what is hypnosis?

Despite what people think hypnosis is not a state of deep sleep. It will involve you falling into a trancelike state which some people describe as day dreamy. What it actually is, is an enhanced state of awareness where you’re conscious mind (the part of the mind you use when you have to think about something before doing it, such as remembering to get your dinner out of the oven before it burns) is repressed and your subconscious mind (the part of the mind you use to allow things to happen without thinking about them or natuarally, such as some driving, reading etc) is bought to the foreground.

 

I’ll give you an example. Allow yourself to think about your breathing for a moment, you’ll notice the more you think about it, the more you’ll have to remember to think about (consciously) taking a breath in and out again.

Now let’s move on and think about the last time you watched TV, what program was it, what channel was it on, was it a comedy or a drama, was it on in the week or at a weekend. Did you think about your breathing whilst you were doing this? No, the reason being because you carried on breathing natuarally or without thinking about it (subconsciously).

 

We do many things subconsciously and store masses of information in the subconscious part of our mind. Psychologist George A. Miller wrote a psychology study paper relating to the brains limitations for storing short term memories. Basically it put forward the theory that our brain is only capable of storing up to 9 chunks of conscious information where our subconscious can store around 2 million. You can see by these figures although we may not be aware of it, most of the time our behaviour is driven by our subconscious mind. 

 

If we change the information stored within the subconscious mind we must therefore be able to change the way we behave. We can achieve this using NLP and hypnotherapy techniques.

Let me give you a very simplified example.

Before Hypnotherapy

• conscious mind “There's somone smoking over there, I’d like a cigarette too”

• subconscious mind “ Sounds like a great idea, you enjoy a smoke”

• conscious mind “I’ll get a cigarette out of the packet and smoke it”

After Hypnotherapy

• conscious mind “There's someone smoking over there”

• subconscious mind “More fool them, you don't smoke and cigarettes taste like dog poo”

• conscious mind “Hmmm glad I don't smoke anymore”

 OK so perhaps it isn’t quite this simple but the principle remains the same.