Hypnotherapy on the go: app helps you relieve anxiety, depression and stress, sleep better and more - its creator explains her mission to make hypnosis mainstream

Former banker Christine Deschemin studied hypnotherapy after learning a friend had used it to stop drinking, and created an app to make it more widely available

The UpNow app, available in-flight to Cathay Pacific passengers, has helped many thousands of people, including former Hong Kong champion jockey Olivier Doleuze

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Christine Deschemin is a certified hypnotherapy practitioner in Hong Kong. She created UpNow, a hypnosis app that puts stress relief within easy reach of its users. Photo: courtesy of Christine Deschemin

Published: 1:15pm, 6 Nov 2021Updated: 2:35pm, 13 Jun 2023

The key to better health, greater happiness and well-being may lie in mastering our anxieties and overcoming a negative mindset - and hypnotherapy is a way to gain control over them. It could also help you feel less stress or quit drinking alcohol.

Hypnosis has been used to treat patients for ailments such as pain, depression and anxiety, and phobias for more than 200 years, but it is still commonly regarded with some scepticism.

Christine Deschemin, a long-term Hong Kong resident and a certified hypnotherapy practitioner, has made it her mission to make hypnosis mainstream. To that end she launched an app, UpNow, in May 2020 to share it with people around the world.

The 47-year-old had a lucrative career in finance, thanks to a degree in aeronautical engineering from the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in France and an MBA from Harvard Business School, but it was in hypnotherapy – which she discovered entirely by chance – that she found her true calling.

Christine Deschemin (left) is a long-term Hong Kong resident and a certified hypnotherapy practitioner. Photo: courtesy of Christine Deschemin

“I was at dinner with friends who were visiting Hong Kong and noticed that one of them, who used to drink heavily, was abstaining from alcohol,” she says. “She shared that she had used hypnotherapy to kick the habit. What fascinated me was that she was not just resisting the urge to drink, she had simply lost the urge.”

Intrigued by this, she went on to study hypnotherapy at the Ecole Centrale d’Hypnose in France.