Hypnosis is everywhere.
It can be intentional, unintentional, self-improving, self-serving, pernicious, inspiring, commodifying and tragic. The problem is we have such terrible trouble defining it and recognising it. Maybe because we’re so close to it.
Explaining hypnosis & hypnotherapy. 5 ways to look at it.
For the uninitiated it has echoes of stage comedy, clucking chickens and ‘tranced-out’ people stuck to chairs. Fascinating, humorous and confounding as this is to watch, the reality is actually way more interesting.
Before my sessions I explain to my clients what hypnosis and hypnotherapy is and what it involves. I explain it, firstly, thus: it is focused attention. Focused attention to the exclusion of everything else.
Now, this doesn’t have to be ‘trance’ per se. Though it can be; that might be one way of describing a part of it. But what exactly is trance? Science is uncertain as to what trance is and doesn’t recognise it. But it could be described as a state of mind or being where we get caught in a particular mode of emotion, thought or behaviour – where everything else is ignored. It’s like we don’t actually see or consider any other options at that point.
I don’t’ mind admitting I find this fascinating as this has enormous consequences, as you’ll discover below. It’s why I’m a hypnotherapist – or more precisely, a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist.
It’s how I see the way society and individuals unconsciously organise themselves, form opinions and ultimately operate. It’s how things unfold for us.
So let’s explore and break down the various ways in which hypnosis plays out.
There’s some crossover here, but I’ll do my best to separate the categories.
1. Screens and the young
Have you ever tried to get a teen to engage in a conversation whilst holding a phone/device in their hands? Of course you have. And it’s not worked, right?
You’re met with silence.
Picture a whole battery of children frozen in time around the globe, transfixed by their devices, not paying any attention to anything around them. I’m not judging, I’m just observing. It could be that they’re online, learning about quantum physics, researching for a cure for cancer or how to speak Spanish.
Or they could be playing Fortnite. Checking out content on Tik Tok, their friends on Snapchat or Instagram. Or looking at porn. Again, I’m not judging here. After all, it is what it is, right?
The interesting thing is, they’re not HERE. They’re there.
And that has quite a profound significance. Because being ‘there’ indicates the human mind is receptive to all kinds of information, all kinds of experiences and it can be captured by those who have the desire and financial incentive to do so. But, of course, there is a choice here. We have agency, but only if we have the awareness and will to pull ourselves away.
We’ll get to this point later.
So, in a sense we are time travellers, in the space suits of our bodies; our minds and our thoughts can transport us to a multiverse of places and experiences that are unbound. We can live vicariously, lapping up everything without ever moving. The old classic film, ‘Total Recall’ exploits this idea beautifully – and ‘The Matrix’ takes this even further.
It’s amazing and…mind bending in its possibilities. (cf the metaverse!)
As always, there are benefits and costs to all of these aspects and it’s how we weigh these up that we can arrive at a practical analysis of an issue. How beneficial a thing is or how detrimental.
Screens, technology, the internet and social media have been incredibly enabling. But we need to be aware of the downstream effects of these tools and how they are used.
Just like the child transfixed to the screen, we need to snap out of whatever we are doing to see those outcomes and what they mean. See Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, ‘The Anxious Generation’ for how the digital age has impacted the young.
2. Anxieties and fears
Where do these come from? Are they ‘real’ or made up? A person petrified of spiders could be totally fearless when it comes to rock climbing or motor racing.
Keanu Reeves, for instance, has a fear of the dark, yet he’s been in a multitude of films, involved in many dangerous stunts and faced very real life challenges, like his girlfriend’s car crash after the death of his still-born baby.
Some people have a fear of dogs, and can’t even look at a photograph of a dog. Yet it’s only a screen, an image, not a dog they’re in the presence of. Incredibly, we manage to transfer something like the fear of dogs to the representation of the thing we’re fearful of.
That takes some imagination!
And that’s the point.
Our anxieties and fears are highly subjective, imaginative and mostly irrational. Yet all of us have experienced them at some point in our lives, in a variety of ways.
