Effectiveness of Cognitive-Behavioral Hypnotherapy on Pain and Emotion Regulation in Patients with Premenstrual Dysphoria

Considering the increasing prevalence of premenstrual dysphoria and considering the need to use the most effective treatment in improving the symptoms of this syndrome, this study aims to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral hypnotherapy on pain and emotion regulation in premenstrual dysphoria sufferers.

The current research method is a semi-experimental type of pre-test and post-test with experimental and control and follow-up groups, in which an experimental group and a control group in three stages of pre-test and post-test and the follow-up period of a Months were compared with each other. The statistical population of the research included all women aged 25 to 40 years who visited a gynecologist in Sari city at least 3 times in a 12-month period during the past year, and with the diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoria, went to the counseling center and 24 people were selected from this group using available sampling method and were randomly divided into an experimental group (12 people) and a control group (12 people). The research tools included the cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire of Garnevsky et al. (2001), the chronic pain questionnaire of Mohammadian (1995) and the premenstrual symptoms screening tool of Siehbazi et al. (2011). Cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy intervention was implemented in 8 sessions of 90 minutes for the experimental group. The data were analyzed with SPSS version 25 statistical software and using the method of analysis of variance with repeated measurements, post hoc tests and independent t-test to check the equality of means at the significance level of 0.05.

The covariance results showed that cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy is significantly effective on pain reduction, emotion regulation, and subscales of compromised strategies and compromised strategies in women with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (P < 0.001).

Cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy improves physical-sensory, emotional-emotional and cognitive-evaluative, compromised strategies and non-compromised strategies, mental health, social relationships, environmental health and overall health of women with premenstrual dysphoria disorder and quality it elevates life in this era.