How Does Hypnosis Work

Many people have a lot of questions about hypnosis and hypnotherapy and so the purpose of this article is to, hopefully, address many of the basic questions.

Now basically hypnosis is all about is giving you the power to use the your OWN mind to get rid of unnecessary beliefs or unwanted habits or to change your feelings about things.

You have that power already in your mind and all a hypnosis session does is help you bring that out.

It helps you reach in and use those powers that you were already given.

When you go for a hypnotherapy session, initially, a discussion and explanation so you know exactly what is going to happen. And then, you just relax.

You begin by relaxing your body and that makes it easier to just relax your mind. You remain aware the entire time because this is therapy and if you weren't aware you couldn't be doing the therapy for yourself, but with hypnosis, it's very enjoyable and relaxing, as a matter of fact, it's very much like reading a really really good book.

You become totally absorbed in the characters of that book, and the world drops away. The feeling is very similar, however, this will be the story of you, your own story, you'll go inside.

What's happening when that's going on?

Well, it's really useful to talk about what's inside our heads. There's a brain in there and there's many ways to talk about what's in there, but for the purposes of hypnosis its most useful to talk about the conscious mind and everything else – we tend to call everything else sub-conscious or un-conscious.

In a way, these are unfortunate names, but all it means is the part of the mind or the brain that is not the conscious part.

That conscious part, it turns out, is actually a very small part of our brain. It's very creative and it's also the seat of all our abstract thinking but, it's a little bit limited. It can only hold seven to ten thoughts at one time, it can only hold twenty seconds of memory and then it has to go into the rest of the brain and it also processes more slowly than the rest of the brain.

The subconscious processes so fast, that before I could even finish thinking the first word of the thought, pick up the cup, my subconscious mind could move my hand, pick up a cup and bring it to me so much faster.

And it processes so much more information. And sure, some of that information is very basic – like moving all the muscles in my hand and fingers to pick up the cup but it's so much more than that and you are really know that whenever you stop and think about what's going on, (you realize) that there's a whole lot more going on than your conscious mind is aware of.

Most people have had this experience. You are driving down the street and everything's going fine. Suddenly, your conscious mind goes OH NO –

• Did I lock the door ?
• Did I turn off the stove?
• Did I feed the dog ?
• Do I have that paper I need for class or work ??

And you're thinking about these things and then suddenly your attention is drawn back to your driving, and you realize you are four or five or six blocks down the road ! Who was driving ? YOU were driving.

Yes your subconcious mind can do very complex things, it knows not only how to drive to where you normally go,it knows to look for the stop signs and the red lights and the pedestrians. It can do all of that for you, in fact, you really couldn't drive at all with just your conscious mind because there's too many things involved.

Just like this driving example, much of our behavior is actually happening at the subconscious level and where did this behavior come from ? Well we learned it starting at a very very young age and what our subconscious mind wants is for us to stay on this planet as long as possible and be as safe as possible so anything it can take in, even at a very very young age, and say's – OH that works or Oh, that worked for me.  If it seems to work, I'm going to program it in and I'm always going to react like that, until I find that there's a better way.

And you grow older and sometimes these programs aren't as useful any more because you've changed, the world has changed and so you look in the mirror and you try to change those things.  But it doesn't happen easily for you, so, that's when you want to call a hypnotherapist because it's easier for you to just relax and just re-program that subconscious by letting it know what you would like to do and why you would like to do it.

By using the language of the subconcious, with hypnosis, and with you in a relaxed state you can achieve success.