Some complementary health practices promote the idea of improving a person’s health by generating a feeling of relaxation that is said to help produce psychological change. Standard medical practice does support relaxation and stress management as generally beneficial. Relaxation hypnosis is a technique in which a hypnotic trance, a relaxed and focused state in which a person become more suggestible, is used to give a person therapeutic suggestions that encourage positive changes in their behavior and other means to relieve their symptoms.
These treatments can involve muscle relaxation, which helps promote relaxation, or creative visualization in which visual images are used to help promote a feeling of ease or comfort. The primary applications of this type of therapy are for anxiety disorders that are regarded as having a strong psychological component (such as irritable bowel syndrome and asthma, for example) and other issues that can be modulated through arousal levels (such as a person’s perception of pain).