This is a free masterclass on hypnosis. How it works, why it works, and how it can help you change the stories in your head or habits such as worrying, smoking, or the time you spend on social media and on your phone.
How do you stop sabotaging yourself?
You know all those moments when you decide to change something in your life, and you throw yourself at that change with all your energy and confidence, only to realise shortly afterwards that you have started putting obstacles in your own way?
It is strange. It is as if you did not really want to change. Except you do. So why on earth does it feel as if one foot is on the accelerator and the other is on the brake?
Well, because often, consciously, we want something. But our subconscious has a different opinion about what is good for us. And sometimes it is right. But often it is not. The subconscious thinks it knows, and it does not.
Because, you see, the subconscious often works like a parent who wants the best for us, who has nothing but positive intentions, and who still ends up harming us for the simple reason that they are working from expired information about how we function. It thinks we are still children even though we left home 10, 20 or 30 years ago.
We have evolved, we changed how we operate, we want different things from life. But to some parents we are still children. It is the same with the subconscious. Sometimes it needs a manual update.
I have the access codes to your subconscious. Paul McKenna
Self sabotage: when the conscious mind wants it and the subconscious presses the brake
What if I told you there are scientific methods for updating your subconscious, for bringing it up to date? What if you could tell it exactly how you want it to work, and it listened and worked for you rather than against you?
Today I want to tell you about hypnosis. About how and why it works, about how I use it in my work helping people change their lives for the better. About the difference between hypnosis, self hypnosis and hypnotherapy, and about all the misconceptions we hold about this field.
You can treat this as an introductory masterclass on hypnosis. It is free, but do yourself a favour and treat it as if you had paid money for it.
We have got to a point where we place no value on free things and, at the same time, find anything that is not free expensive. In practice we risk the only information we take in being the information with no value, or perceived as having none. That is dangerous. So consider that the information you are receiving right now has a cost. Because in reality it does, even if all you pay for it is your time.
Self hypnosis
Before we go deep into the subject, I feel the need to tell you how I came to study and then practise hypnosis. It is both relevant and mildly amusing. You see, I have been reading personal development since I was sixteen. Hundreds of books. But I only got to my first more serious course in psychology years later.
It was a course about self hypnosis and change techniques, and about how you can programme your mind for “success”. I did not ask myself at the time what “success” meant, but the idea of controlling my mind better attracted me like a magnet.
And I liked it. Not enough to want to learn hypnosis at that point. In fact I had not even done my first coaching training yet, and my identity was 100% entrepreneur.
Conscientiously, evening after evening, I started using what I had learned there to visualise the future. I started inducing shallow hypnotic trances in myself, taking my mind by the hand and walking it carefully, again and again, through scenes from the future I wanted, believing that was all there was to it.
And it was not. But even though it was only a small part of what hypnosis can do, it helped me enormously.
Over the years I relaxed my relationship with control enough that I no longer feel the need to take the reins except in those few moments when I feel my world is shaking too hard.
And in those moments, despite all the techniques I have learned over the years, I found myself going back again and again to self hypnosis, as a daily personal hygiene. A way of reminding myself, especially when things are hard, of a line I once heard from Tony Robbins that sounded like something I would like to believe:
I don’t negotiate with my mind. When I say “Go”, we go.
Then, some years later, I started studying Ericksonian hypnosis, which, by the way, is a recognised school of psychotherapy, in Romania and in other countries.
More precisely, I found two psychotherapists specialising in Ericksonian work and asked them how much it would cost to buy 10 to 20 hours of their life in which I could ask them questions about how what they do works. I left with a hundred pages of notes.
I had no intention of practising Ericksonian hypnosis, but I was convinced I could integrate principles and techniques from it into my one to one work. Which is what I did.
The difference between hypnotherapy and hypnosis
This is the moment, I think, for an important note. In my work as a change strategist, although I use techniques from many schools of coaching, psychotherapy, hypnosis and others, I do not go into the past with my clients. I do not do trauma healing. That is the domain of psychotherapy. And although psychotherapy has its important place, I am myself a satisfied client with more than 500 hours of it, I work with the present and the future.
I believe that, with a few exceptions such as major trauma, most of our problems continue to exist in the present because we continue to do things in the present that feed them. Which is why, if we change what we think in the present, change what we feel in the present and change a few behaviours we still have, we can make sure our future will be different. And our future starts a few moments from now.
But that is an idea to develop another time. I mention it here only to clarify what I do: I help people change the way they think and the way they see themselves in the present, so they can enjoy a better future. Other people deal with going into the past.
