How To Use Hypnosis To Get The Life That You Want
We all desire certain things. Some people dream of success in their career or in some sporting endeavour, others want lots of money or a big house. Maybe it’s not material things you want but something of a more subjective nature, like more confidence or to be great at public speaking. Imagine if it was possible to learn how to use hypnosis to get the life you want?
The whole area of manifesting what you want first became widely known to people as far back as 1937 in Napoleon Hill’s famous book “Think And Grow Rich“. In this book, Hill described a simple strategy of thinking which would make you rich. In the year 2008, the famous hypnotist Paul McKenna released the book “I Can Make You Rich” which included a self-hypnosis session on cd which the reader was encouraged to make a daily practice of listening to. The idea was that by going into a trance-like state while listening to Paul’s post-hypnotic suggestions that you would achieve your desired outcome. This is one of my favourite manifesting books.
Over the past twenty to thirty years, the popular belief that hypnosis was some sort of creepy mind control has faded away. The swinging pocket watch images from movies and tv series has finally given way to a more mature understanding that hypnosis is a great way to influence your unconscious mind in positive ways to achieve positive changes in your everyday life. As a qualified hypnotherapist, I believe that the power of hypnosis can provide huge potential benefits for the hypntoized individual. We’ll discuss some of those ways in greater detail below.
What Does Hypnosis Feel Like?
Have you ever had a very vivid daydream? You know – one of those one’s where it felt so real that when you come out of it, you’re not entirely sure if it was a daydream or did it really happen. If you have experienced that “vividness”, then you have experienced a trance state or hypnotic state. The three main components of a hypnotic trance are:
- Increased Attention: this is the ability to pay attention only to what’s happening in your trance experience. People who can successfully do this “zone out” of the actual room they are in and they “go” fully to the scene in their imagination. Typically this means, they use all of their five senses to give them information about that scene in their imagination and make it so real that it becomes like a real experience.
- Increased Concentration: the ability to not let anything from the outside world distract you.
- Increased Suggestibility: when given a suggestion in the state of hypnosis, you are more likely to fully accept it.
How Do I Teach Myself Hypnosis?
Before you embark upon learning how to hypnotize yourself or others, it is important to educate yourself on whether those people you intend to hypnotize are good candidates for clinical hypnosis. I suggest reading my blog post entitled “Is Hypnosis Suitable For Everyone“.
After that, it’s just a decision about which form of hypnosis you’d like to learn – is it to gain control of your mind through self hypnosis or is your aim to eventually become a healthcare professional providing professional hypnotherapy services.
The next decision is about what you want to teach yourself. If you’d like to teach yourself how to hypnotize others safely, then I suggest you download the book I wrote called “Learn Hypnosis – How To Hypnotize Anyone Safely“. Following this link will take you to another page on my website where you can read about the contents of the book.
I wrote the book specifically for people who are thinking about becoming certified hypnotists or clinical hypnotherapists. There are many other more in-depth books on the topic but mine is a good book to explain the basics of hypnosis in a friendly tone. The book is sprinkled with real-life stories from my own experiences in learning hypnosis.
If your aim is to learn self hypnosis, a simple book that can get you started is “Self Hypnosis For Dummies“. The easy-to-follow style of this book is ideal for complete beginners who would like to learn new skills in changing their mental state.
How Do I Start Hypnotizing Myself?
I always suggest beginning by just listening to self hypnosis audio recordings that have been written and recorded by a professional hypnotherapist. The reason this is a good idea is that it will introduce you to some of the power words that you would experience in a live session in a hypnotist’s office. You’ll experience professional hypnosis techniques being voiced by a trained professional.
When you listen for the first time, you may not be aware of many of the different techniques used but the more time you spend listening, you’ll pick up a hypnotic phrase or two.
Most recordings contain what’s called a progressive relaxation induction. The first part of any hypnosis session, whether doing it by yourself or attempting to hyonotize others, is the induction. The word “induction” simply means the process of getting someone into a state of deep relaxation.
The word “progressive” simply means you keep adding more and more suggestions for relaxation. Progressive muscle relaxation is a pretty standard way that most good hypnotists get their subjects into a relaxed state.
You’ll also learn, by listening to those recordings, how a good hypnotist uses a progressive induction followed by a deepener to get you into that lovely deep state of self-hypnosis. Once you have previous experience from listening to a recording for about a month, you can then begin to construct your own inductions.
