Rachel Silverman* (22 at the time) hunched over in agony and curled up in a ball on her soft, well-worn couch. While many women her age were out socializing with friends and partners after work, her plans revolved around treating bursts of intense abdominal pain, which began in college with a bout of infectious colitis (inflammation in the colon due to, in Silverman’s case, bacteria). Though antibiotics resolved that infection in the short term, she didn’t know that a lifelong battle with her stomach lay ahead.
The intense pain continued even after her illness subsided. She missed birthdays, had to work from home some days instead of going into the office, and routinely canceled plans due to stabbing stomach cramps. Silverman even spent an entire day of a brief trip to Spain in the hotel instead of seeing the sights due to a flare-up. Looking for answers, doctors ran tests (an MRI, endoscopy, colonoscopy, blood work, etc.) over a period of five years. Ultimately, they said she had irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)…a relief, in one way, to have a diagnosis—and also disheartening, as there is no cure.
IBS is a disorder known to cause abdominal pain and/or discomfort, and changed bathroom habits (patients may experience diarrhea, constipation, or even both). It affects people of all ages, according to the International Foundation for Gastrointestinal Disorders (IFFGD), which also states that around 5-10% of the world’s population has the disorder—and 25 to 45 million in the United States alone. Even more, about two in three people with IBS identify as female.
An IFFGD survey of nearly 2,000 people with the condition revealed that it took more than six-and-a-half years after symptoms began to receive a diagnosis of IBS. For Silverman, a diagnosis came sooner than others, thanks mostly to the fact that her father is a gastroenterologist.
“A lot of my patients will hear things, unfortunately, like the colonoscopy is negative, the CT scans are negative. It’s just IBS; you’ll be fine. It’s minimalized. But when you start digging into it, I tell my patients that disorders of gut-brain interaction, like IBS, can be the most complex of GI disorders. And the reason it’s minimalized is because we don’t fully understand why they happen; so we don’t explain them well,” says Xiao Jing (Iris) Wang, M.D., gastroenterologist at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, and author of Boo Can’t Poo.
To make matters more complicated, IBS, its causes, and its symptoms often differ from person to person. With this in mind, and due to the various contributing factors of IBS, treatment tends to focus on symptom management rather than a cure.
IFFGD states that the condition is a major women’s health issue, leading to an increased risk of unnecessary surgery for extra-abdominal and abdominal surgery in women with IBS. Take hysterectomies and ovarian surgeries as examples—the IFFGD says that these surgeries have been reported in patients with IBS as much as 47% to 55% and have been performed more often in the group than in other cohorts.
Silverman’s path to relief
Luckily for Silverman, the now-29-year-old lawyer, her father (dad-doctor as she jokingly calls him) suggested she try hypnotherapy as a treatment not long after her diagnosis. “When my dad told me I should try hypnosis, I was like, ‘You are out of your mind. What do you mean I should be hypnotized?’” Silverman recalls of the 2023 conversation. “I was almost…not offended because obviously, he’s a doctor, he knows what he’s talking about. But what makes you think a breathing exercise is going to help my stomach issues that literally nothing else has been able to help?” She says the idea of trying hypnosis made her feel like her IBS was being painted as a psychological issue. “What I learned was that really, everything is connected.”
Dr. Wang says this reaction is all too common. “It’s been a bit of a fringe practice until fairly recently. The reason for that really is that it’s hypnosis. People hear that you’re going to do hypnosis, and they’re like: ‘What are you talking about? This isn’t real science.’ This is not real medicine, etc.,’” she says. Perhaps hesitation around the practice has been spurred by pop culture depicting it as a pocket watch swinging back and forth and the person being told to squawk like a chicken. But this isn’t the reality of the practice, and practitioners (and phone applications) are working to dispel this concept.
