How hypnotherapy helped Jean reverse hypertension & become medicine free!
Jean hadn't even thought about her blood pressure all her life, she regarded herself as relatively fit and healthy, going swimming and dancing on a regular basis. She walked everywhere and thought her diet was good and seemed to always sleep well. There were times however, at times of stress, when she struggled to get to sleep and woke up in the night, not being able to get back to sleep easily.
She was still working full-time when her husband, a few years older, began to become unwell and had to have a serious operation which meant he had to give up work.
Finances were affected with just one wage coming in and her husband's treatment taking a hefty chunk out of the weekly budget. She started to feel the burden of responsibility and had to start taking the family car to work and cutting down on her active lifestyle to make space for her husband's needs.
She noticed unusual symptoms appearing, for example, she would wake up feeling groggy in the morning like she'd had too much to drink the night before, and some visual and auditory disturbances where she had ringing in the ears and struggling to focus. She also noticed feeling more tired and anxious and started forgetting things more of the time.
Jean was from a family of happy-go-lucky self-copers who relied on sheer grit and determination to keep them going to get them through things. However, she was very aware that one of her siblings and both parents passed away from cardiovascular disease, and 1 of her remaining siblings were hypertensive and seeing a cardiologist for heart disease.
Hypertension had never crossed her mind and she just put it down to all the stress she had been through. She thought it best anyway she should see her GP to check everything was okay.
Jean's blood pressure was very high and in the hypertensive range. Her GP waited for a while and took it again, and again since many people experience 'White Coat Syndrome' when visiting the surgery. He asked her to borrow a machine from pathology or buy one so she could monitor this at home for a couple of weeks. She did but the numbers never changed. She was diagnosed with hypertension and immediately required to take blood pressure reducing medication.
At first, Jean resisted, she wasn't keen and read all about the side effects, so didn't take her tablets. Her symptoms didn't go away and she finally succumbed to taking them exactly as her GP had prescribed.
This was just over a year ago and she was concerned she was still taking them but nothing about her life had changed other than side effects from the meds were making her feel dizzy, and she had swelling in her legs and feet. She realized she was relying on these to manage things and yet desperately wanted to stop taking them.
After retiring a few months ago her stress levels increased, she was bored at home caring for her husband full-time and didn't have the motivation to go out much by herself. She lost the social contact she had at work and was left wondering what to do with herself. She was cooking a lot but not always eating a healthy diet, nibbling on things throughout the day, and finding herself putting on weight now the activities had stopped.
Jean came to see me with the goal of getting off her medication and changing aspects of her life that she was becoming stressed and unfulfilled with. We created some goals to aim for in the coming sessions:
- Reduce blood pressure
- Increase exercise
- Eat a healthier diet
- Lose weight
- Sleep better
- Deal with the grief of recent family deaths and the loss of her husband's health
- Manage the stress of being retired
- Plan more meaningful ways to live each day
Jean had a lot of issues to tackle but hypnotherapy is a holistic therapy where we can tackle issues sometimes simultaneously on different levels.
We knew that reducing blood pressure, losing weight, and sleeping better would happen naturally by managing stress, changing her eating habits, and getting more active.
Once hypnotherapy helped to instigate these changes we started working, on her grief and loss of her husband's health, feeling fulfilled in retirement, and grieving for her loved ones who had passed.
Some things along the way needed more input from elsewhere e.g., a caring service that gave her space away from home while her husband's needs could be met by another carer, nutritional therapy to help with meal planning, and services that helped them with easing the financial burden of living with chronic illness.
Within weeks of changing lifestyle factors Jean and people in her situation can feel very comfortable and confident that they can live medication free but with constant monitoring of blood pressure in case things change.