That is also one of the big differences between hypnosis and hypnotherapy, from my point of view. Hypnosis is a mental state. Hypnosis is how we feel when we are in a hypnotic trance. It is easily identifiable and physiologically measurable.
Hypnotherapy, as the name says, is a type of therapy that uses hypnosis.
In other words, we can enter a state of hypnosis without that state being part of a therapy process in which we are trying to heal something from the past. We can enter hypnosis in order to modify perceptions, to replace limiting beliefs with productive ones, to change the way we see ourselves, with the aim of increasing the chances of a future closer to the one we want.
After learning as much as I could in this informal way about Ericksonian hypnosis, I read all of Milton Erickson’s books, and the books about him, and they fascinated me. There is a film about Erickson called Wizard of the Desert, if you can find it.
I began using Erickson’s principles heavily in my own method, Change Strategy, but mostly I worked conversationally, without using hypnotic trance. Then came the neuro linguistic programming trainings with Richard Bandler and John La Valle, and only a few years later I did a hypnosis training with Paul McKenna, one of the best known hypnotherapists in the UK and the United States.
What hypnosis actually is, and how it works
Do you remember when we talked about the subconscious sometimes needing to be brought up to date?
Well, one of the problems with the way we humans function is that when we set out to do or to change something, we do it as a conscious process.
That is, consciously, we tell ourselves “I would like to quit smoking”, for example. Or “stop eating chocolate at midnight”. Or “go to the gym more often”. It is a conscious process, in a moment when we genuinely want it.
Except that most of the time, in daily life, what guides us is what happens in our subconscious. We hold an enormous number of thoughts, opinions, judgements and limiting beliefs in there, wandering through our mind without us even knowing they are doing it.
Of course, now and then we catch one telling us that we are “not enough”, that “we cannot anyway”, that “we are not that type”, or that “yes, but it is hard not to eat in the evening in front of Netflix”. And we get scared. But we would be far more scared if we knew that for every moment in which we catch one such negative thought, there are 20 or 30 other similar moments and thoughts running in the background that we never become aware of.
If we were to define hypnosis, starting from what Cambridge says, hypnosis is “a mental state like sleep, produced artificially, in which a person’s thoughts can be easily influenced”.
We also know there is a direct correlation between brainwave frequencies and the state of hypnosis.
In short, hypnosis is the facilitation of altered states of consciousness, with the aim of unblocking or accelerating changes that people want.
In practice, though, things are a little more nuanced than that. When we say “hypnosis” we most often mean being in “the state of hypnosis”. That is, being in the middle of a hypnotic trance.
Brainwaves: beta, alpha, theta and delta
What decades of research have found is that our brain constantly emits waves at certain frequencies, and those frequencies differ depending on the state we are in. If you were in a laboratory and a doctor connected you to equipment monitoring your brain frequencies, they would find that:
When you are awake, alert, in the ordinary state you are in for most of the day, your brain emits at frequencies between 12 and 30 Hz. We call these beta waves. They are characterised by logical thinking and a high capacity for concentration.
The same equipment would find that the moment you start relaxing, whether you are watching a film on Netflix, listening to your favourite music, or listening to a podcast with a voice that relaxes you, your brain starts emitting waves between 8 and 12 Hz. A lower frequency than beta, in what we call alpha waves. This state is characterised by peace, increased creativity and, very importantly, an increased receptivity to suggestion.
In practice, once we reach the alpha range, our mind starts to open, to become less rigid. The fixed ideas we hold about how the world works become a little more flexible, and our subconscious becomes more permeable. We become more open to accepting that the world could work in ways other than the ones we have convinced ourselves of. We become more capable of finding new ideas and new solutions to old problems. Everything becomes more malleable, like plasticine.
It matters that you understand we reach these “hypnotic” states in real life too, every single day.
Time spent in nature facilitates it. Painting, music, meditation and mindfulness do it. Prayer does it. It is just that we generally do not control what happens in the middle of these states of involuntary hypnosis. Yes, the film relaxed me and I was certainly in alpha for at least a few minutes during it, so my subconscious was more permeable, more influenceable and more open to suggestion. But open to which suggestions? To the ones the director decided to put in the film. Whether or not they set out to plant them in your mind, and whether they help you or get in your way.
You are starting to see why you need to pay attention to how you choose the films, the TV shows and the music you listen to. Especially if they put you into a trance state, if you lose track of time. Because many of the rigid ideas about how your world, your relationships, your job and your children “should” be most likely come from there. Of course they also come from childhood, no doubt about that. But this is something you feed every day, through your thoughts and through the information you expose your mind to.
