Hypnosis for neck and shoulder pain
Many of us suffer from the occasional stiff neck, or tense shoulders, maybe due to an uncomfortable night’s sleep in a different place to what we are used to, or from sitting at a desk hunched over the keyboard for too long.
However, chronic or long term shoulder tension can play havoc with your body and your mind on many levels.
It is part of the human instinctive fight or flight response to round the shoulders forward as a protective action to safeguard the vital organs in the soft central area of our bodies. This instinct has been with us for thousands of years, and is a primal instinct to survive. If a predatory animal was on the scene, and you did not have the capacity to run, the next best thing is to roll forward, almost in the foetal position, to give yourself the best chance of surviving the attack. All the major organs of the body are in the trunk area, so we natural assume this curled over position to protect them.
The carotid arteries are the most vulnerable major arteries on the ‘outside’ of the body. The femoral, brachial, aorta and more, are positioned in a way that the above foetal position can to an extent, protect. The carotid arteries run down the outside of the neck so to an extent are more exposed, and we all know what happens when a carotid artery is severed, and extremely fast.
For this reason, again when we feel threatened, that primal instinct takes over and we bend our head down and pull the shoulders up to the ears as the rest of the body rounds forward, to protect this very vulnerable part.
The human fear response, the fight or flight response, is necessary and useful to us. It really is a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, from the days of lions, tigers and bears being a threat, to the days of text messages, mortgage statements, parking fines, or a 12 hour shift at work. However, the primal fear response has no discernment, it simply recognises your fear as something triggers your body into the survival response, and acts accordingly, thinking that it is doing you a favour.
Being in a constant state of anxiety (fight or flight response on a low, drip-feed level) will have the effect upon your neck and shoulders. As the shoulders get closer towards the ears during the course of a stressful day, by the end of it they feel sore and tense, and the next aches and is stiff. With the accumulation of many stressful days, combined with poor positioning or posture, dehydration and troubled sleep, you may be left with not only the pain in your neck and shoulders (which can be fairly intense) but also the affects upon the rest of your body and mind as your fear response and all the hormones associated with it, are drip fed into your system, causing acidity, indigestion, even IBS.
The good news is that you can easily re-train your mind to relax your shoulders with hypnosis. For chronic shoulder tension, you may only need one session to begin feeling significantly better, and you can then listen to your recording during the evenings to really learn more about this shoulder relaxation technique. If there are other issues of concern that are causing you to experience so much anxiety and tension, then we can work on these in other sessions. That is the power of hypnosis, it helps you to learn how to speak the language of your body. After all, the mind and body work together so it makes sense to speak to them both.
