Pain & Body
Hypnosis for headaches and migraine
Loosen the head, settle the system.
This session directs attention to the jaw, neck and shoulders to soften the tightness that gathers there.
It spends most of the time on a sense of cool and quiet spreading through the head, giving the system a chance to settle down. You are guided to let go of the holding.
The band across the forehead is what tells you the day has gone on too long. The jaw has been tight for hours without you noticing, and the back of the neck feels pulled and hard.
There is a sort of pressure that sits behind the eyes, making it difficult to look at anything for very long or think clearly.
What’s in it
A loosening of the tension around your head, jaw, neck and shoulders, and a cool, settled quiet through the whole system.
Why do it
Easing comes with practice, so a few minutes of softening here helps your body learn to come back to calm when pressure builds.
- Theme
- Pain & Body
- Delivery styles
- 3
- Lengths
- Quick ~10mStandard ~20mDeep ~45m
- Ends
- Calm and present
- Stages
- 4
- On this shelf
- 18 sessions
Timeline: Start to Finish
The middle section is built to direct attention to the head, neck and jaw. The time is spent rehearsing a sense of cool spaciousness in those places until it feels like the only thing happening.
3 of the 4 stages are named techniques with a published origin, credited under each.
-
InductionStage 16 min
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
A classic head-to-toe relaxation. Tense and release, or simply soften, each muscle group in sequence.
After Edmund Jacobson PMR (1929); Dave Elman Hypnotherapy · what progressive muscle relaxation is
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DeepenerStage 23 min
Staircase Descent
Visualized stairs descending into a deeper level of trance. Each step takes you down.
After Ledochowski, Deep Trance Training Manual
-
Suggestion ScriptStage 310 min
Headache & Migraine — Balanced
-
AwakeningStage 42 min
Calm Alert Awakening
Awake and present, but calm rather than energized. Good for evening or pre-meeting use.
After Yapko, Trancework
Three ways to say it
The same goal, written three ways. You pick the one that sounds like something you would believe — and you can hear a different one tomorrow without rebuilding anything.
Balanced
Loosen the head, neck and jaw, let cool spacious quiet settle the whole system. The default.
Future self
Meet the version of you who moves through the days with a light, easy head and a settled system.
New identity
Step into being someone whose head and body already know how to soften and settle.
Where it sits
Discomfort, tension and the parts of the body that will not let go.
Before you press play
Hypnosis is not for everyone. If you have epilepsy, a psychotic illness, or you are under psychiatric care, talk to your clinician before using this — here or anywhere.
Why this works — and what the research actually says
Group-level, not session-level: no study has tested this exact session, and we will not pretend otherwise. Every source below was opened and read on 2026-08-25 before it was quoted.
Why do it as hypnosis?
You cannot simply tell a muscle to let go, which is why trying to force your head to feel better does not work.
What you can do is give the system a very specific series of instructions on loosening and spacing out, and then let it follow them.
The time is spent directing attention to the neck and jaw, asking them to find a way to open that they do not find on their own.
Pain: strong for the sharp kind, weak for the long kind
A 2025 review split pain in two, and got a different answer for each.
For acute pain — a procedure, an operation, an injury — hypnosis made a real, measurable difference, and those patients also needed fewer opioids.
For long-running chronic pain, the same review found no significant effect at all.
- Acute pain: a medium, significant effect across 6 trials and 888 people
- Those patients also used significantly fewer opioids
- Chronic pain: 6 trials, 595 people, no significant effect
Worth knowing: The authors name their own weaknesses. The small number of articles available limited the analysis, and two different pain scales were pooled.
A wide variety of hypnosis methods were used, and the lack of double blinding may affect trial quality. They also note high heterogeneity and small sample sizes in most studies.
The exact wording and figures
For acute pain, 6 randomised controlled trials and 888 participants showed a medium, statistically significant effect (Hedges' g = 0.54, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.90, p = 0.0024).
Opioid consumption was also 1.5 SD lower in the hypnosis group (95% CI 0.12 to 2.88, p = 0.03).
For chronic pain, across 6 trials and 595 participants, the effect was not statistically significant (Hedges' g = 0.07, 95% CI -0.14 to 0.27, p = 0.518).
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.
Yerzhan A, Ayazbekova A, Lavage DR, Chelly JE (2025). The Use of Medical Hypnosis to Prevent and Treat Acute and Chronic Pain. Journal of Clinical Medicine.
open access (CC BY 4.0)
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