Exam stress is in the air. Could hypnosis, havening or CBT be the answer?

Almost summertime and the living is stressful, if it’s an exam household.

After years of a mishmash of schooling and remote-learning, missed milestones and social interaction, a generation faces into exam season, including the Leaving Cert – with written examinations starting on June 7th – and its linked unknowns of grade inflation, erratic CAO points and late results.

Quite apart from a reported upswing in anxiety among younger people, there’s the normal anxiety of exam time. How can those who love them help teenagers manage exam stress, and empower them? More to the point, are there quick fixes?

Looking for support, guidance, a boost, our household wondered could hypnotherapy help? Is a celebrity-hosted mass hypnosis coaching event a valid way of managing exam stress or just hocus-pocus? Are there other paths too?

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I’m ripe for the plucking but simultaneously sceptical about Paul McKenna’s recent show, at Dún Laoghaire’s Pavilion Theatre. The high-profile English hypnotist and self-help guru offered “instant confidence” in a 90-minute coaching session; two nights of the 300-plus seater sold out. Will there be a benefit in this? Is there any danger of being hypnotised into doing pirouettes on stage?

It’s far removed from the cliched stage hypnotist making people think they’re chickens. Several audience members join McKenna on stage, including a man grieving from the death of his father

Fear not, my Leaving Certer and I were safe.

McKenna is a showman: smooth, impressive and humorous. The former broadcaster’s honeyed voice would be soothing and hypnotic reading a shopping list. On stage he explains what he’s going to do, demonstrates on a volunteer, then gets the entire audience to do it.

He tells me later: “It sounds scary if you say it’s a mass hypnosis event. There is mass hypnosis involved because everyone gets hypnotised at the end, but essentially I’m using three things.” He lists them as a psycho-sensory technique called “havening”, neuro linguistic programming (NLP, “the hottest thing in personal development right now”) and traditional hypnosis.

It’s far removed from the cliched stage hypnotist making people think they’re chickens. Several audience members join McKenna on stage, including a man grieving from the death of his father a year ago.

[ Less than a month to the Leaving Cert exams: the dos and don’ts of the final countdown ]

McKenna says there’s science behind his hybrid of techniques. “The objective is very simple. First of all, everyone has a great night. It’s not a boring lecture. It’s presented in a way that’s lighthearted. But also, it’s also about personal change. It’s important to me that everyone goes away with techniques they can use in everyday life. It’s not just motivation, because motivation doesn’t last.”

I feel a bit delinquent. McKenna covers multiple techniques, and so quickly, it’s hard to keep up. “Think of a happy time. Right. Now, imagine you’re back there. See what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel how good you felt.” I’m behind already, still trying to come up with the specific happy time, while the rest of the audience may be in nirvana.

All the same, it is uplifting, and induces positivity. But next day I’ve forgotten the steps. I need a cog-sheet. (Handily, he has books for sale.)

You might presume that more conventional therapists are a million miles from this showbiz incarnation, but it’s not at all as clearcut

The gas thing about it is, my Leaving Certer, who has zoned into it, announces out of the blue on the way out, “I think I’m going to tidy my bedroom when I get home”. That’s a revolutionary suggestion from him. (Alas, he is tired when we get home, and the urge has passed.)

You might presume that more conventional therapists are a million miles from this showbiz incarnation, but it’s not at all as clearcut.

Dublin-based consultant clinical psychologist Dr Claire Hayes in some ways works in the same space, and with groups. In schools she teaches how to manage stress and anxiety. “I’m very interested in prevention and in teaching the very basic principles of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), because they work.” She aims to help understand and manage anxiety “long, long, long before it gets to serious anxiety”.

She’s developed a programme for schools and workplaces, using a three-step process (her ABC Coping Triangle) based on CBT principles, to acknowledge feelings, link these to thoughts or events, and then focus on helpful actions to take.

As well as her triangle (the three-step CBT technique features in her new book), she also uses “relaxation, visualisation, imagery exercises that I find hugely powerful” in creating a different sense of self. “I’m not a trained hypnotherapist, but I’ve been doing imagery work for years. I’ve often thought about hypnotherapy training, but I love what I do [with CBT] and I think it works.”

