More Complementary & Integrative Healthcare Articles
Hypnosis Helps Slow Aging Process
Did you know that aging results from the cells in your body no longer dividing and forming new daughter cells? After cells replicate about 50 times, they stop, and then, slowly, the tissues that make up our organs, our skin, our bones, etc., wear out, we age, and we eventually die. Every time a cell divides, its DNA strands get shorter and shorter and cells eventually stop dividing when the DNA inside their nuclei get to a specific length.
In 1985, scientists discovered an enzyme called telomerase, which repairs DNA strands to longer lengths. Studies since then have found that hypnosis and mindfulness result in an increase in telomerase activity and a slowing of the aging process.
Telomerase is an enzyme that repairs the ends of DNA strands (i.e. telomeres). In other words, young cells have longer DNA strands, while old cells have shorter DNA strands, and cells die when DNA have been shortened to a specific length. This is essentially the aging process.
Through hypnosis, you can improve the biochemistry of your body so as to maintain DNA length and promote beauty, youth, and vitality. You can think of the body's biochemistry as a molecular marinade comprised of various hormones, neurotransmitters, and enzymes that interact together and bathe and influence your body's cells.
This cellular bath can either promote long-term youth, inside and outside, or rapid cellular division, disease and accelerated aging.
Which would you rather experience accelerated aging or prolonged youth? The choice is actually yours to make and the key to making it lies inside your subconscious mind.
Perception Of Stress
Whatever the mind imagines, perceives and believes, the body responds to by either releasing stress hormones that promote accelerated aging, or by releasing hormones that promote prolonged youth. For example, the hypnosis technique of anchoring a feeling (e.g. calm) into a word or a physical gesture (e.g. connecting your forefinger and thumb) triggers a calm state, during challenging moments in daily life.
Once a desired feeling is successfully anchored through hypnosis, a person can then use that anchor anytime she desires to feel differently, with the emotional shift getting easier to achieve every time the anchor is activated.
Habits That Damage Cells
Hypnosis studies show it can be twice as effective as other treatments in smoking cessation. Smoking, excessive drinking, excessive worry, as well as overeating, are all habits that result in damage to the cells in your body and lead to accelerated aging.
Hypnosis helps people overcome these and other damaging habits by reframing the triggers associated with those habits so that the triggers just don't work anymore.
Minimize Chronic Pain
Over 100 million people live in chronic pain, and over 70% of those people are women. Numerous research studies show strong support for hypnosis and its positive effect on reducing and even eliminating chronic pain. And a life without constant pain means less suffering, sadness and stress, and longer cellular life expectancy.
Better Sleep
There's a reason people call it “beauty sleep” as without it, cells don't have the opportunity to repair and hormone levels don't have enough time to reset to optimal levels. A study published in Medical News Today reported that hypnotized subjects experienced 80% more deep sleep than subjects who were not hypnotized. Wouldn't you love to get more “beauty sleep” and feel and look better naturally?