In fact, hypnosis is not new; a variation of the practice dates back to the 1700s with Franz Mesmer, who used it with patients. Though he was later discredited due to his misguided notion that hypnotism used a type of occult force, scientists of the time saw promise in the practice. It eventually piqued the interest of Sigmund Freud, and ultimately it was used in WWI and WWII to tackle post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“Within the last 10 years or so, there’s been an uptick with hypnotherapy for IBS. More than IBS, pain,” Dr. Wang says. A part of this is due to having more research behind the practice. “There’s data that’s being generated within the psychogastroenterology community,” Dr. Wang says. People have wider access to hypnosis thanks to phone applications and growing practitioners of the therapy, per the Cleveland Clinic, and more research on the topic is being performed, leading to a wider acceptance. “It’s become more accepted, more standardized, and has made it into more guidelines, and with that, it will become more accessible,” explains Dr. Wang.
Silverman’s desperation for relief from the Russian roulette-style days of stomach pain outweighed her skepticism. So, at her father’s suggestion, she paid for a phone application called Nerva that led her through a hypnosis session specifically for IBS. “The program that I did had a six-week, do it everyday type of thing. Every day there was a hypnosis sequence to listen to,” Silverman says. She explains it as a type of guided meditation done through an app (though it can be led by practitioners in real life). Each session explains what happens in your body when performing hypnosis for IBS, helping tap into that gut-brain connection.
“Each session is 15 minutes; which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re trying to fit it into a work day…it’s hard to find 15 minutes where you can just sit still and not do anything,” she says. But she made the time—either while working from home or even sitting in her office—and to her surprise (and delight), it worked. She went nearly six months without a flare-up.
Glenn Rottmann, C.Ht., a certified hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner who discovered self-hypnosis in high school via The Silva Mind Control Method (which aims to take readers on a self-improvement journey via self-hypnosis), says the therapy for IBS works by using the subconscious mind to create a changed response. “We can work with the subconscious mind to lessen the body’s physical reaction to issues such as IBS. Through guided imagery and different techniques, we can change the body’s response to many irritants,” he says. While Rottmann says that repeated practice has its benefits, Dr. Wang says some see relief for years after a single session.
Rottmann believes in the powers of hypnotherapy so much he created a collection of videos on the subject, and created a course to instruct others on hypnosis and the link between the body and mind.
The gut-brain connection behind hypnosis
The key to how hypnosis for IBS (and pain in general) works, lies in the link between the mind and body. Though the gut-brain connection is incredibly complex, Dr. Wang says it’s something that research is more recently focused on as ways to understand it develops. “It’s this incredibly complex interaction of the central nervous system with the enteric nervous system. And the enteric nervous system is something that not a lot of people know exists. It’s an entire nervous system in your GI tract that actually runs on its own. It doesn’t need input from your brain in order to digest your food or push forward your stool.” She says that interstitial cells (called the interstitial cells of Cajal) fire and tell your muscles what to do all on their own. But just because it can function on cruise control, doesn’t mean your brain can’t interfere. “But your gut is connected to the central nervous system, largely via the vagus nerve. With that vagus nerve integration, it speeds up your bowel or slows it down and kind of sends extra signals to modulate those internal pacemakers, is usually what we call them,” she says.
As it’s “the same nervous system that’s in the gut, that’s in the brain,” Dr. Wang says sometimes antidepressants may help patients with IBS for this very reason.
But the gut-brain connection is difficult to regulate. “Anyone who’s tried to meditate or deep breathe, it’s really hard to turn off your stress response. You need to teach your vagus nerve how to regulate on its own again. That’s what we think about when we use hypnotherapy. How are we regulating this gut-brain interaction?”
Dr. Wang says many issues she, as a professional, sees these days stem from chronic stress impacting bodily functions. “We’re constantly diverting blood and resources away from our gut and that constant kind of lack of regular input; your gut just kind of goes haywire and does its own thing. Because it still needs to move and you’re not giving it your input.”
To make matters even more complicated, your brain can actually exacerbate problems in your gut. “My doctors told me that my IBS was pretty much directly correlated with stress,” Silverman says. “Which makes sense. It would always flare up doing law school finals; when I have important things happening at work. But I didn’t really understand the actual connection between your brain and the IBS symptoms and how all of that functions in one unit ultimately causing my excruciating pain.”
