My experience with hypnotherapy for post-viral fatigue/pain/fear
A software upgrade
Last week I wrote (here) about my success in pushing through a post-viral fatigue spell, running six miles and coming out more energetic on the other end. To my delight that post was shared beyond my subscribers and has been read over 2,500 times this week!
I realized I have more to share - a long history of experiences and attempted interventions which together could form a useful case study. Today I’ll write about another recent intervention which may have been beneficial.
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A close friend began working with a hypnotist to alleviate chronic pain following his shoulder surgery. After finding relief, he offered to buy me a session with the same practitioner. That was a year ago, three months after the start of my illness. I appreciated the thoughtful gift but wasn’t eager to begin: I trusted that my fears, pains, and other body signals were well calibrated to prevent me from taking harmful actions in my fragile state. I didn’t want my body signals artificially suppressed.
Slowly over the next ten months my perspective shifted. As described in detail in last week’s post, a series of positive experiences with exercise caused me to reevaluate the wisdom of my symptoms. By January 2026 I felt I was ready, and I reached out.
Beginning the session
I logged into Zoom. After thoroughly probing many core facets of my life, the hypnotist asked me to come up with an image to represent my symptoms. “It’s like my body is made of glass,” I said. He asked again:
“Can you describe it as something separate from your body?”
I thought. I said “it’s like a red field…”
“The field permeates my body and grows wherever my attention touches it, concentrating and spreading inward. Whichever parts it occupies are filled with a diffuse pain, and I am compelled to hold them still, to move them with great gentleness and care.”
He explained that this field could be thought of as a piece of software that runs on my nervous systems and/or subconscious mind. Our goal was to update this software. To do so he would guide me into a relaxed dreamlike state, and in that state I would perform a sequence of visualizations and mantras. My participation would be voluntary throughout.
He taught me a “vagus-breathing” exercise, suggested as an intervention that I might use during times of anxiety. Then he guided me through these breaths, and through a body scan, and then deep into the hypnotic state. Our first stop was Castle Rock State Park.
The upgrade sequence
“Can you see the beautiful view around you? Feel the sun on your skin and the grass beneath you?”
Yes. I am lying on the grass, hat covering my face, relaxing in the sunshine after a long hike and a big lunch. The sphere of my freedom extends for miles, through the surrounding trail system and across the wide valley ahead.
After spending a few minutes establishing this scene, I’m guided to an encounter with my previously-described red field. The two of us are brought into dialogue.
“Can you ask the field what it’s purpose is?”
I can. The field was installed when I was very sick and my actions were painful, and later, in the early phases of recovery during which overexertion would cause me fatigue. The field was installed to keep my safe by encouraging me to pay attention to my body, both to prevent me from overexerting myself, and to help me judge the effects of my past actions.
“It sounds like the field was created with good intentions, but that it may no longer be beneficial.”
Yeah.
Could you thank the field for looking out for you?
I thank the field.
It’s now time to dispose of the field.
I imagine an extremely powerful vacuum cleaner. I point the hose at myself and begin sucking the field out of my body. The hose proceeds slowly, across my chest and shoulders, down my arms and legs, and over my neck and head. It sticks to each limb, sucking out every last particle like a shop vac to sawdust. After many thorough passes, it’s done.
The field is now within the vacuum. I launch the vacuum into space where it disintegrates into a fine mist of particles. Those that reenter the atmosphere are swallowed into deep crevasses of the ocean. No more field. Just me in Castle Rock.
Now the creative exercise is to design and install my upgraded software. My chosen replacement is a blue sci-fi suit: a thin layer covering my entire body, lined with networks of channels. The suit effortlessly regulates my body’s resources, providing optimal energy and restoration. With the suit, I am assured that whatever rest is needed will take place naturally, without conscious intervention.
I put on my new suit and walk around. I can walk with ease. The blue lines running over my shoulders softly transmit their resources, providing my muscles with nutrients and energy and filtering out negative particles. With my suit donned, the surrounding environment is mine to explore.
I teleport to a climbing gym. I’m there with my suit, doing pull-ups. My attention is not on my body, it is in the space around me. Life is open, full of possibilities.
Increased ease following the session
Leaving the session my hypnotist encouraged me to take a few practices into my daily life: some routines (like daily self-hypnosis) and some ad hoc interventions (like the vagus-breathing exercise). And I was to take my blue suit with me. Honestly, the routines didn’t all stick, but the ad hoc interventions stayed with me for a while. Whenever I felt my field of pain / fear / confusion / tiredness, I imagined my blue suit working away, optimally managing and restoring those problematic areas, and I felt comforted.
I went on my first trail run soon after our session. I remember at one point losing energy and slowing down. Instinctually, the fear flashed:
You have exhausted yourself. Feel your body - does it hurt? Are the symptoms there? You must be very careful.
But I remembered my suit, and thought:
My body will take care of itself. It has already slowed itself down, naturally. I need not worry.
The ground truth was the same - I was on a run, I did a lot of walking, I was tired. But when I remembered the suit, some amount of fear would dissipate.
A reasonable intervention
I think that both the intentions behind the hypnosis, and the way it was carried out, were appropriate for my stage of recovery.
Consider: for a year I was plagued by a fickle illness, never knowing when the next symptom would strike. It seemed that using my muscles would cause symptoms to worsen, and my symptoms resided in those very same muscles. Of course such experiences caused me to develop heightened awareness of my body’s warning signals, and as a result the “red field” got ingrained. But after experimenting with gradually reintroducing exercise, I started to believe that my health dynamics were more favorable than the field led me to believe.
In other words: it seems that I spent a year in fear, effectively hypnotizing myself, bringing that red field into existence. With that in mind, it’s reasonable to spend a few hours un-hypnotizing myself towards a somewhat more normal relationship to my body.
In fact, the blue suit is quite realistic: we all contain a fantastically optimized network of (blue) veins that carry unneeded matter away from our organs, in concert with energy- and nutrient-providing arteries. This circulatory system, and the rest of our body systems, do their jobs well without conscious intervention. A miracle.
How this contributed to my recovery
In the months following my sessions I began to experience a recovery flywheel. As I reduced my fears and perceived symptoms I started maintaining gradually more intense exercise routines. As I succeeded in these routines my fears would further recede.
Such flywheels get stuck when perceived negative reactions to exercise outweigh perceived benefits. My own flywheel had been mostly stuck since I originally fell ill (that’s what makes something chronic), and my hypnosis sessions seemed to provide just enough grease (via lessening of fears) to get the flywheel back up and running.
To be clear, the effects of those sessions barely hold a candle to the fear-dismantling that occurred in the wake of my recent experiments with pushing through fatigue via exercising hard. There’s nothing like physically proving your perceived limitations to be spectacularly wrong. But still, when I look at the past months, it seems reasonable to suggest that my hypnotherapy practice contributed to a buildup of self-trust which allowed for my later more impactful experiments to take place.