It is important to understand that hypnosis is not voodoo, it is not something created by a psychologist or a scientist in a laboratory. It is simply something we humans were doing anyway, and the practitioners of hypnosis and hypnotherapy have only studied the ways in which we can use it to improve our lives.
But back to waves and frequencies. Hypnosis, or the hypnotic trance state, starts to occur when our brain emits alpha waves, and continues into the next frequency, theta.
After beta, the waking state, and after alpha, come theta waves, between 4 and 8 Hz. Theta waves are characterised by even deeper states of relaxation, an internal state of calm and a high level of introspection. The flow state also happens, almost always, in theta. When we are in an induced hypnotic trance and our brainwaves are emitting at theta frequencies, the mind becomes much more open to positive suggestions and more capable of modifying negative beliefs.
In practice it is as if the permeability of the subconscious increases. It is easier to plant seeds there and the chances of them taking root increase considerably. It is fertile ground for planting new ideas and beliefs and getting rid of old ones, precisely because the conscious, intellectual part is slightly numbed.
And being numbed, relaxed, it stops intervening irritably with all its usual opinions and fears about how the world works, what is possible for us in our lives and what is “impossible”. It is as if we shook off all of those perceptions for a few minutes and could decide which of them we want to replace, and with what.
Then, guided by the hypnotherapist, we can imagine a future in which our behaviours are different from before. That is how what I described earlier happens: it is as if we took our mind by the hand and walked it a few times down a new road, towards a new destination, better and different from our habits so far.
Of course, many of the exercises for writing and rewriting these pieces of our mind, and the guided imagery and imagination exercises, can also be done outside a hypnosis process, outside a trance. It is just that we now know, after decades of studies, that anything happening in the trance state is strongly amplified.
In practice, if we repeat a film a few times in which we manage to calm ourselves without needing to smoke or eat sweets, and we do it in hypnosis, in alpha or theta, it is the equivalent of hundreds of imagination exercises done in an ordinary waking beta state. Are you starting to see why hypnosis is interesting?
Because you can do those mental repetitions a hundred times in your head, fighting all the while with a conscious mind full of opinions, limiting beliefs and sabotaging thoughts, or you can do them two or three times in hypnosis, calm and relaxed, and the effects are as if you had done them hundreds of times, because they are planted deep in the subconscious.
Does hypnosis put you to sleep?
You may be wondering whether there is anything after beta, alpha and theta. Yes, immediately after come delta waves, generally with frequencies below 4 Hz. Delta waves are the ones we all emit when we sleep. Sometimes, if the client is very tired, they can fall asleep during a hypnosis session, but most of the time this does not happen. Most of hypnosis occurs in alpha and theta, at the border between being awake and being asleep.
If you have never been through a consciously induced hypnotic trance, the easiest way to understand how it feels is to imagine this scenario:
It is late at night. You have watched a film on Netflix and you are heading to bed intending to sleep. You put your head on the pillow, close your eyes and thoughts come. Perhaps about something that happened today, or something you know you have to do tomorrow. You start feeling your body getting lighter and lighter, until you almost stop feeling it at all.
And while you are running these scenes and seeing them with your mind’s eye, at some point the scenes start weaving together with sequences from the film you have just watched. You realise it makes no sense, that what you are doing tomorrow has nothing to do with the film. Then other images start interfering and your mind begins building a film of its own, a blend of all these thoughts and sequences. The reality you had chosen to think about consciously starts mixing with the fiction generated by your subconscious.
You have not fallen asleep yet, you are not dreaming. If you wanted to open your eyes, you could. If you wanted to get up for a glass of water, you could. And maybe you even do. But that state, between “I am watching the film in my mind” and at the same time “I notice I am sliding gently and pleasantly towards sleep and I am allowing myself to”, is almost identical to the hypnotic trance state. If you were in a sleep laboratory right now, the equipment would show your brainwaves emitting somewhere between alpha and theta, sliding gently towards delta and sleep.
Is hypnosis just relaxation? Or is it more than that?
It is not just relaxation. Listening to certain music, being spoken to in a certain tone, and being guided through a process of relaxing the body and mind is only the beginning. It is an important part, because it opens a “bracket” in which changes can happen much faster and much more deeply. And that bracket is closed later, towards the end of the session, with words like “and now I am going to count from 10 to 1, and when I reach 1 you can come back to the present, to the room you are in, and you can take with you all these new resources to use in your life. And whenever you are ready, you can open your eyes.”
