About Hypnosis

There is nothing strange, mysterious or science-fiction-like about hypnosis. It’s just a profession like any other. Put simply, hypnosis is a state of magnified concentration. And a good hypnotherapist is a magnified concentration specialist, taking negative habits and behaviours such as smoking, overeating and stress and replacing them with positive habits, such as exercise, eating healthily and peace of mind.

Hypnosis represents an opportunity for you to change. It is a gift you are giving to yourself, by allowing you to become master of your own mind and replacing a past habit or behaviour with what you want today..

All hypnosis is self-hypnosis – a good hypnotherapist is a guide who can show you how to go into your own mind and make the changes you want to make. Many people believe that all they have to do is close their eyes and the hypnotherapist will do the rest or even that the hypnotherapist can make them do things against there will. This can be a very costly belief. hypnotherapy is always a partnership between a client and their hypnotherapist.

Having said that, hypnosis is a very natural phenomenon we all go into a state of hypnosis every day – you’re reading a book, for example, and someone comes along and speaks to you. You’re so engrossed in the book that you don’t hear them. That’s a state of hypnosis. Or, you’re in a lift and you fail to get off at the right floor because your mind has drifted off thinking about something else. That’s a state of hypnosis too.

I often say to clients before a session, “Don’t expect to feel hypnotised, just expect to feel relaxed.” Because people have seen the old films and stage shows and sometimes it seems from the outside as though the person is in some strange state and under the control of the hypnotist. But it’s really only a state of relaxed concentration. It’s a very familiar feeling. In fact, we all go in and out of a state of hypnosis throughout the day.

Some people believe they can’t be hypnotised, or they might say that they are very strong-willed. As has been said, a good hypnotherapist will not be trying to control you against your will and as long as you have a desire to change, then you can be hypnotised easily and helped with hypnosis.

Which is why, when some people ask, “Can I be hypnotised?” I always tell them that anybody of normal intelligence can be hypnotised because we’re all going in and out of a trance all day long. For example, you’re in a car, at a red traffic light and the light changes to green and you don’t notice until someone honks their horn behind you. You have drifted into a relaxed state, which is an alpha brainwave state, which is a state of light to medium hypnosis. So you see that it is a very familiar state because we’re all drifting in and out of various states of hypnosis all day long.

One question I often get is, "What does it feel like to be hypnotised?" Well, the answer is, a lot of people don’t feel any different when they are hypnotised. They often tell me that they were just sitting there going along with it; which is the right thing to do, because it was not until they were coming out of hypnosis that they realised, how deeply hypnotised they had been. Perhaps the biggest misconception that I want to put right is that a hypnotherapist cannot control your mind.

A hypnotherapist can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. But a hypnotherapist can help you easily to do something you do want to do. I often say to people, if I were to suggest to you, while in the chair, that you’ll rob every bank in London and bring me the money, well, of course, you would refuse.

The point, I’m making is this, if a hypnotherapist were to say anything you’d disagree with, it would be filtered out by the deepest structures of the unconscious mind – your ethics, morals, values and beliefs. Which is why good hypnotherapists tailor their programmes so carefully.

The next big myth is this, people often say, “Will I lose my memory?” The answer is, no, you’ll remember everything that goes on in the session, It will be as if you’re just sitting there in the chair, with your eyes closed, while in a deeply relaxed state, that’s all.

And here’s another one. a doctor, in charge of the casualty section of a large hospital, who wanted to stop smoking, asked if it was possible that one could get stuck in a hypnotic state? When asked if he'd ever had, anyone come through his doors with a case of terminal hypnosis, he of course, said no, because that’s like saying I sat down, closed my eyes to relax, listened to my favourite piece of music and got stuck there and that never happens, and that never will.

In fact, when people question the safety of hypnosis, I often remind them that several years back, the government did an eighteen-month investigation into hypnosis after a schizophrenic tried to sue a famous stage hypnotist. Of course in the end, not only was the case dismissed but the really good thing to come out of that situation for the profession was that the government concluded that hypnosis is a hundred percent safe.

So now we know that hypnosis is totally safe, it’s a normal, natural, everyday state. The question is, “Does hypnosis work?"

Since the British and American Medical Associations approved clinical hypnosis in the 1950s, there have been many important scientific research papers and academic books written that contain countless studies on the effectiveness of hypnosis.

Let's use an example from the field of stop smoking. Because there has been so much research done in this area, we can say that when people try to stop the habit of smoking, willpower alone has a success rate of about 8% and Nicotine patches have a success rate of about 15%. Let’s compare that to hypnotherapy. There was a study done by Dr Von Deadendrof MD, printed in the January 1968 edition of The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, entitled “The use of hypnosis in a thousand cases of tobacco maniacs.”

There are three interesting points about this study. First of all, he didn’t just test fifty or a hundred people. He actually tested a thousand people. Secondly, he didn’t just follow up for a month or two to make sure that they remained non-smokers, he actually followed up eighteen months later. And thirdly, out of a thousand smokers after eighteen months, he found with his methods of hypnosis 94% remained non-smokers. And this was one of the most impressive studies done, largely due to his unique approach which has been studied in depth. And I believe that we’ve actually made a few improvements in the last forty-two years in the field of clinical hypnosis. Staying on our example of smoking, the largest study of its kind published in the New Scientist Magazine concluded, and I quote, “Hypnosis is the most effective method to stop smoking.”

Hypnotherapy is actually taught as part of the curriculum in many medical colleges these days and Doctors and Dentists have been applying it in the field of medicine for more than a century. Indeed much of the research that has been done in the area of hypnotherapy has been conducted by Medical Doctors and Surgeons.

The fact is that modern methods of hypnotherapy especially when combined with some of the latest developments in the field of NLP and Cognitive Therapy are often safer, quicker, more effective and therefore much cheaper in the long run than any other approach at dealing with problems such as smoking, alcohol, gambling, eating problems, anger issues, fears, anxiety, stress, insomnia, pain control, depression, low self esteem, even sports performance and much, much more.

So let’s recap. We now know that hypnosis is safe. We know that when you chose the right hypnotherapist hypnosis makes it easier to change habits and unwanted behaviours. We know that hypnosis works. And we know that hypnosis will work for you.

In fact, the powerful nature of hypnosis often means that the day of your appointment with the right hypnotherapist marks the end of your problem.

I hope this information has been useful to you and I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read it, thank you.

If you'd like more information please call 07776304063 for a free phone consultation.