Good Things to Know about Hypnosis

Good Things to Know about Hypnosis by Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D.
	Self-hypnosis can be a powerful tool and ally in personal development but it must be used correctly. The points and tips provided in this section can help you get off to a good start and avoid many common pitfalls.
What's all this about "practice"? The term "practice" is commonly used when referring to doing self-hypnosis. "Practice" correctly implies a never-ending process, one in which you continually get better the more you do it; self-hypnosis is a process with a continuing dynamic. "Practice" is also easier to say than something like "hypnose." "Don't bother me for a while, honey, I'm going to go hypnose." Not very elegant. Besides, casual eavesdroppers don't need to know what you're up to; "practice" is a nice generic term that tells others nothing unless they are in on it. (Don't be misled by the use of "practice." Some people on first hearing the term think they are going to have to practice for some indefinite period of time before they can actually do it. Not so. When you are practicing, you are doing it.) Bad News, Good News First, there is no magic by which any of us, without effort, can in one fell swoop fix everything that is wrong with us. I know this fact can be deflating because I remember the grandiose expectations I had when I first discovered hypnosis. I figured hypnosis was going make me strong, good looking, irresistible to girls, a world-class athlete, and a genius. (I was just 14 at the time.) It was not long before I discovered it was not going to work that way. So that's the bad news. However -- if you'll forgive the semantic jumble -- I'm happy to say that the bad news is not nearly as bad as the good news is good. The fact is that self-hypnosis eventually becomes everything (well, almost everything) anyone could reasonably expect. You just have to work at it a little. It has been my experience that most people will actually work pretty hard if they believe it will be worthwhile. And believe me, self-hypnosis will repay you for your effort. In spades, as the expression goes. It is a great way to do anything that depends on your own efforts. For example: Quit smoking. Willpower won't work here for lots of people, and self-hypnosis is the best way to do it. Improve friendships and your relations with spouse and others. Get to know people who are more interesting and exciting than you (and get away with it). Sleep better (alone and otherwise, if you know what I mean). Gain control over dreams, especially alternate reality dreams (I cover this in some detail in my latest book). Learn more about the book here. Lose weight and keep it off, even if you have gone way over the edge. [For a different and more interesting look at weight control, take a look at Bugs, Yooneese and the 'Goners] Develop a better attitude. Control doldrums, snits, and generally crappy moods. Control jealousy. Perform better at sports. Improve memory and concentration. Take a look at this Bad-to-Good Memory Story. Improve career success. Self-hypnosis is great for improving your prospects in life. Develop greater sales ability. We are all selling, in one way or another, so improvement in this skill can't hurt. Especially if you get your subliminals working for you (for details on this topic you'll have to see my new book). You might also find this instructive: From Onions to Lamborghinis. Raise academic performance and grades. From Fs to Ph.D. Overcome shyness, stage fright and other fears. Experiment with age- and past-life regression. Whether or not such things exist is a matter of controversy, but what you can do with self-hypnosis can be pretty convincing. Be more creative. Like salesmanship, we could all use more creativity. If you are not interested in at least one of these topics you either have one doozy of an application in mind (and I'd like to hear about it) or you are in the wrong place. The good news is that all of these achievements are within the reach of just about everyone. All that is required is the willingness to put in a little effort to learn the skills of self-hypnosis and how to use suggestions. Self-hypnosis is a skill. I keep yammering on about this skill business because I know what has become of us as a people. We have come to expect instant fixes from medicine or science, instant gratification through raised credit card limits, and instant solutions from TV dramas and sitcoms and all those stupid little commercials that turn your brain to jelly. C'mon, folks, that is not the way life is on this planet! Nothing worthwhile is easy, there ain't no free lunch, the piper eventually has to be paid, and anyone who spends his life looking for the holy grail or a magic bullet or the fountain of youth or any other chimera is going to waste his life. Self-hypnosis is like, and just as demanding as, a musical instrument. Once you have mastered it you can use it to make beautiful music, and you will make it look easy. But you will know that you worked at it, because like any skill it requires the development of correct technique. You have to do it right to get the most out of it and that comes only with practice. And in a way self-hypnosis is a little harder because it is all in your mind! Unfortunately the Western cultures of Europe and America (all of the Americas) -- I do not presume to speak for those of you raised in the East -- prepare us to work