I have been a hypnotherapist since 2002. In this time I have seen A LOT of what hypnotherapy can do, and how it does it. I’m sure many of you wonder if hypnotherapy can help you. We ALL have different issues that we’d like help resolving. Can hypnotherapy help yours? If so, how does it do it? In this article I would like to share with you what, I know from experience, hypnosis can help you with.
What hypnotherapy helps with
In my experience, hypnotherapy is capable of helping with pretty much everything in your life. It is common to see hypnosis help people lose weight, quit smoking, and relieve stress. However, it can do much more than that.
Even a basic relaxation session helps you in numerous ways. It strengthens your immune system, increases your confidence, improves your creativity and logical thinking, increases your happiness, and more. Pretty much every hypnosis session contains a relaxation element that helps these things. Specific sessions expand on this and help with much MORE.
Later in this article, I will discuss other things hypnotherapy can help you with. First, though, let’s talk about how hypnotherapy works.
How hypnotherapy works
Hypnotherapy is about subconscious change. This is immensely powerful for helping you make rapid changes in your habits and behavior. Here’s why: ALL your automatic habits and urges are controlled by your subconscious mind.
Ever wanted to quit something, or change a habit, but can’t? That’s because you want the change consciously, but not subconsciously. You can think on a conscious level not to smoke or eat a doughnut, but can’t resist. Your subconscious mind wants it. As you probably know, your subconscious nags away at you with cravings until you finally cave in.
A hypnotherapist will talk to your subconscious mind and persuade it not to crave the thing that is bad for you. Your subconscious mind often doesn’t know it’s bad for you until told via hypnotherapy. Once your subconscious mind is convinced, it is much easier to stop that habit. Your subconscious mind will not crave that thing as much. This means both your conscious and subconscious become aligned and are pulling in the same direction.
Entering a trance state
A hypnotherapist talks to your subconscious mind by guiding you into a trance. This is NOT anything sinister or magical, despite what you may have heard.
A trance is a daydream state of mind. You slip into one many times a day when daydreaming, watching TV, or reading. This is when you are deeply engrossed in something. In this state of mind, your conscious mind is tuned down, allowing greater access to your subconscious mind.
You are still completely in control, and can snap out of it whenever you want – just like you can when daydreaming. Often you don’t want to for a while because it’s such a pleasantly relaxing state of mind to be in. The trance in itself is good for you because of its relaxation qualities. The specific therapy adds to this.
Health and wellness benefits of hypnotherapy
As mentioned previously, there are many uses and benefits of hypnotherapy. Here are a few more of them that can improve your health, wellness, and quality of life.
Hypnotherapy is good for helping you achieve your goals. Most people don’t have clearly defined goals, and if they do, they either forget about them, or shift them around too much. Hypnotherapy helps you keep your mind focussed on what you want. You will be driven subconsciously to achieve your goal. This is usually achieved with visualization. If you regularly visualize yourself as if you’ve already achieved your goal, your subconscious mind is driven to make it a reality. This can apply to those health examples we already touched upon, like changing the way you eat, losing weight, engaging in physical exercise, quitting smoking, etc.
Hypnotherapy is great for treating phobias. Fears and phobias are picked up by negative experiences in your life. Your subconscious mind gets programmed to automatically trigger a fear response. A dog may have barked loudly, frightening you as a child. This can cause your subconscious mind to become reprogrammed with an excessive fear of dogs. It is trying to protect you, but sometimes gets things out of perspective. A hypnotherapist can talk to your subconscious mind and persuade it not to fear dogs so much.
In a similar way to treating phobias, hypnosis can also treat other fears that hold you back. They might be a fear of the opposite sex, public speaking, meeting new people, etc. Many people even fear success, believe it or not. Their subconscious mind deliberately holds them back because they fear change, even when it’s positive. A good hypnotherapist should be able to help you with ANY fear.
Hypnotherapy is also great at improving your creativity. Your creativity suffers when you use your logical conscious mind too much. Hypnotherapy is good at tuning down your conscious mind, allowing your subconscious to flow with new thoughts and ideas. You think much more creatively with a relaxed mind. That’s why Archimedes had his eureka moment when relaxing in the bath.
Final thoughts
Hypnotherapy is a fast and powerful method to help you change your habits and thoughts. It gets to the root of the problem in your subconscious mind. It can literally take years to make these changes through conscious thought alone.
Your conscious mind usually wants to quit smoking, eat healthy, and exercise more, but it’s your subconscious mind that wants to keep things as they are. Hypnotherapy is a powerful tool for making subconscious changes. This leads to rapid and permanent changes to your behaviors and habits.
Other articles by Jon Rhodes
What is the Difference Between Hypnosis and Meditation?
How Hypnosis Can Help with Motion Sickness
About the Author
Jon Rhodes is a clinical hypnotherapist from the UK and a former professional musician. He became qualified as a clinical hypnotherapist from the London College Of Clinical Hypnotherapy. Today, he runs the popular site HypnoBusters online and has created a collection of hypnotherapy sessions that are FREE for you to try, which can be accessed here: Free Hypnosis Downloads.