That said, the gut-brain connection isn’t only about nerves or your nervous system, Dr. Wang clarifies. “It’s also about the microbiome….what bacteria populations grow and wane in your gut actually change.” Research has shown that people with IBS experience changes in their gut microbiome, which can lead to intestinal inflammation and pain, according to IFFGD.
How hypnosis for IBS works
Though it may feel odd to look to one organ to treat pain in another, it makes sense to address the issue in the area where pain is processed: the brain. Certified hypnotists can work with the subconscious mind to lessen the body’s physical reaction to issues such as IBS, Rottmann says. “Through guided imagery and different techniques, we can change the body’s response to many irritants,” he explains. Some irritants may include stress and certain foods, per the Mayo Clinic.
Dr. Wang says hypnosis helps by trying to decrease the amount of sensation that goes from your gut to your brain. “With IBS and a lot of these disorders with gut-brain interaction (DGBI) issues, is that not only does the nerve fire too much but that the signal gets amplified. There’s increased myelination on those neurons that go from your gut to your brain. So instead of traveling down a dirt road, your signals are now traveling on a super-highway. It gets louder. It gets faster. We want to turn that signal down and that’s the big goal of hypnosis. It’s regulatory but it’s really how do we decrease the hypersensitivity response that has developed?”
Ultimately, she says, the goal is to turn down the volume of pain signals. Dr. Wang says this can be done in a few ways (medication, hypnosis, cognitive behavioral therapy, maybe even virtual reality one day). “But the overall idea of those are actually very similar. We are using our own body’s brain imagery, mechanisms, and reactions to reverse some of the attention that our brain is paying to our gut. This is a little bit of a learned response, but it’s not volitional,” Dr. Wang explains. “My patients are not doing this to themselves. This is not their fault. This is not something we are asking them to use behavior to fix because they did it. We’re asking them to use their behavior to fix something that has been done to them. That is so, so key. I don’t want them thinking this is their fault.”
And, it’s a treatment option that can be done via app right from the get-go, or in-person, without side effects for most people, Dr. Wang says. The only group of people she advises to proceed with caution when undergoing hypnosis are those with a trauma history. “If they have major psychiatric conditions, I’d want to make sure they have a professional in the room at least for a couple of sessions to make sure they are tolerating it well,” she says. “Once in a while, in hypnosis, you can have an adverse reaction, bringing you to a state where you’re reliving a past trauma or some fear or other kind of feeling that is difficult to control. It’s not going to induce psychosis if you don’t already have an issue with that. It’s not going to bring on trauma if you don’t have an existing issue with that.”
Rottmann also notes that “we don’t always get the result we’re looking for right away,” but he says sometimes people find relief in as little as one session. “However, everyone is different, and sometimes it’s a process of repetition to achieve the desired result that we want. There are many factors that influence this. The client’s receptivity, the issue itself, and how much emotion and identity is attached to that issue.”
What a hypnosis for IBS session may look like
Rottmann says he begins each session with a progressive relaxation that starts by listening and focusing on what your hypnotist is saying. “Then once I get them relaxed, we go into their imagination and do certain visualization techniques,” Rottmann explains. Next, “we do what’s called a hypnotic induction. This is to get them relaxed and into their imagination. Once we’re there, I use different techniques, a combination of visualizations, direct suggestions, and reflection,” to connect the mind and body.
Dr. Wang says the trance state is nothing mysterious, and it’s something that everyone experiences. She says that a variety of mechanisms can bring you into that state. “The trance state is the state that if you were driving along the highway and all of a sudden five exits passed and then you’re like ’how did I get here?’ But, you were aware, you were awake. If someone cut you off you would be able to react, but your mind was so focused on what you were doing. Everybody has been there at some point,” Dr. Wang says. “It’s a state that can be achieved as long as you are allowing the hypnosis to happen.”
Next up, deepening the trance state, “in a way that you become more and more focused on what I’m telling you. And it’s not like meditation, where you’re trying to blank out your mind. Hypnosis is focused attention on what you’re being told. “So it is a lot easier for people who have trouble with meditation because you’re not supposed to blank out your mind. You’re supposed to be listening,” Dr. Wang says.
