It is quite likely that your only conscious encounter with hypnosis has consisted of watching a hypnotist on stage subjugating audience members and getting them to what appears to be falling asleep or cluck like a chicken on demand. Hypnosis is far more than that of what stage entertainers may have misled you to perceive.

What you may not be aware of is that we all enter a hypnotic state on a daily basis. The state of hypnosis is much more common and much less spectacular than most people tend to believe.

Daydreaming, for example, is one of the occurrences, where we are so focused on visualizing or imagining a situation in our mind that we become less aware of what is actually happening around us. When we daydream, we are in a state of mild trance — detached from the things around us, yet still fully in control; nobody can get us to do something that we do not want to do.

That is what hypnosis feels like. It is an altered state of consciousness, where your attention is entirely focused on what you are picturing, while you remain fully in control of your actions.

Hypnosis cannot deprive you of the control you have over your life and actions; instead, it enables you to understand that there are more dimensions to that control than you might have thought. Hypnosis and self-hypnosis are empowering. They make you aware of your full potential and enable you to regain control over your life.

In recent years, hypnotism has become more mainstream each day.

It has become difficult to read a newspaper or magazine, listen to radio talk shows or watch television without seeing or hearing about hypnosis.

In recent years, hypnosis, along with other alternative therapies, has become more mainstream every day. According to an article in the November 1997 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, there were more visits to alternative practitioners than to primary care physicians. The therapies which increased the most from 1990 to 1997 were herbal medicine, massage, vitamins, self-help groups, folk remedies, hypnosis/hypnotherapy, energy healing, and homeopathy. This number continues to increase.

Hypnosis is used medically as well as for behavior modification. The process assists to remove pre-operative anxiety and expedite post-operative healing, and is even used as natural anesthesia during operations. It has also been used to increase immune system efficiency, reduce nausea in chemotherapy patients, and much more.

Hypnotherapy has been mainly considered a behavior modification technique, rather than a natural extension of conventional medical treatment. Though hypnosis is used in the medical arena, we will focus on its personal benefits for behavior modification.

Conscious and subconscious

Your conscious mind is your ‘awareness’. It is your communication center. The conscious mind:

• Thinks

• Reasons

• Calculates

• Plans

• Determines results

• Makes decisions

It registers pain, fear, happiness, and it sets goals — both long-term and very short-term. In order for the conscious mind to be able to do all of these things, it must have a place to pull information from — a storage area.

The subconscious mind is our data storage bank. When our conscious mind asks, our subconscious mind gives. The subconscious mind takes in everything we learn and experience in our lifetime. It begins at birth (some say before birth), soaking up information like a sponge, accumulating data as we grow and experience life. It also begins forming beliefs based on what we learn and experience, which determines how we react to everything in our life. These beliefs gain both strength and momentum the older we become.

The subconscious mind does not make choices; it accepts everything, good and bad, positive and negative. The conscious mind, however, does constantly make choices. Since everything has its equal and opposite — such as day/night, love/hate, prosperity/poverty and on and on — our lives are a matter of choice, our conscious choice. All these conscious choices are made with the information we have amassed in our subconscious mind over our lifetime.

The subconscious mind is where our intuition and instincts, as well as our memories, are stored. Imagine it as being the hard drive of our natural computer. Though we make choices consciously, the subconscious mind will always overrule the conscious mind. Even if you know of a better way to do something (consciously), that knowledge will not be applied if the thought is not compatible with your subconscious programming. The beauty is that hypnosis is the key to bypass the conscious blocks and open the door to the subconscious mind.

Furthermore, the subconscious mind does not like force. When you have a name “on the tip of your tongue”, the harder you try to remember it, the further it slips away. Forget about it, and later it seems to magically pop into your thoughts. Everything we experience or sense at anytime in our lives — whether we are aware or not — is recorded in our mind and under the proper conditions can be recalled.

Hypnosis Applied for Personal Change

• Have you tried to lose weight during the past year?

• Are you stuck in a job that you don’t like or that doesn’t bring you what you expect from it?

• Are you staying in a relationship that is not working?

• Do you smoke or drink?

• Do you have habits you would like to get rid of?

• Do you have limitations and restrictions in your life where a change in behaviour will set you free?

If your answer is yes to any of those questions, then there is excellent news for you. Hypnosis can help you or — even better—you can use hypnosis to help yourself.

You may think that you’ve tried everything, and perhaps you have adopted a defeatist attitude — but what if this attitude itself was the cause of your bad habit? Seeing yourself as a victim makes you fall into a pattern of acceptance and submission.

Seeing yourself as being in charge gives you the mental tools to achieve your goals or simply make the necessary adjustments to kick unwanted habits out of your life.

Most people have accepted hypnosis as a way to eliminate smoking habits, reduce stress and change behaviours for weight loss. By realizing that the success in these areas via hypnosis can be applied to most areas of human behaviour for successful outcomes, you have taken the first step to your personal freedom.

Tom Nicoli, BCH, CI

Author, Speaker & Trainer

A Better You Hypnosis, Inc