[ ‘I rarely tell fellow GPs about my interest in hypnosis’ ]

Hayes teaches her ABC Coping Triangle to groups “as a kind of a primary prevention. There’s so much confusion over this. Feeling anxious is a normal reaction to stress/danger, or perceived stress/danger. People misinterpret that normal reaction, and think there’s something wrong with them. When they have this sick feeling in their tummy, clammy hands, the sweats, they discover one of the quickest ways to feel better is to avoid: not to go into the maths class, not to go into the exam, not to study.

“So they procrastinate, they avoid. But that only works short term.” Some turn to alcohol or other things, or withdraw, she says. “Anxiety and depression can be very linked.”

The ABC helps people understand anxiety is a normal response to danger or perceived danger, to “take our power back” from anxiety, rather than giving our power to whatever is making us feel anxious. As Susan Jeffers wrote, “feel the fear and do it anyway, but we do it with an understanding that actually, there’s nothing wrong with us for feeling anxious. That’s normal.”

People say trust your feelings, but “I don’t, I really don’t. I help people recognise our feelings of anxiety are real, but they can be based on what we think, just as quickly as on what’s happening.”

Breathing is very useful, she says. “Very simple practical breathing exercises can help manage it.”

Hayes says working with a group of people can be very effective, too, especially in preventing difficulties for large numbers of people

She was a primary-school teacher for two years, and with students experiencing anxiety, she tried to reassure them but “I knew what I was doing wasn’t working”. Leaving to study psychology, she came across CBT. “The ideas are so simple, so practical, and I couldn’t understand why people had to wait until they’d all kinds of really serious difficulties before they got a chance to learn this. My dream is that everybody would know this, the way we know to put our seat belts on: to know the difference between our feelings and our thoughts, and really focus on our action.”

Many parents, in her experience, are “terrified of their children not feeling happy, because of suicide. So helping them feel lousy if they want to feel lousy, but recognising that part of it is based on being human, being a teenager, exams or whatever. That we have moments where we feel bad. Also, young people compare themselves to everybody else, and it can make them feel worse, rather than better.”

But can techniques, whether hypnotherapy or havening or CBT, work in a group set-up, whether an audience or in a school?

She loves working one-to-one, but Hayes says working with a group of people can be very effective, too, especially in preventing difficulties for large numbers of people. She has developed a video programme on anxiety for secondary schools.

Paul McKenna says “every entertainer has a sense of connection with an audience”, plus he calibrates whether it’s working by asking for a show of hands. “Right, who’s feeling better? And nearly every hand goes up.”

He’s adamant some people will reorient their lives based on 90 minutes in his audience. “A five-minute technique. Bam! Suddenly they’ve changed it all on the inside. They can suddenly form functional relationships, or take care of their procrastination or self-sabotage.” Of the man in the audience who had lost his father, he says: “He isn’t going to feel so overwhelmed with grief. But he’s had a year already, and all I did was clean it up at the end.”

Whether it’s 300 or 3,000 people, “you’re still speaking to one person essentially. And they’re listening to you.” Plus, “when you’re in a group of like-minded people, you get a rise in serotonin. Whether it’s an AA meeting or a football match, it feels good.”

Has he faced criticism? “Years ago, there were some pompous, stuffy, old clinicians and doctors who disapproved massively of hypnosis for entertainment. They thought it was in bad taste.”

When I started down this road 37 years ago, therapy was voodoo, or it was for you if you were mad

—  Paul McKenna

Did the pirouetting on stage that used to happen give hypnotherapists a bad name? “Well, it did and it didn’t. It showed people that hypnosis was powerful, and it works. So as a convincer, it’s right up there. Yes, there were some shows that were distasteful. But some comedians are distasteful.”

“A show like [mine] isn’t a comedy hypnosis show. I’m not hypnotising people to do daft things. This is more like a motivational event. There are motivational speakers all over the place. Why not have people tell you stories or get you to do techniques that make you feel good, make your quality of life better? The word ‘coaching’ is what made a difference. When I started down this road 37 years ago, therapy was voodoo, or it was for you if you were mad. It wasn’t for people who are really all right but wanted to be a bit better.”

Choose Well: The ABC Coping Sentence by Dr Claire Hayes, has just been published by Beehive

Freedom from Anxiety by Paul McKenna is published by Welbeck, paulmckenna.com