If you’re living with IBS, you know how challenging it can be to manage your symptoms effectively and feel in control of your body. The constant discomfort, threat of unpredictable flare-ups, and significant impact on daily life can leave you feeling overwhelmed. Thankfully, complementary therapies like hypnotherapy for IBS and dietary interventions like the low FODMAP diet are becoming popular options for managing IBS symptoms. Read on if you’re wondering which one is best for you and the pros and cons of each.
Understanding IBS
First, what is IBS? IBS, or irritable bowel syndrome, is a chronic gastrointestinal disorder that often involves symptoms like abdominal pain, bloating, gas, diarrhoea, and constipation and can also include things like headaches, back pain, fatigue, and brain fog.
Although it may seem like your gut is getting damaged in the processed, IBS is actually a disorder of the communication between your gut and your brain. This means that the problem is functional, affecting how your gut functions rather than causing structural damage. The faulty communication between the brain and gut is the root cause of symptoms like pain, bloating, spasms, constipation, diarrhoea, nausea, and heartburn.
How can hypnotherapy help with IBS?
Luckily, hypnotherapy is far from the image you might have of hypnosis as a stage performance trick, where people seem controlled by someone else, doing things they normally wouldn’t do. In fact, hypnotherapy is a therapeutic approach that can improve various issues, including IBS. Hypnotherapy uses hypnosis combined with relaxation to help you become more responsive to positive suggestions and create changes in thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that you want. It can also affect how the brain interprets pain and discomfort.
By improving the gut-brain connection, and affecting how the brain interprets pain, hypnotherapy for IBS helps reduce physical symptoms like bloating, pain and unpredictable bowel movements. It also helps to make the gut less sensitive and helps you manage stress and reduce anxiety about IBS symptoms. Studies from the past 35+ years have consistently found hypnotherapy to create significant, short and long term symptom relief in in IBS sufferers in 70 to 80% of cases.
What can the low FODMAP diet do to help IBS?
The low FODMAP diet has often been touted as the go-to strategy to manage IBS symptoms. FODMAPs are a group of carbohydrates found in foods like wheat, dairy, onions, and garlic. These foods tend to take longer to break down in the small intestine and ferment in the colon, attracting more water and creating more gas in the process.
In a ‘normal’ gut, this doesn’t cause an issue, but in someone with IBS, it can cause pain, discomfort, bloating, and unpredictable bowel movements. The low FODMAP therefore diet aims to identify which foods are most troublesome for you by eliminating all FODMAP foods for a few weeks, then slowly reintroducing them to identify triggers.
The low FODMAP or hypnotherapy for IBS, which is best?
Both approaches can be effective in managing IBS symptoms, but they work differently. Hypnotherapy targets the gut-brain connection, restoring communication and reducing symptom severity by working on thoughts and feelings about IBS. The low FODMAP diet helps identify and eliminate food triggers but doesn’t address the root cause of symptoms.
A randomised clinical trial found gut-directed hypnotherapy to be as effective as the low FODMAP diet in treating IBS. This study also showed that hypnotherapy improved psychological indices like anxiety and depression more than the low FODMAP diet alone.
With hypnotherapy, you can significantly improve gut symptoms like bloating, pain, and unpredictable bowel movements without overhauling your diet entirely. Hypnotherapy also brings benefits in stress management and anxiety reduction.
Neither option is a quick fix; both require time and commitment. Hypnotherapy doesn’t require dietary changes, but you’ll need to commit to listening to recordings between sessions. The low FODMAP diet requires rethinking your eating habits and following a strict plan as well as potentially eliminating certain foods on the long term.
Considering your stress levels, the relationship between anxiety and your IBS flare-ups, and your existing relationship with food, can help decide which approach to take. If you’re curious about using hypnotherapy to manage your IBS, feel free to book a free, no-obligations initial chat with me to answer any questions you may have!
