If you work in healthcare and feel stressed or are a manager concerned about workplace stress, today is the day to get in the right mindset and take action.
One way to help people reduce work-related stress and anxiety issues is by getting the right mindset. This is where hypnotherapy can help.
Hypnotherapy is a lesser-known effective strategy for helping with workplace stress, but let’s start with the specific stressors in healthcare.
Understanding stress in the healthcare sector
Healthcare professionals know what stress is—its personal and organisational demands. However, healthcare workers aren’t always the best people for identifying and dealing with their own stress.
Common stressors for healthcare workers include:
- Long work hours
- Shifts
- Lack of control in working hours
- Managing interruptions
- Night duty
- Management pressures
- Lack of resources, including a lack of suitable staff
- A lack of support
- Uncontrolled demands
- Emotional difficulties, including trauma, death, difficult people
- A need to keep updated and attend additional learning and development
- Organisational change
- and more
Some areas of healthcare are considered more stressful than others, such as intensive care, the operating theatre, the emergency department, and pressured workplace areas. Administrators, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, porters, and behind-the-scenes healthcare workers who support clinical practice can also feel stressed. However, any area can be stressful if the healthcare worker perceives it to be so.
Stress can have an impact on health and performance.
Sometimes, managers identify stress at work because the individual’s performance changes or they become withdrawn. Sometimes, there is an increase in complaints.
Some workers take much time off sick or arrive late for work.
Individuals might notice feeling tired, having health-related problems, or lacking motivation.
The science of stress and its impact on health
Stress comes from the Latin word stringer, which means to draw tight. Engineering uses the word stress to denote strain or pressure.
Today, stress relates to its effect on individuals and society, so it is subjective.
When science started to explain stress’s psychological impact on the body, Hans Selye (1946) described it as having three stages.
- 1. An alarm reaction. The person is shocked or overwhelmed.
- 2. Resistance stage. This is where the person assesses the situation and gets back in balance. However, if the person has poor coping mechanisms, little support, and believes that they can’t manage the stress, then this will move them to the third stage.
- 3. Exhaustion. At this stage, everything gets too much.
However, Selye’s work has been criticised, as this model doesn’t show how the individual identifies and reviews stress.
Later work by Lazarus (1976) puts the individual into perspective by showing that how stressed an individual becomes depends on how the individual appraises the demands. So, stress is seen as an intrinsic factor, not just something done to someone. It’s about coping mechanisms. The primary appraisal concerns the person assessing whether the pressure is a threat. Then, the individual decides if they have the resources to cope.
As with all areas of science, there is also a biological aspect to stress. Stress can affect people physiologically by triggering the autonomic nervous system. Stress affects the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus, causing the pituitary gland to activate the adrenal glands and release adrenaline and cortisol hormones. These stress hormones stimulate chemicals in the brain, nerves, heart, and muscles to trigger action. It’s often called the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism.
Chronic stress affects the mind and body.
There are many biological effects of chronic stress on the body. They include:
- Muscular tension, E.g. Headaches and migraines, backache, muscle cramps, neck and jaw tension
- Anxiety and worry
- Low mood
- Digestive problems. E.g. gastric issues such as a dry mouth, heartburn, diarrhoea, constipation, IBS
- High blood pressure and chest pain
- Reduced immunity results in more coughs, colds and infections
- Sexual problems. E.g. Impotence, infertility, menstrual problems
- Skin problems. E.g. Rashes and dry skin
- You have confused thoughts or feelings of being spaced out.
- Weight change caused by over or under-eating.
- Irritability
- Profuse perspiration
- and more
These are all important as anyone with these problems could impact a healthcare worker’s job.
What is hypnotherapy? Debunking the myths.
Hypnotherapy uses hypnosis as a tool and therapy, such as counselling, to focus attention and deliver positive suggestions with imagination to help someone change.
Hypnotherapy is not the same as stage hypnosis.
Stage hypnosis is hypnosis used with entertainment to make people laugh.
Hypnotised people do not go to sleep; they are not unconscious, and they can hear most things that are said by the hypnotherapist.
Hypnotised people do not lose control.
People do not get stuck in hypnosis.
Hypnotherapy can help a wide range of problems. However, many myths deter some people from using hypnotherapy.
Proven benefits of hypnotherapy for stress management
Many studies have reviewed hypnotherapy and stress, whether used alone or with other tools and techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
Some studies use self-hypnosis, others use group hypnotherapy, and more commonly, individuals are helped with hypnotherapy.
One trial used mindful hypnotherapy over an eight-week period and found that stress reduced,
However, the most quoted paper on hypnosis to help reduce stress was written by Hammond (2010), who showed that self-hypnosis helped reduce stress and anxiety.
So, hypnotherapy helps people to relax and reduce stress and anxiety.
Organisations can meet their requirements for reducing stress and making the workplace better for their employees.
A positive environment with reduced stress also increases productivity and creativity.
Consequently, hypnotherapy can help people reduce stress by improving sleep, reducing emotional disturbances and increasing resilience.
How hypnotherapy can be integrated into healthcare settings
In healthcare, hypnotherapy can be used to reduce stress in several ways.
Hypnotherapy can help in the workplace by:
- Increasing mental and physical relaxation
- Reducing anxiety and stress. This can help with motivation, decision-making, creativity, confidence-building, positive mindset development, etc.
Hypnotherapy can be delivered in a group or by helping people with stress through individual packages of sessions to meet specific needs. For example, if someone lacks confidence in talking to their manager about reducing their hours or changing shifts, hypnotherapy can help.
How to find a hypnotherapist
Hypnotherapists can be found in the following places:
- Directories such as the Hypnotherapy Directory
- Professional membership sites, E.g. The National Hypnotherapy Society, GHR, The National Council of Hypnotherapists
- Recommendations for others. NB A therapist that might suit one person might not be the best for someone else, and not all hypnotherapists specialise in stress management.
Finally, I offer a unique blend of hypnotherapy, counselling and coaching to help people with stress and anxiety issues. As a retired nurse, I understand the difficulties that healthcare workers face. Contact me for a free initial consultation and find out more. Also, check Eventbrite for my webinars.