We tell ourselves stories, repeat our self-talk, over-use our imaginations until we’ve convinced ourselves and our emotions into a fear of x ,y or z. This is why anxiety and fear is often a form of hypnosis. Self hypnosis.
We are caught in focusing on the problem, perhaps an incident in the past, an imaginary ‘what if’ of the future. Some of this is a useful negative bias to keep us safe and on guard and alive, but much of it is misplaced worry, triggered by other stimuli, or simply an unhelpful habit like so many others.
60% of people are reported as suffering anxiety in the UK, that’s 8 million in one given time (Champion Health and Mental Health UK). We have an anxiety pandemic on our hands here and it’s getting worse with the pressures of 21st century living.
Yes, we have a burgeoning mental health industry – and mindfulness and various approaches (such as mine!) have crept into the corporate arena where industry leaders, bosses and HR have recognized the need for this kind of responsibility.
But until we perhaps change our thinking, up our knowledge and understanding, life in the west will get progressively divisive and eat itself up, particularly as AI gets more and more used and misused by the various forces at play in the world.
So, in many ways, it’s my mission to get people to understand that we need to de-hypnotise before we move forward with useful hypnosis. That way we can disentangle ourselves from our own personal neuroses and anxiety – and get ourselves in a place of calm to enable good decision-making.
3. Flow states
Being in flow is generally considered a positive and useful state to be in. We experience this most notably when we’re playing a sport, for instance, like tennis, or playing a musical instrument or speaking a language.
Being in flow is being focused on what you’re doing … yet, paradoxically, you’re not. It’s a form of trance…where what you’re doing is so automatic that you’re not overly trying. Everything seems to come easily. You’ve learned the techniques, skills and technical details of the discipline, and that’s usually taken some time, but now you’re expressing yourself through that medium without conscious thought. You feel at one with the act.
We also experience flow when driving and talking. Also when creating – like painting or writing.
Incidentally, Einstein was a regular self-hypnotist and reportedly came up with the theory of relativity during a self hypnosis session. His phrase, ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them’ (Albert Einstein 1879-1955) leans into this. And Mozart is said to have composed the opera, ‘Cosi fan Tutte’ while hypnotised or in flow.
There are plenty of other examples of flowstates, like walking, where we are unconscious of what we’re doing. This simple act uses around 200 muscles during one step forward, yet we do it without conscious thought. Life is something of a miracle in that way.
Flow usually comes from practice, practice and more practice. The benefit of flow allows us to do two things at once (eg talk while driving) and saves us time and energy to create and progress. The cost can be … that we can flow into certain unhelpful beliefs, ideas and poor choices (smoking can be a flow state!) and if we’re too trusting of the flow, it could cost us dear.
4. Mass Formation Psychosis
Here’s where things get really interesting! Mass Formation Psychosis is a form of mass hypnosis (some may say mass hysteria, or tribalism) where crowds or groups of people get pulled together by a similar emotion, belief or action. A certain awareness is abandoned and, due to an overwhelming primal urge to belong or be accepted, people are ‘hypnotised’ into that group. Often all rational thought is discarded.
Tangible and somewhat visceral examples of this at work are Nazi Germany and Diana, Princess of Wales’s death. (You don’t often see those two events in one sentence!).
If anyone has watched a Hitler rally or was around during the time of Diana’s death, you will see two extreme forms of emotion at work.
Football crowds, religious gatherings, political rallies and music festivals.
These are all examples of Mass Formation Psychosis, or mass hypnosis.
As human beings we can get stirred into political or spiritual ideologies and movements frighteningly easily. Feelings run high over racial injustice, nationality, sexual identity and the ‘antis-‘ of these that these categories spawn.
It can cause argument, division, conflict and war.
I often encourage my clients to stand back and simply observe oneself and life in all its glory and insanity. To not get too drawn in. To detach.
5. Habits – Smoking, overeating, alcoholism and drugs
Anything repeated soon becomes a habit. We know this from first hand experience. This is great news because it means if we practise something, like a language or an instrument or a sport we can get better. And better. And if we start really young and we persist, we can get even better still. Even become a professional at it.
