Exploring CBT & Hypnosis Therapy for Boosting Neuroplasticity

Learn About Brain Rewiring & Neuroplasticity

You might not know it, but your brain has the ability to grow and change. This ability for reorganization and rewiring is called neuroplasticity, brain plasticity, or neural plasticity, and it’s literally how flexible your brain can be.

If you’re wondering how neuroplasticity and therapy are connected, Miami Hypnosis & Therapy is here with an overview that can break it down for you. Follow along as our experts explore the details of neuroplasticity and how it relates to common clinical techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), hypnosis, and NLP.

Understanding Neuroplasticity

Your brain is made up of cells with distinctive structures, chemistry, and function. Over time, these cells adapt in response to your experiences and behaviors. While many of these changes help you acclimate to changing situations and needs, some of these changes can negatively impact your mental health. CBT can help act as a tool to reverse such changes.

Integrating hypnosis, NLP, and CBT as a way to enhance neuroplasticity helps retrain your brain. Whether you’re struggling with eating disorders, anger management, PTSD, or other mental health concerns, neuroplasticity and therapy may be the keys to a more successful, happy life.

What Is CBT?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of clinical therapy that takes advantage of neuroplasticity to reprogram your brain. Since many psychological concerns are typically based on potentially unbalanced thought patterns and behaviors, CBT strives to find more productive ways of thinking about and coping with the underlying concerns.

Some of the strategies therapists use to help you change your thinking patterns include:

• Learning to recognize problematic thoughts
• Re-evaluating negative thoughts through a more realistic lens
• Understanding the behaviors or motivations of yourself and others
• Utilizing problem-solving skills as a coping mechanism

Changing your behavioral patterns through CBT and neuroplasticity is a little different. These strategies may include:

• Facing your fears as opposed to avoiding them
• Using roleplay to prepare for difficult interactions
• Learning techniques to calm and relax your body

With several approaches available, your therapist can customize a treatment plan using techniques that are most effective for your needs.

Neuroplasticity and CBT

CBT inherently encourages neuroplasticity because it’s all about adopting different ways of thinking and behaving through practice. As you continue working toward reframing certain thoughts and actions to change them, your brain responds and adapts to the new thoughts and behaviors. Neuroplasticity and therapy become linked as you continue to grow and change.

How CBT Can Help You

While CBT can be effective for a number of concerns, here’s an overview of how it can be an effective tool for a few of the most common mental health conditions.

Bipolar Disorder

When we apply CBT to bipolar disorder, therapists use some of the techniques listed above in more targeted ways. They may encourage you to address depressive symptoms, feelings of guilt, and negative thoughts in an attempt to reduce overall stress and minimize manic and depressive episodes. With a heightened awareness of emotions, moods, and physical sensations, you can prepare yourself for any type of episode by engaging in pre-determined behaviors that help you achieve relief.

Anxiety

Brain rewiring and neuroplasticity for anxiety can be a little different than other disorders because many people don’t truly understand their problem. They may have a basic understanding of their fears, or they might not know the underlying cause of their anxiety at all. In all of these cases, using CBT to identify and name the cause of the anxiety is the primary goal. Once this anxiety is named, you can stop avoiding it and face your concern with tactics recommended by a therapist.

Depression

Neuroplasticity and therapy are also incredibly important when using CBT to address depression. CBT is the preferred therapeutic technique for mild to moderate depression. Generally, therapists start with goal setting before moving on to helping clients improve their awareness and understanding of the activity or behavior that’s exacerbating their depression. Therapists will recommend several different options to modify these thoughts and behaviors, revising treatment based on a client’s experience.

Once a technique or coping mechanism is proven effective, therapists will help a client expand it so it can be applied more generally across a client’s entire life. With neuroplasticity, therapy becomes more effective.

Hypnosis Therapy & Neuroplasticity

Hypnosis therapy is a practice that utilizes guided hypnosis to help you reach a more relaxed state. In this trance, you have increased suggestibility so a therapist can steer you away from negative behaviors toward more positive coping mechanisms. Most commonly, hypnosis can be used to address pain management, smoking cessation, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Can Hypnosis Promote Neuroplasticity?

Brain rewiring and neuroplasticity are central tenets of hypnosis, but instead of the client doing the heavy lifting on their own, they have a hypnotherapist as backup! Because you’re already in a relaxed state, the brain is primed for retraining. With the therapist holding the reins and suggesting alternative pathways, you get more targeted support to address your needs as an individual or in a group therapy session.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) & Neuroplasticity

NLP therapy is a clinical therapy method that helps you learn how language, thoughts, and behavior correlate. As you identify negative words and thoughts, you can change your reactions to them and reframe them to achieve the desired outcome. NLP is commonly used to target phobias, eating habits, and relationships.

NLP Therapy and Neuroplasticity

NLP harnesses a variety of techniques based on the elasticity of your brain, including

• Anchoring: Linking feelings of alertness and invigoration to an action. When you pair the feeling with the action, you can activate the feeling by completing the action.
• Submodalities: Picturing negative feelings, like fatigue, as a physical object, you can shrink it down, replace it, or otherwise change it to adjust your internal image of the negative feeling to make it more manageable.
• Meta-Modeling: Ask yourself what is fueling your negative emotions and how your life would change if these emotions were eliminated. You can uncover and challenge limitations by unlocking new perspectives.

These techniques each target your internal assumptions and thought patterns in an effort to change them.

Which Therapy Is Best?

All of these therapies focus on retraining your brain and changing negative behavior patterns using slightly different techniques. When it comes to neuroplasticity and therapy, it may not matter where you start as long as you book that initial session to discuss your concerns with a professional. Some styles might work better for you than others, in which case your therapist may focus on those.

At Miami Hypnosis and Therapy, we blend these therapies together to create a completely customized treatment plan that’s most effective for you. The most important element here is consistently putting in the work to develop lifelong coping techniques that deliver long-term benefits. Talk to us about brain rewiring and neuroplasticity today when you call for an in-person or virtual therapy session.