What happens inside that bracket of deep relaxation is the actual work, the change process. And while inducing the relaxation trance is fairly similar for every client, what happens inside is very, very personalised.
Even if most of the time the client perceives it as relaxing, it is not just a series of visualisation exercises and listening to affirmations. In practice, from the practitioner’s perspective, the process is quite technical and usually consists of a series of three or four guided exercises drawn from various schools that deal with change: hypnosis, CBT, NLP, EFT, or techniques from somatic therapy schools.
These are chosen specifically according to the objective being worked on and according to the particularities of the client, observed in the initial assessment session. That is why the result is very different from a pre-recorded relaxation session you might find on YouTube. Which is still useful if you want to understand what the opening of the “bracket” looks and feels like, the induction into trance through guided relaxation. And it can produce good results on relaxation. But it does not necessarily produce change, in the way a hypnosis or hypnotherapy process does.
In my experience, the incredible power of hypnosis processes lies in the level of personalisation and in the choice of working methods inside the trance. And in weaving them together with other methods that facilitate change.
The voice, the rhythm, the timbre, the order of the words used, all of these are elements that facilitate change and depend on the experience of the facilitator.
What kinds of objectives can be reached through hypnosis
Now that you are starting to understand how hypnosis works, let me tell you what it can be used for.
In short, for any problem in your life that has a component of limiting beliefs, recurring thoughts that get in your way, behaviours you want to change, phobias, pain management, stress, anxiety, insomnia, and anything to do with calming the nervous system and emotional self regulation. But also for increasing performance in what you do: increasing concentration, amplifying motivation, improving sporting performance, and I am sure we could find more examples if we looked.
As for me, although I have worked over time on many of the subjects above, I have more experience with a few of them:
- hypnosis for quitting smoking
- hypnosis for reducing stress and anxiety, with effects on relaxation and insomnia too
- hypnosis for eliminating limiting beliefs
- teaching self hypnosis techniques for accessing peak performance states, which I have used myself for over ten years, in sport and business as well as in creative problem solving, or before writing or painting
On the subjects where it applies, meaning the ones where hypnosis is scientifically demonstrated to help, and there are a couple of studies at the end, my way of working involves a mix of techniques, what I call strategic interventions. A mix of hypnosis, change strategy, neuro linguistic programming and techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy.
I generally work in short processes, of at most three or four sessions. That is because more is generally not needed. Although the processes are highly structured and we know exactly what we are doing, there is a very high level of personalisation, which is set in the first session. And optionally we can add a self hypnosis training process, so you can learn to help yourself after we finish working together. Only if you want that.
Questions and answers about hypnosis
There are a few misconceptions about hypnosis that I had heard myself before studying the field, and I would like to address them.
“How real is this hypnosis thing?”
Hypnotherapy, clinical hypnosis and Ericksonian hypnotherapy are recognised approaches and schools, in Romania and elsewhere. It matters that we understand this. We are not talking about fantasies like past life regressions or all sorts of dubious new “constellations” that encourage magical thinking or require accepting reincarnation. We are talking about schools and practitioners who have agreed, across the world, that hypnosis works, that we understand and can explain how and why it works, and that it has a scientific basis. It is not voodoo, it is science. There simply has not been enough education for the general public to understand what happens in there, which is why there is sometimes scepticism. Easy enough to understand.
“Hypnotise me.”
Now that you know more than most people about how hypnosis works, I think it is easier to see that the hypnotist is more of a facilitator for the hypnosis process. In other words, he does not hypnotise you. You choose to enter, to put yourself into, a state of hypnosis. Of course he can make the process easier for you. Through voice, through relaxing music, through words used in a certain order, through hypnotic suggestions. But you need to want it and to be open to it. At most you can say it is a process we do together. Hypnosis is not something that “is done to you”.
“I am afraid. I do not want to lose control.”
We have been influenced by films and cartoons in which someone takes a watch or a pendulum out of their pocket, waves it in front of someone, and the effect is that this person completely loses control. They become controllable by the so-called hypnotist, who can “order” them to do various things.
In real life this does not happen. There are countless case studies in which famous hypnotists tried to control others, to suggest that they do things they did not want to do. It simply does not work. The client has control, and you cannot “convince” them to do things that go against their values.
The most extreme thing that can happen is that the client dozes off for a few moments during the process, but in my experience even then they are perfectly aware of the words you are saying.
More than that, in the hypnosis I practise I usually have a dialogue with the client while they are in the hypnotic state. I ask them to imagine certain things, I ask them to nod if they managed to imagine it, I even ask them to answer me yes or no, in words. And sometimes, not rarely, we have conversations in which I ask them to tell me how they feel or what they see while we do exercises sketching and visualising the future.
