Self-Hypnosis: What It Is and How It Can Benefit You

Hypnosis is generally used to help people gain control over their behavior, or to help them understand why they feel anxiety, pain, and stress towards specific circumstances. Hypnosis, also known as hypnotherapy is a trance-like-state in which your concentration and focus are increased. When you’re considered to be under its impact, you’re in a calm and relaxed state of being, but open to suggestions from the therapist, or the other person that is performing the act of hypnosis upon you. They will usually do this using mental images and verbal repetitions in form of mantras so that they can fully absorb your attention. This sounds rather practical when we have a therapist aside, but how can we manage to conduct self-hypnosis? And what are the reasons that people conduct self-hypnosis in the first place?

First things first, the term self-hypnosis is used to refer to the situation in which a person is giving suggestions to himself or herself. According to Dr.Miller, a learning center for self-healing tools, to gain access to the powerful tools of self-hypnosis, you need to learn how to induce (or allow a self-hypnosis audio recording to induce) a relaxed, receptive, trusting, open state of consciousness through a series of suggestions given to yourself (autosuggestion). After that, they suggest that you offer yourself specific healing suggestions designed to induce your mind and body to function in a more positive way.

However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Experts recommend that for the hypnotherapy to be successful, you need to be fully aware of the process you’re getting into and accept it with an open mind. What does this mean? It means that you must know for sure if you want to be hypnotized. You must not be skeptical or afraid of the process, or even over-analyse the experience, output or process. You must only acknowledge to yourself the message and awareness that you want to achieve from the self-hypnosis, only focusing on using it for the plans you have on which you want to let your subconscious know.

To reach to the hypnotic state, you must also work on some short affirmations or statements that you can use along the experience. When trying to induce self-hypnosis, one must learn how to use a specific “trigger word” that will only induce self-hypnosis when you deliberately use the word to hypnotize yourself.  In the other hand, you can also work with a phrase, also termed as an “autosuggestion”, which you should repeat to yourselves during the self-hypnosis.

These statements also depend on what you’re trying to achieve from the self-hypnosis process. However, these can be some of the phrases you may use while under self-hypnosis:

1. As I look back on today I’m grateful to have lived this day.
2. My mistake is becoming a learning opportunity.
3. My challenges are the paths for growth.
4. Joy and calmness are taking over.
5. I see how far I have come and believe I am willing to go further to reach my goals or dreams.
6. I let go of wasteful thinking or dwelling on the past.
7. I let go of any anxiety or fear and welcome peace of mind.
8. I trust that everything in my life is a divine order.
9. I am grateful for all I have in me and the potential to use it to the best I can.
10. I feel so great and I will enjoy this feeling for the rest of this evening.

The Benefits of Self-Hypnosis

More often than we think, we feel like our lives are completely out of control. We watch the days pass by quickly, without reserving some time for ourselves, even when knowing that 20-30 minutes of calmness can make a long-term impact. This is where self-hypnosis kicks in, in these very few minutes we put aside to dedicate to ourselves.

The benefits of self-hypnosis have been proven to improve the state of being and overall living quality of stressed persona, people with low self-esteem and people with anxiety. This, due to the techniques used that can induce a great level of relaxation and through the open-to-suggestions state during the hypnosis, through which you can accept affirmations.

Furthermore, considering that stress prevents the proper functioning of the immune system, researchers from the Ohio State University came to a conclusion that self-hypnosis to prevent stress can also help in protecting the immune system against the negative effects of it. They proved this by showing that students who performed self-hypnosis during stressful exam weeks showed a stronger immune system when compared to those who did not learn self-hypnosis.

“We’re really talking about being able to shut out a lot of distracting thoughts. And it varies according to how anxious a person is at the time. Our goal was to really get people to focus on the task at hand.” said Kiecolt-Glaser, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University.

Bottom line

Will self-hypnosis work for you? It’s upon you to try and improve the affirmations, statements and techniques that you use. No technique can possibly fit all sort of people, and of course that you may have your own perks to work with. Luckily enough, there is plenty of information online, even tutorials which you can use to help you achieve to a self-hypnosis condition. I would personally recommend you check out the YouTube channel of Michael Sealey. His hypnosis tutorials are sublimely soothing, and they can maybe help you reach the goals you seek.

Photos: Shutterstock / Edited by: Martina Advaney

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