Free self-hypnosis therapy in your home? Just ask Alexa
Image by Reveri Health
- Hypnosis refers to a trance state that is characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation, and heightened imagination.
- Hypnotherapy can be used to help you quit smoking, to manage chronic and acute pain, during labor and childbirth, as well as to ease stress and anxiety.
- Reveri Health, headed by Ariel Poler and Dr. David Spiegel, has launched several self-hypnosis skill programs through Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, one of which is designed to combat the anxiety surrounding the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Hypnosis refers to a trance state that is characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation, and heightened imagination. Hypnosis can be thought of as a tool to be used during hypnotherapy, which is, in simplest terms, the practice of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes.
Hypnotherapy has been used in practices such as:
- Helping people quit smoking
- Relieving chronic and acute pain
- During childbirth (referred to as hypnobirthing)
- Navigating the cause of mental health issues such as anxiety, PTSD, or depression
Hypnosis has been shown to impact three separate areas of the brain:
First, there is a decrease in activity in the part of the brain that is responsible for psychological functions such as decision making, evaluation processes, and emotional regulation. Then, there’s an increase in the connection between the part of the brain that controls your working memory and self-control and the part of the brain that plays a significant role in pain perception, social engagements, and emotions. Lastly, there are reduced connections in the parts of the brain that control neural activity and cognitive tasks.
Clinical trials of the Amazon Alexa stress relief skills have showed a significant decrease in anxiety amongst users.Image by Reveri Health
What is hypnotherapy?
Hypnotherapy takes advantage of the relaxed, suggestible state your brain is in to alter our perceptions of things.
Hypnotherapy expert Diane Zimberoff (cofounder of the Wellness Institute) compares our subconscious mind to a computer’s filing system. Our subconscious is like a hard drive. We store experiences, emotions, thoughts, and other processes there.
Hypnotherapist Judi Vitale describes:
“With hypnosis, you might want to help someone stop smoking by suggesting the taste or smell of cigarettes is worse than it actually is. But a hypnotherapist can use age-regression techniques [during hypnosis] to examine the impulse that fuels the client’s habit.
Self-hypnosis can aid in pain management, quitting smoking and stress relief.
Self-hypnosis, according to Reveri Health, is a type of hypnotherapy that can be done via an audio guide. You can do this in the comfort of your own home. First, you follow a series of instructions to get you into a focused state of attention (what is referred to as the hypnotic state).
Once you are in a calm and focused state, the therapy track will begin. After you hear and absorb all of the suggestions in the session, you will be guided out of your hypnotic state.
Reveri Health was cofounded by Dr. David Spiegel, who is considered one of the United States’ most respected experts in clinical uses of hypnosis, alongside Ariel Poler, an passionate investor in the field of human augmentation.
With a team of psychologists, doctors, designers, and engineers, Reveri Health is dedicated to the belief that we can all feel better by changing the way we think – and one of the best tools to do this is the use of hypnotherapy.
Clinical trials for Amazon Alexa self-hypnosis have revealed very encouraging results.
According to Poler, Reveri Health has run clinical trials using self-hypnosis tracks through Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant at Stanford University that focused on the ability to quit smoking and pain management.
The results of the pain management via hypnotherapy trial showed that pain ratings of users moved from an average 5.1 to 3.95 after using the Alexa Hypnosis pain relief app for 3 months. This specific trial also showed that hypnosis reduces pain by up to 50 percent over a year among women with metastatic breast cancer.
While it’s important to note that self-hypnosis doesn’t work for everyone, these results suggest there may be a new wave of hypnotherapy treatments that are available in the comfort of your own home.
“Alexa, start hypnosis stress relief.”
Reveri Health has launched a specific program (which is currently being offered for free) to help combat the anxiety around the COVID-19 global pandemic.
If you’re near your Alexa device, find a comfortable position, and then say: “Alexa, start hypnosis stress relief.”
The voice of Dr. Spiegel will take you through a short hypnotherapy session that was designed to help you manage stress and anxiety that can be generated from the current COVID-19 pandemic.
This is a 10-15 minute session that you can repeat as many times as you’d like for free. You can begin using this service by clicking here.