The trouble is, you guessed it, this comes with a flip side too.
We can become really good at stressing, doing anxiety, smoking, eating too much, doing too many drugs, drink or porn. These can also become habits.
Life doesn’t call these good or bad habits. It doesn’t judge … it just gives us the tools. We just need to make sure the repeated action becomes a useful habit.
We can be ‘addicted’, and I know many people who are, to exercise. That’s pretty useful.
But smoking, which I work a lot with. That’s not useful, like all the other so called, bad habits listed above.
Often bad habits start as avoidance tactics, or in some cases they provide a quick shot of dopamine, known as the pleasure neurotransmitter. We get addicted to this, especially when it’s combined with cortisol.
Biology and chemistry aside, the problem here is again one of self-hypnosis. We convince ourselves that certain things that are not useful for us are good for us in some way.
At one level we know they’re not useful. But on another we hypnotise ourselves into thinking they will make us feel better, relax us, make us more confident.
Smoking, where nicotine is a powerful stimulant, is an example of this. Physiologically it makes us more stressed, the heart rate and adrenaline levels go up, yet we smoke. Why? To make us more calm, more relaxed – and at first it does, because we THINK it does. A classic case of hypnosis and belief in action if ever we saw one! Then we are caught in the smoke/stress cycle, where smokers smoke to relieve the stress that smoking causes – more on this elsewhere.
So despite all the evidence to the contrary, we go ahead and do the things we do, useful or not useful. We shut down our critical thinking and switch to auto-pilot.
Just like we do with so many other aspects in life.
These damaging habits can all be overcome if we firstly recognise this form of hypnosis, then de-hypnotise…and finally learn to use the process for more useful habits.
6. Information and The News
I tend to counsel highly anxious clients to watch themselves more than the News.
We live in an uncertain world, a world of tragedy and misfortune in any place at any time. And the news is as competitive and as commercial as any other industry. This, combined with a hardwired curiosity for the tragic that we seem to have, forms an often unhelpful and unhealthy dynamic. We find ourselves drawn and ‘hypnotised’ into these stories.
Before we know it we are feeding our pre-existing fears. Because there is very little good news broadcast (bad news is more compelling than good), we start to catastrophise the world. Everything becomes a problem. We get worse. It can make us depressed.
Of course, where there is a commercial element there can be distortion. And in a fast time-poor world of 280 characters, thinking can become punchy and extreme, with no room for nuance. Which has given birth to the ‘fake news’ phrase. And just as there is distortion and ‘fake news’ there is conspiracy theory – the extreme form of overtheorising and castrophising ‘fake news’.
Confused? Why wouldn’t you be. But this is what we’re up against.
Story after story. Polarisation after polarisation; over politics, identity, the ‘truth’ which, it seems, is always up for grabs.
This, again, is hypnosis at work. An overfocusing on a viewpoint, information, an idea. To the exclusion of other viewpoints or options.
As the saying once said, ‘Stay Safe’. Indeed.
But I would add, ‘stay awake’ too.
Useful Hypnotism and Hypnotherapy.
Ultimately, then, we hypnotise ourselves.
We can’t control everything outside ourselves. But we have agency and sovereignty over how we filter.
There are many other instances of hypnosis at work on different levels, as I’ve struggled to define it here.
Arguments, wars, terrorism – and the justification for these.
But ultimately, from a mental health perspective, everything starts with awareness, a certain degree of detachment, mindfulness. It would also help humanity.
A deep breath in, standing back from the din and the forces that draw us to them, whatever they are, from wherever they come, however they take shape.
It sounds very eastern and it is. But don’t get me wrong. We need abandonment, surrender, involvement, joy, passion and enthusiasm. In fact it’s what makes life what it is and worth living.
We just need to learn how and when to direct it for the good of ourselves and others. How to use hypnosis and our thinking usefully, with cost/benefits attached.
I help using Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy, to improve your mental health and your life.
Contact me on 07778 613268 or he**@************co.uk