primarily with our muscles and only marginally with our minds. So it sometimes takes a little getting used to the concept of achieving something without moving a muscle. (And please don't throw reading up to me, as in reading textbooks in school or reading this text on your monitor. Reading requires lots of muscles in the eyes, and the transfer is from the writer to the reader via a physical medium.) It is true that you can be hypnotized by someone else, and that you can use pre-recorded tapes to talk you into a hypnotic state. But you still, at bottom, are doing it yourself. I take the position that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. So even as helpful as the presence of a hypnotist or a taped induction can be, you are actually engaged in other-directed self-hypnosis. You can be sure, though, that the work it takes to be able to use self-hypnosis is a heckuva lot easier than trying to achieve something without it. So the bad news, while not all the bad, is that it takes some work. The good news is that, once you begin to develop the skills of self-hypnosis, it really doesn't feel like work at all. And it does seem to work like magic. (It isn't, but it still seems that way.) Theory There is a comprehensive, psychodynamic theory behind the approach presented here. But, since some people find theories and explanations boring, I have placed it in another file. However, if you are interested, you are welcome to click here and take a look. Self-Hypnosis is a Skill As it is with any skill, the development of self-hypnosis requires practice. An hour a day would be great, if you could manage it. But 20 minutes a day is more realistic for most people, and there are days in just about everyone's life when it is impossible to take even that much time to practice. On the other hand, what is the maximum amount of time you should spend practicing hypnosis? If 20 minutes a day is good, wouldn't three hours be a lot better? Not necessarily. The slope of the learning curve seems to be fairly stable for times beyond about an hour a day. In other words, beyond a certain point, more time does not equate to better skill. You will only learn so fast; there is only so much you can learn in a given period of time. Don't get in a hurry because it won't do you any good. Two or three hours a day, for example, would be counter-productive. This conclusion is based primarily on anecdotal evidence; no controlled experiments have been conducted to test the time it takes to learn self-hypnosis. But you can be confident that it will not do you any good to spend too much time at it. (Not spending enough time is probably the more serious error. So if you have to err, err on the side of too much time.) Here is an example of the kind of anecdotal evidence that suggests that practicing beyond 30 minutes to an hour a day will not increase the results proportionately. It involves some sailors assigned to submarine duty. They spend months under water and have plenty of time to practice self-hypnosis when they are at sea. Seven sailors from the same submarine attended one of my San Diego seminars. They knew I would be interested in their results so they were kind enough to send me a detailed, written report. Four of them practiced for two hours every day for about six weeks, while the other three practiced about 20 minutes a day, four or five days a week. After the six-week period they had lengthy discussions and arrived at the unanimous conclusion that they had all progressed to about the same level of skill. In other words, the progress of the sailors who practiced an average of an hour and a half a week was just as good as the sailors who practiced 14 hours a week. This does not qualify as scientific research because there were inadequate controls and too few subjects, but I have heard this kind of story many times. It is unfortunate that we do not have a reliable, easy instrument to measure the depth of hypnosis. One thing that is certain, though, is that everyone can do it. Whether it takes an hour, a month, or even a year (rare), you will be able to use the skills of self-hypnosis. And while individual variation is relatively narrow, it does exist. That is, no two people learn at the same rate. Why this is so, we don't know. You don't have to practice every day, but it is probably better if you do. But even a very brief practice session of a couple of minutes is better than going more than two or three days without practicing. You should probably shoot for at least a few minutes of practice every day. The best time of day to practice depends upon you and your natural makeup. The general rule of thumb is to practice during that part of the day when you are at your sharpest. It's Different for Everyone Differences in individual response times bother some people, but it shouldn't. (Well, other than the fact that we'd all like to be super-fast because that is more convenient.) IQ is not important so long as it is somewhere around normal. If you are understanding at least most of what you are reading here, you are smart enough to do well with self-hypnosis. Concentration does have a bearing on the various levels of hypnosis. Better concentration means better and quicker hypnotic states. But if your concentration is poor, don't let that stop you. Self-hypnosis practice improves concentration. Age also has a bearing on hypnotizability in some very general ways. The very young and the very old do not respond