“How I finally beat my anxiety”
the 9-minute trick.
Meet Rosamund:
A person in her 40s who went through breast cancer treatment in 2021. The uncertainty she felt about her future caused her anxiety to spike and her heart to race, waking her up in the early hours of the morning.
Rosamund Dean on the hypnotherapy app that finally stilled her whirring 3am brain
We are an anxious nation. According to the Mental Health Foundation, 37 per cent of women and almost 30 per cent of men have reported high levels of anxiety in the past two years, a significant increase on 2012 to 2015. From work stress and money worries to health woes or family problems, many of us have something that keeps us up at night.
In my case, having been through treatment for primary breast cancer in 2021 aged 40, it’s a destabilising sense of uncertainty about what is going on in my body. At diagnosis I was fit, healthy and felt well, yet I was unwittingly growing two tumours in my right breast. Who’s to say that’s not happening again, elsewhere in my body?
Waking up in the early hours — heart racing, brain whirling, racked with anxiety — is my new normal. Despite cutting down on caffeine and alcohol (and even trying antidepressants, which did not agree with me), this early-hours panic seems to be a depressing inevitability.
But there might be a solution. According to Dr David Spiegel, a Stanford professor of psychiatry and director of the university’s Center on Stress and Health, it is possible to rewire your brain. His answer? Hypnotherapy.
If you’re raising an eyebrow, I get it. You’re probably thinking of stage hypnotists swinging watches who encourage drunk revellers to bark like a dog — a world away from the logic, reason and cognitive science you’d associate with a Stanford psychiatrist.
But Dr Spiegel has ploughed 40 years of clinical and research experience into a new app, Reveri, which he hopes will make hypnotherapy mainstream. It has just launched in the UK after racking up 500,000 downloads in the US. After a seven-day free trial an annual plan is £89.99, which works out at £7.50 a month. “We tend to overvalue physical interventions for medical and psychiatric problems, and undervalue psychological interventions,” he says. “For something to be considered a ‘real’ treatment [people believe] it needs to be incision, ingestion or injection.”
Compared with drugs, the risk-benefit ratio for hypnotherapy is excellent, since there are no side effects. And having felt like a human medical waste disposal unit during cancer treatment, a non-pharmaceutical approach really appeals.
Reveri offers interactive and guided hypnosis sessions for a range of concerns including sleep, stress, smoking, drinking, pain, overeating or lack of focus. Quite a few claims then.
I sign up for the seven-day stress-relief programme. Each session, voiced by Spiegel, quickly gets me into a state of relaxation, where I feel like I’m floating.
“I wanted to build something that was as much like the experience of being with me in the office as I could,” he says. It’s for this reason that he made the app interactive, so his voice will ask you to, for example, rate your stress levels and the app uses voice recognition technology to respond accordingly.
I start to think it must not be working because I don’t feel “hypnotised”, I’m in control throughout, and aware that I could stop things at any moment just by opening my eyes. But I persevere, which is made easier by the fact that the sessions are short, lasting on average 8-9 minutes.
At first, it’s hard to notice a difference. Perhaps I’m awake in the night less often, but there have always been better nights and worse ones. However, after five days of using the app, I wake up feeling less tired than usual. I open one eye to peer warily at my clock and am astonished to see that it’s 7.09am. I have slept eight hours straight, for the first time in more than a year.
And it was no fluke. For the first time since cancer treatment I’m regularly sleeping through the night. Not only that, I’m waking up feeling optimistic, rather than with a sense of nameless dread.
Spiegel laughs at my astonishment. “You wouldn’t be so surprised if you’d taken a sleeping pill, right?” he says. “This works, and it really does surprise people. We underestimate what we can do with our brains. We have far more control than we think.”
Full disclaimer, I am not only doing hypnotherapy (having completed the stress-relief programme, there is a nine-minute “enhance focus” session that I often do after lunch). I’m also following all the anti-anxiety advice, including exercising, socialising, limiting stimulants, eating well and having therapy. A multipronged approach seems sensible when there are so many factors that can exacerbate stress.
For a second opinion I call Dr Sabine Donnai, the founder of Viavi, a private clinic with a focus on preventative medicine and healthy longevity.
“The short answer is yes,” she says immediately, when I ask if hypnotherapy is known to work. “It’s a recognised medical treatment, which is prescribed by some clinicians for phobias, weight loss or smoking cessation. It’s not a placebo. It just has bad connotations because some people think of it as entertainment.” She compares it to meditation, “which used to be something that hippies did, and now we all know the benefits of it”.
She is more sceptical about an app being as effective as seeing a hypnotherapist in person, but “I’m not saying it’s not possible,” she says, “and of course it has the benefit of reaching a lot more people.”
It’s certainly more convenient than going to a hypnotherapist’s office. “When we work on insomnia for instance, if it’s 3am and you’re trying to get back to sleep, you probably don’t want me in your bedroom,” Spiegel says with a laugh. “But you’ve got me in your smartphone.”
Donnai points out that hypnosis is only as effective as you allow it to be. “Some people find it really difficult to go under hypnosis,” she says. “You need to trust the process. If you resist going into that deeply relaxed state, it isn’t going to work.”
The app does have a “hypnotisability test”, so you can see how effective it will be for you. Of course there are people whose mental health issues are beyond the capabilities of a hypnotherapy app.
“Some people are going to need careful evaluation and medication, or long-term structured psychotherapy, but not everybody,” Speigel says. “The purpose of Reveri is to be a generally available tool to help people help themselves.”
And there’s solid evidence behind it. Spiegel describes a clinical trial he had published in the Lancet, where they monitored people undergoing endovascular surgery without anaesthetic. One of the three randomised groups had standard care, where you push a button to get opioids into your bloodstream. The second group had a supportive nurse comforting them during the procedure. The third had hypnosis.
“This group was taught to imagine themselves floating, and transform discomfort into a sense of tingling or numbness,” he says. “At the end, the standard care group’s pain level was 5/10, the nursing support group was 3/10 and, in the hypnosis group, it was 1/10.” The hypnosis group still had opioids, but half as much as the standard care group, meaning fewer side effects.
“Then we asked them how anxious they were, and that was 6/10 in the standard care group, 3/10 in the nursing group and 0/10 in the hypnosis group.”
So if hypnotherapy really is an evidence-backed effective treatment with zero side effects, why isn’t it more widely available? “It’s the prejudice against non-pharmacological interventions,” he says. “If it were a drug that had those results, every hospital in the country would be using it.”
For more information, visit reveri.com
Rosamund is a real person.
This article was originally published in The Times on December 23, 2023. Reveri Health, Inc owns the license to republish the article on our website.