Your mind wanders and the critical factor in your conscious mind starts to go “on pause”. This will allow you to access your powerful subconscious mind and give yourself good, therapeutic suggestions.
How Do You Hypnotize Someone Safely?
In order to hypnotize someone else, you first of all must educate yourself about who it’s ok to hypnotize. There are some people who should not go into hypnosis and it is your responsibility to know who those people are. Remember, if you induce hypnosis in a person and, as a result, cause them harm, you could be found liable in a court of law. In saying this, I do not want to discourage your study of hypnosis but it is important to do it safely.
Probably the best thing to do is to get yourself a good training manual. In the blue box beneath this paragraph, you’ll see information about a book that I wrote as a primer for people intending to follow the route of becoming a hypnotherapist. Even though it was written primarily for budding hypnotherapists, I believe it would also be of great benefit if you wish to become a stage hypnotist. The book is entitled “Learn Hypnosis – How To Hypnotize Anyone Safely“.
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Learn Hypnosis For Beginners
Learn how to get someone into hypnosis, how to deepen trance, post-hypnotic suggestions and how to end trance safely.
Can You Hypnotize Someone To Do Anything?
The stock answer to this on thousands of hypnotherapy related websites in different location all over the world is “No”. However, the truth is a little more nuanced. One of the easiest ways of influence a person is to find a person that is open to being influenced.
If you use the process of hypnosis and conditioning on this person, then you are more likely to find they will do what you suggest. However, if the hypnotized individual strongly disagrees with the direct suggestion they have been given, then it is most likely that the suggestion will have no effect.
While it can be fun to experiment with a family member or friend and get them to do something silly, it is important to bear in mind that they will, more than likely, remember everything that has been said to them while in hypnosis. So, be careful what you say because they might be rather angry with you if you go too far.
I can hear the groans of many high school and college students reading this in the hope they might be able to hypnotize the guy or girl they fancy to go on a date with them.
Can You Be Hypnotized And Not Know It?
It is possible for someone who is familiar with hypnotic language to use conversational hypnosis on you without you knowing. This basically entails the use of hypnosis without normal awareness of it.
Under normal conditions, we close our eyes and gradually relax and understand we are going into an altered state of consciousness. In conversational hypnosis, suggestions are intertwined with normal conversation so that you are unaware you are being influenced.
By the way, if this sounds like a storyline from a James Bond movie, remember, it’s not. Advertisers regularly use these techniques to slip suggestions underneath the radar of our conscious mind. Salespeople regularly use psychological tricks to get us to say yes. Politicians regularly use hypnotic power words to make us believe what they would like us to believe.
What Are The Four Steps Of Hypnotic Induction?
There are four main steps to hypnotic induction. These are just as important to know for a person wishing to learn how to hypnotize others as it is for people who wish to learn how to go into a self-hypnotic trance.
- Rapport / Attention: if you are hypnotizing someone else, you must get their attention. The closest you will see to this in a real-life scenario is a couple who are madly in love on a date in a restaurant. They are gazing into each others eyes, oblivious of everyone else or anything else that is happening in the room. You’ll see stage hypnotists doing this in that one minute before they click their fingers and say “sleep” in a loud and commanding voice. They look in the ;subject’s eyes and ask them to concentrate or look in their eyes. It would be normal for the hypnotist to ask the subject to take a deep breath. Once attention has been grabbed, it is then quite easy to get the person in hypnosis.
- Induction: inducing a person into hypnosis can be a longer process such as using what’s called a progressive relaxation induction, or a very rapid induction, depending on the person. During this time, suggestions may be given to convince the person they are in hypnosis. Some of those techniques can include convincing the person their arm is so heavy that they cannot lift it, or that their eyes are glued shut for the duration of the session.
- Deepener: once a state of trance has been achieved, the hypnotist will now deepen the trance. Each hypnotist uses a different way. Some include counting downwards, or imagining a ruler which measures your trance level and then imagining sinking down and down along this ruler towards zero. As deepening happens, brain activity slows and the brain region involved in alert awareness starts to become less alert.
- Post-hypnotic Suggestions / Termination: Typically some post-hypnotic suggestions will be given. The reason they are called “post-hypnotic” is because they are designed to work long after the trance state has ended. These can be a valuable tool in alleviating mental health issues, medical conditions, sleep problems or even chronic pain, to name a few.