In all of these moments the client could open their eyes at any time, or ask to pause the process, if they wanted. In fact that is usually how I start a session, reminding people that they can open their eyes at any time, that they can even keep them open if they feel like it, and that they can interrupt me any time they have a question or anything that makes them uncomfortable. But once they understand the principles of how hypnosis works, and especially knowing that this is not hypnotherapy, that we are not going to visit the past or revisit traumas, and that it is not possible to “reveal” things you do not want to say, people relax fairly quickly.
“Can it be done online?”
Yes, and in my experience even better than face to face. Both versions work, but I have noticed that in processes involving hypnosis in particular, people are much more comfortable at home, on a Zoom call, as long as they can control their environment, meaning it is quiet and they can be sure nobody will disturb them during the session.
More than that, since it is a process using relaxing music and words spoken in a certain voice and timbre, having headphones on makes the whole experience stronger and deeper than even being in the same room.
Plus, online you have access to this from any corner of the country and of the world. We do not have to be in the same city.
“I cannot be hypnotised, I am too analytical.”
I left this limiting belief until last because it amuses me. I am one of the most analytical people I know, and it is what I said myself, from the client’s chair, the first time: I want it to work, but I am afraid that given how my mind works I am completely un-hypnotisable.
What I have discovered since is that things work the other way round. Analytical people often have difficulty relaxing in ordinary situations in their lives. And once they start relaxing in hypnosis, it feels so good that an hour later the sentence I hear most often when I ask how they feel is: “honestly, I was hoping it would not end.”
And I discovered something else, on my own skin. That the more capable you are of generating negative thoughts on your own, and the more easily you come to perceive them as almost real, the more that indicates that your mind is fairly easily suggestible. In other words, if you make negative films in your head and say negative things to yourself, and that quickly changes your emotional state for the worse, then guess what? Your mind is just as easily suggestible to positive, constructive films, thoughts and ideas.
Instead of an ending
Which reminds me of a short story, a Cherokee legend, that feels right for closing this brief incursion into what hypnosis is and how it can help you.
One evening, an old Cherokee man told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people, and has since the world began. Sitting down next to the child, the old man said:
My son, there is a fight between two wolves that live inside each of us. One of them is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, sincerity, gentleness, empathy, truth, compassion, courage and trust. And the other one is bad, he is terrible. He is anger, envy, jealousy, bitterness, regret, greed, arrogance, guilt, resentment, pride, lies, superiority and ego.
The child, looking at the fire in front of them, thought for a minute and then, turning to his grandfather, asked:
“And which wolf wins?”
The grandfather, eyes on the horizon, answered simply:
“The one you feed.”
Now, I do not know how it is for you, but I have trained myself to grab hold of any way I can feed my good wolf. And to find ways of not feeding the bad one.
And hypnosis is one of the most effective ways of doing that I have found.
A few studies on the effectiveness of hypnosis
I will leave just two studies here.
Hypnosis in the treatment of anxiety- and stress-related disorders, D Corydon Hammond, 2010:
Self-hypnosis training represents a rapid, cost-effective, nonaddictive and safe alternative to medication for the treatment of anxiety-related conditions. Here we provide a review of the experimental literature on the use of self-hypnosis in the treatment of anxiety and stress-related disorders, including anxiety associated with cancer, surgery, burns and medical/dental procedures. An overview of research is also provided with regard to self-hypnotic treatment of anxiety-related disorders, such as tension headaches, migraines and irritable bowel syndrome. The tremendous volume of research provides compelling evidence that hypnosis is an efficacious treatment for state anxiety (e.g., prior to tests, surgery and medical procedures) and anxiety-related disorders, such as headaches and irritable bowel syndrome.
Hypnosis as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy: a meta-analysis, I Kirsch, G Montgomery, G Sapirstein, 1995:
A meta-analysis was performed on 18 studies in which a cognitive-behavioral therapy was compared with the same therapy supplemented by hypnosis. The results indicated that the addition of hypnosis substantially enhanced treatment outcome, so that the average client receiving cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy showed greater improvement than at least 70% of clients receiving nonhypnotic treatment. Effects seemed particularly pronounced for treatments of obesity, especially at long-term follow-up, indicating that unlike those in nonhypnotic treatment, clients to whom hypnotic inductions had been administered continued to lose weight after treatment ended. These results were particularly striking because of the few procedural differences between the hypnotic and nonhypnotic treatments.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.