Teaching Children ‘Skills Not Pills’

In the 1980’s in Minneapolis, researchers showed the child migraine sufferers who were taught self-hypnosis techniques had a third to a half less migraines than other children who were treated with drugs.

In America, Rebecca Kajander specializes in teaching children how to deal with stress and says children nowadays are more prone to stress than we might think. Signs of tension include problems sleeping, headaches, stomach upsets and more as they struggle to cope with exam pressure, modern day problems like divorce, parent’s long working hours, materialism and the publicity surrounding internet scares and terrorism.

Kajander teaches the children how to spot their own signs of tension or anxiety and different simple techniques to stop it building. The mind-body connection is nothing new, as we discussed in our earlier article Accepting The Mind Body Link, and aside from hypnosis, disciplines like pure meditation and yoga have long embraced the idea.

Your mental attitude really can affect your physical symptoms, whether you believe that it’s the physical symptom itself that has been relieved or purely your attitude towards it that has altered your perception. As one of Kajander’s child patients was quoted in an article:

I was skeptical about that (positive self-talk), but I’ve found it’s really true… My attitude would really affect how my neck felt. If I wake up and have a headache and think, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a bad day,’ it’s different than waking up and thinking, ‘I have a headache and I’m going to have to manage this.’

It can be difficult to ‘talk yourself’ into these techniques and often a little help is needed, such as that provided by Kajander and her team. Under hypnosis, a hypnotherapist can help the process and can teach you self-hypnosis. It takes practice but the benefits can be enormous.