well, sometimes not at all. Children between about five and eight respond well to hypnosis but do not do well with -- and should not be taught -- self-hypnosis. Adolescents sometimes do well with self-hypnosis. It depends on what their glands are doing to them at the moment. It is probably a good idea to avoid teaching self-hypnosis to adolescents, especially those who are younger, because they are almost always interested in it for all the wrong reasons. (There are lots of exceptions, of course. If you are a teenager reading this, you are obviously an exception. If you are a parent of a younger teenager, you may or may not be a good judge of whether or not your kids can deal with it. Most parents think their kids are exceptional; obviously, by definition, most kids are not.) Suggestion: The Potter's Hands Suggestion as used in self-hypnosis is a potent force that directs the subconscious mind toward the achievement of consciously chosen goals. Suggestions must be specific, technically correct, and applied with regularity under the right conditions. Without properly prepared and applied suggestions, self-hypnosis does not yield very spectacular results. Just practicing self-hypnosis sans suggestion is helpful in dealing with stress and anxiety, and it might bring a person a little closer to knowing him- or herself. But if suggestion is not going to be used, some form of meditation might be more appropriate. Trance States "What's it like?" is one of the most commonly asked questions about the hypnotic state. This question is almost always related in one way or another to the word "trance." Trance is a common and unfortunate term frequently associated with any kind of hypnosis. For the most part, especially in self-hypnosis, the Hollywood image of a trance will not apply. You will not be transported to some psychic Xanadu to experience raptures of spirit and flesh. Nor will you be likely to wander around with arms outstretched and a dazed look on your face like you are looking for a grave to rob. (Unless that is your normal look.) The most oft-heard descriptions of the self-hypnotic state are that one is relaxed, pleasant, aware but not caring, almost like being asleep but still awake, in control but not needing to do anything -- comments like that. You will not lose your self-control, nor will you do anything in a self-hypnotic state that you would not otherwise do. (Of course, what some people would otherwise do can be surprising.) Coma-like Trance States If the word "trance" conjures up images of a coma-like state in which you lose all consciousness and are unaware of what you are doing, forget it! The probability that you will have that kind of an experience in self-hypnosis ranges from "it ain't gonna happen" to "not in your wildest dreams" (no pun intended). Seriously, the most common description of a good self-hypnotic state is something to the effect that you are awake, but you don't care. Attribution and Staying With It Self-hypnosis is deceptively natural. You have experienced it countless times. What, for example, do you think is going on when you watch TV? There you are, surrounded by distractions of all sorts in even the plainest of rooms, watching a television screen which can be as small as . . . what? A few square inches? Yet when something good is on you are riveted, concentrating only on the drama unfolding on that relatively tiny piece of your environment, the screen. That kind of experience is a hypnotic one, one that comes about because you are focused. Any time you are focused like that you are in a state similar to or sometimes synonymous with hypnosis. The processes by which hypnosis works are natural, gradual and comfortable. That's why it is so easy to think that the results of self-hypnosis would have happened anyway. This, in turn, causes many people to abandon self-hypnosis as soon as they have achieved their immediate goals. Big mistake! It is a mistake because, for one thing, it usually does not take long to revert back to the original condition. This is generally the way it goes (this is a weight control example, but it could be anything): A person finds himself or herself overweight, fails to lose the weight after trying to diet one or two -- or a couple of dozen -- times. The person is introduced to self-hypnosis, begins doing it by the book, and loses most or all of the excess weight. At that point the person stops using self-hypnosis and gains the weight back in approximately the same amount of time it took to lose it. So then it's back to dieting. But something is not working because the weight losses are small and temporary. So the person belatedly decides maybe self-hypnosis really was the key after all. And that maybe he or she should have stuck with it, which would have been much easier than going through the whole routine again. The moral of the story is twofold: One, keep accurate records of your beginning points and remember that the process will seem deceptively natural. No matter what you achieve you will be tempted to take the credit all for "yourself," rather than admitting that self-hypnosis helped. And two, keep in mind that any process that is good enough to help you achieve your goals is good enough to stick with from now on. If you don't stick with it you run the risk of later being another self-hypnosis be-backer. 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	Copyright ©1998, 2004 Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.