Interesting article from the NCH website :

People often ask “Why isn’t there more research on hypnosis?”  In fact, the people who ask this, in my experience, never seem to have read (or even heard of) the main research journals in the field of hypnosis (IJCEH, AJCH, and Contemporary Hypnosis) and are unaware that there’s actually an awful lot of research on hypnosis, arguably more than on any other psychological therapy, apart from cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).  However, one of the problems facing hypnosis researchers is that methods of hypnotherapy are too messy, eclectic and complex to be well-suited to good research design.  It helps build an evidence base if a treatment is “manualised” and can be described in a guide so that other researchers can replicate it in independent studies.  Hypnotherapists tend to do lots of strange things with clients, making it difficult to isolate which “bits” are effective and which bits are redundant.  Modern research on psychological therapies is constantly evolving and improving in quality.  Protocols for therapies tend to have become simpler in order to facilitate the process of research. 

A well-known example is the “Applied Relaxation” protocol developed in Sweden by the psychologist Lars-Goran Öst, currently a professor at the University of Stockholm, and his colleagues (Applied Relaxation: Description of a Coping Technique and Review of Controlled Studies, 1987).  It developed out of Edmund Jacobson’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Wolpe’s Systematic Desensitisation, and a variety of “coping skills” approaches to anxiety management that evolved in the 1970s.  The following account is based on Öst’s original protocol and the self-help version published by Davis et al. (Davis, et al., 1995 pp. 65-74; Applied Relaxation: Description of a Coping Technique and Review of Controlled Studies, 1987).  Although essentially a form of modern behaviour therapy, Applied Relaxation has also been used in combination with cognitive restructuring as part of a cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) approach.

Applied Relaxation is of interest to hypnotherapists because it consists of a very simple treatment protocol employing relaxation coping skills, which has been adapted for use with a range of problems, and supported by a number of well-designed research studies.  It has met critical appraisal criteria for being classed as an Empirically-Supported Treatment (EST) for panic disorder and research has also supported its efficacy in the treatment of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and, to some extent, for specific phobias, headache, pain, epilepsy, tinnitus, and other conditions.  It’s also been recommended for general management of worry and stress, i.e., for subclinical problems.

I think this protocol would be of interest to hypnotherapists because the method closely resembles “hypnotic desensitisation” (Wolberg, 1948; Wolpe, 1958) and it provides a good example of how a simplified hypnotherapy treatment protocol could be developed for use in treatment outcome research.  When reading the description below, just consider replacing the Jacobson tension-release relaxation method with self-hypnosis training in suggested relaxation and (I hope) it should be easy for hypnotherapists to see how this coping skills framework can be directly modified and transformed into a simple behavioural hypnotherapy method for anxiety.

Full details here