How To Use Hypnosis For Weight Loss
If you’ve struggled with your weight, you’ll know all about how difficult it can be to stay away from chocolate or fizzy drinks, or whatever was your particular “downfall”. We call these things our “downfall” but the word we probably should be using to describe what’s going on is “attraction”. We are really attracted to those foods or drinks, and taking them away seems like deprivation. Most diets encourage deprivation.
The problem with this is that the human mind is programmed to seek out pleasure and to avoid pain. If we inflict pain upon ourselves by telling ourselves we “can’t have it”, we are deliberately going to battle against our own subconscious mind. We are essentially using our willpower to battle against our much stronger subconscious mind. This simply won’t work long term. The answer lies in becoming interested in what naturally slim people think about food.
Naturally slim people just don’t have that strong attraction for the “bad” foods. In most cases, they can take them or leave them, and typically they leave them much more often than not. They are strongly attracted to healthy foods in the right proportion at the right times.
For best results long term, we can use hypnosis to cause you to feel either strongly turned off by the bad foods, or just indifferent to them. We can also use hypnosis to create positive emotions around eating healthily, eg. craving an apple instead of a soda. Hypnosis and indeed self-hypnosis can be a very effective way of losing weight and keeping it off.
How To Use Hypnosis For Anxiety
Irrational anxiety is a growing problem in our increasingly fast and stressful world. If you worry regularly, or overthink on a regular basis, it’s quite likely you feel anxious quite often. I like to use an analogy with my clients. I tell them, that the human mind and body is like the cogs you might see in a clock. Every movement affects every other cog. For all those cogs to work like clockwork (pardon the pun), we have to operate our cogs in a certain way.
If we are to feel secure or calm, we must think thoughts of calmness and security. People who feel calm and secure generally do not have worry thoughts very often (if at all). They just learn how to dismiss those thoughts quickly. Through hypnosis, we can teach the mind how to interrupt it’s old anxiety-creating thoughts and create new habits. We can teach our unconscious minds to only focus on positive “what if’s”, and in the process, reduce or eliminate irrational anxiety.
How To Use Hypnosis For Pain
One of the more exciting uses of hypnosis is as an effective technique for chronic pain reduction . Doctors will tell you that while pain medication can help to make life bearable for those living with chronic pain conditions, the medication itself can also cause problems for the body.
Many studies have shown an average of 25% less pain when hypnosis is included in the mix. Now of course, caution has to be used in treating chronic pain with hypnosis and your health care provider should always monitor the treatment to ensure it’s safety.
How To Use Self Hypnosis For Success
Hypnosis has a long history of being used to achieve success. Many of our sporting heroes have used hypnosis to visualise success. Here is a simple step-by-step approach for achieving success with self hypnosis.
- Set Your Goal: make sure that your goal is a S.M.A.R.T goal. On other words, Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant & Time-Limited. The reason most people fail before they begin, is that they set vague goals. Get really specific. Also make sure your goal is achievable. You must be able to achieve this by yourself without other people or situations needing to be right. Your goal needs to fit with your life in order to be relevant. Finally, there needs to be a deadline date to achieve the goal by.
- Hypnotic Induction: Use your favourite hypnotic induction. The easiest is probably a progressive muscle relaxation induction.
- You’ve Already Succeeded: use positive visualisation to imagine you’ve already succeeded. See the sights, hear the sounds and feel how it feels to have succeeded. Make the whole experience feel like it has already happened. This is a powerful message to your unconscious mind to go out and get what you have imagined.
- Take Action: Come out of the hypnostic state and take some, even small, action towards achieving your goal.
- Rinse & Repeat: Keep doing the same self hypnosis pattern every day for thirty days.
Alternatively, you could just download my recording entitled “Achieve Your Goals” and just listen to that for thirty days.
Conclusion
I hope this article has helped you to understand a bit more about how to use hypnosis to get the life you want. I believe the key to the various forms of hypnosis is to understand that practice is the thing that makes you better at it. Keep practicing and soon you’ll have a powerful tool to help you get the life you want.
Author: Paul Hunter
Although thousands of people read his blog every month, Paul's path to success was not an easy one. Click here to read his amazing story "From Unwanted Baby And Adopted To A Respected Self Help Blogger". If you want to send Paul a quick message, then visit his contact page here