Then, the therapy begins. “So you just follow along and let things happen. We’re kind of using those techniques that induce hypnosis to deepen the trance. I’m basically drawing you into a deep enough stage, we give suggestions to your brain to basically stop paying attention to the pain. To turn down the pain signals.”
That’s why a recording on an app can work so well. “It’s guided imagery in this trance state that makes your brain more susceptible to rewiring. We put in a lot of suggestions to help even beyond the hypnosis session, and this will continue to help you heal,” Dr. Wang says.
She says, “The behavior changes can help live with IBS, and in living with the IBS it actually gets better.”
Silverman says that the phone application she used would involve a recorded voice telling her to envision a clear colon.
“Each session places you in a different location,” Silverman says the app puts her in a different location in her mind (like at the library, in a field, or even at the pharmacy). The voice then “calms you down,” Silverman says. She says it feels like meditation, and not necessarily like she’s asleep. “Then you are told to literally picture your stomach being fine. A situation where your colon is 100% normal, for lack of a better word. Where it’s clear and you have no pain and no anxiety about leaving because you’re afraid you’re going to be in pain, or something like that. Then they bring you back to real life and you can wake up.”
Finally, the patient is guided out of the trance state. “Then they bring you back to real life and you can wake up,” Silverman says. However, it’s important to note that the patient is not asleep during hypnosis; the person is conscious, aware, and works alongside the hypnotist throughout the treatment.
The bottom line
Professionals in both the healthcare and hypnosis communities think practicing the technique could help people with all sorts of conditions. “I had a client with very severe rheumatoid arthritis pain in her hands. I used a pain management hypnotherapy technique with her, when she opened her eyes, the pain was gone,” explains Rottmann. “She started immediately crying out of the relief that she felt for the first time in years. To this day, the pain still has not returned.”
It may help those with neurological disorders as well. “I had a client with a constant dry cough, almost like a tick,” Rottmann says. “She had this for years, after the first session it was 75% gone. We did one follow-up session and it has not returned since.”
More studies need to be done before your general practitioner recommends hypnotherapy as a treatment for other conditions. But, for now, the data is promising.
“The number of trained hypnotherapists is low, and the number that do trained gut hypnotherapy is even lower, though increasing more and more. But there are still not enough providers to treat everybody who needs their care. That’s why app-based hypnotherapy has become a thing. If you have an app, it doesn’t matter if you’re living in rural America, a big city, or a small suburb. These are going to be huge in terms of access. Right now this service is all out of pocket, so that limits who can use them. But a lot of apps are going through the FDA to get approved and we hope that eventually they will be covered by insurance,” Dr. Wang says. That way, the apps (like Nerva and MetaMe’s Regulora ), will help a good percentage of standard IBS patients, and then those who are a bit more complex are the people who need in-person, she explains. You can also ask your gastroenterologist for recommendations, or the International Foundation for Gastrointestinal Disorders suggests checking out ibshypnosis.com to find a provider in your area.
Dr. Wang says there are certain patients who will respond well to the therapy (mostly those who are willing to consider it and believe in the process of hypnotherapy), and she recommends it right off the bat, while others (say, who are not open to being hypnotized) she knows may not be eager to try it. “I want to make sure that this isn’t a salvage, or backup, therapy. This is an option that works really well and it’s more a matter of if you’re a good candidate for it and willing to give it a shot,” Dr. Wang says.
Ultimately, Silverman feels optimistic about her future with the condition now that she’s learned the benefits of hypnosis. She says she’s “more aware of things” she can do to help prevent or reduce flare-ups. “Continuing to meditate and do hypnosis sessions, doing things that calm my anxiety and manage stress. It’s even helped me during flare-ups because I do the breathing exercises that I was taught. It doesn’t get rid of the pain, but the breathing helps manage it,” she says.
As for those wondering if it really works: “Don’t knock it til you try it,” Silverman says. “Ultimately, it might not help everyone, but there’s a very high possibility that it will help you at least a little. And when you’re dealing with something that isn’t really treatable, I say anything that might help is worth a shot.”
*Name has been changed for anonymity.
Sonya Maynard is the Research Director for Prevention Magazine. She has more than 15 years of experience in fact-checking, with a specialty in health and wellness content.
