changes, weight loss, reduction in alcohol intake, stopping smoking and stress management. In cases where these measures do not bring the desired results, medication will be prescribed. Control of blood pressure is important because hypertension can lead to cardiovascular problems including heart attack and stroke.

Hypnotherapy and Hypertension

Some people are concerned enough about their health to seek hypnotherapy. One of the ways in which hypnotherapy can help you is in making the lifestyle changes requested by your doctor. Stopping smoking may be one of these. It is important to know however that in order to stop smoking successfully with hypnotherapy, you will need to want to. Hypnotherapy can also help you with the motivation to lose weight and develop healthier eating habits.

If your hypertension is emotionally based in that it is related to stress factors in your life or your response to handling stress, hypnotherapy can be enormously helpful here too. The state of hypnosis itself leads to experiencing deeply relaxed states, and this may be an unfamiliar feeling for you. Learning to do self-hypnosis can be invaluable here so that you can learn to induce therapeutic trance states in yourself.

It may become clear during the interview that you have certain beliefs or personality traits that are causing you to go about your life in a state of high alert. Hypnotherapy can help you identify these and find ways of handling things that are easier on you and yet as effective and satisfying.

In some cases hypertension has been shown to be linked to an unresolved issue that is causing emotional tension in the body. This is probably not surprising since we frequently refer to the heart in emotional matters. Thus we are "heart-broken", "heavy-hearted" and dealt with "heartlessly".

When treating hypertension with hypnotherapy, it is important to keep in touch with your doctor and monitor your blood pressure regularly since changes will need to be catered for in dosages of medication.

Hypertension is clearly an important enough health condition to merit lifestyle changes. Using hypnotherapy to achieve these can have a marked effect on both your blood pressure and your health in general.