When you think of hypnosis, you may think of dangling something on a string in front of a friend saying, “You are getting very sleepy.” In actuality, the process and results of hypnosis differ greatly from this idea.

Hypnosis is a trance state that is characterized by extreme suggestibility and relaxation. It is not like sleep but is comparative to daydreaming. The brain actually does this naturally, but we do not necessarily recognize when it happens.

Hypnosis is used for stage performances, and one misconception that stems from this is that the person being hypnotized does not have control.

“You’re not going to get someone in a stage show that’s going to do something they don’t want to do,” certified clinical hypnotherapist and owner of Creative Self Hypnotherapy in Topeka Sheri Daudet said, “So even the people that are up there and willing to follow the suggestion are doing so because they’re willing to do it. It’s not that the stage hypnotist is taking away their control.”

The reason that many people do things they would not normally do when they are in the trance state is that they are highly suggestible, meaning that when they are told to do something, they will probably accept the idea completely. Hypnosis is beneficial for more than just entertainment, though, and can be used to help people through what is called hypnotherapy.

“[Hypnotherapy is] basically using hypnosis with different techniques and inducing a trance so that you can work with subconscious information to hopefully bring about change in a person’s behavior, attitude, and feelings,” Daudet said.

According to Daudet, hypnotherapy can be used to help with issues ranging from anxiety and pain management to finding something that has been lost or doing a past life exploration.

“What I see a lot of is smoking cessation and weight loss,” Daudet said, “But hypnotherapy really lends itself to any issue.”

In one interesting case, Daudet helped an individual regress back to the womb to help with asthma.

“There’s a theory that people with asthma, if they had a difficult birth coming through the birth canal, which this individual did, that the asthma is a subconscious response to having an absence of oxygen coming through the birth canal, and with her it seemed to work,” Daudet said.

In a typical hypnotherapy session with a client, Daudet discusses the individual’s issue in depth and tries to get as complete a history as possible of the issue. She then goes over the process of hypnosis, and generally, she uses a maternal induction to get the individual into a trance. This method of induction entails progressive relaxation, visualization, and deepening techniques to expand the trance.

“After you’ve got someone in a trance state, with [for example] smoking cessation, you’re going to use suggestion therapy, and so you’re going to give them suggestions that will help them stop smoking,” Daudet said.

It is theorized that hypnotism works to subdue the conscious mind so that it is less active in the thinking process, allowing the hypnotist to work directly with the subconscious. It is our subconscious mind working along with our conscious mind that allows us to solve problems, form sentences, or locate lost items. In addition, we subconsciously program ourselves to perform tasks like walking and breathing, but we also program ourselves to relate food to comfort or to become dependent on smoking.

“[With hypnotherapy] you can go in and make changes to the programming that you’ve basically done yourself, in some cases just not done a very good job,” Daudet said.

Due to the misconceptions that surround hypnosis, hypnotherapy is not commonplace. Although, according to Daudet, there are areas in the country where it is accepted more widely and where insurance even covers it, particularly in California and the Southwest.

“A lot of people still associate it as the work of the devil and I’ve had clients tell me that their church didn’t condone it, and so they just didn’t tell the church,” Daudet said. “And there is still a lot of, I don’t want to say fear and superstition, but there is still a lot of that in this part of the country.”

One thing that could change people’s views of hypnosis is celebrities. Singer Lily Allen has recently been mentioned in the news for using hypnotherapy to lose weight. If therapy like this is more publicized, it could encourage people to more frequently seek out help for their problems.

Daudet said that hypnosis is not a difficult technique to learn and can be used as a tool to help people through their issues. She assured that it is something anyone can do, although if you’re under 18, you would need parental consent to attend a hypnotherapy session.

“Hypnosis is quicker [than psychotherapy], it tends to be easier to change behavior and if you can demystify it a little bit and get people to realize that this isn’t something that someone is doing to you, then this is a technique that they’re going to use for themselves,” Daudet said.

Source: science.howstuffworks.com/hypnosis1.htm