Does Hypnosis work?

Self-Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy use the combination of hypnosis and therapeutic work, therefore are very different to stage hypnosis, where the trance state is being used to entertain. When using self-hypnosis, you are putting yourself into trance to do something therapeutically to help yourself. Your first question may well be “Does it work?” Most people are familiar with hypnotherapy for stopping smoking and perhaps for phobias like fear of flying, but it can be used for a range of conditions and so I wanted to present at the beginning of the book a few case studies to show how it can be used and the results it can get, before you start work on helping yourself, understanding just how much you can achieve will help you to commit to the process. Some of the cases I am sharing with you use self-hypnosis and some involve hypnosis with someone else, but they have supported their work with self-hypnosis, you can equally achieve change by yourself if you want that change, as working with someone else. Reading through these case studies will help you to get ideas to help yourself as well as showing how helpful hypnosis can be.

Case Study Enhanced Learning and Exams using Self-Hypnosis

A 40-year-old woman had an exam in two weeks, she was struggling to remember things and had low confidence about passing. Her tutor had said she might not be ready to take the exam which accelerated her decline in confidence, but she wanted to try to take it as she could always retake if she failed, she wanted to set herself the goal of trying her best to pass. She did just two fully planned sessions for herself.

She knew that the stress response could cloud her thinking, as blood flow is diverted from the forebrain to the hind brain, so one of the keys to remembering and thinking clearly in an exam, is to remain relaxed. With this in mind, she created a positive resource (you will find information on this in the confidence section) that would relax her before going into the exam or if she began to get stressed during the exam. She visualised within trance all the doubt leaving her mind, like thought bubbles leaving her mind and going into a cloud, a cloud that the sun would burn away. She visualised her success in the exam and receiving her certificate when she had passed, we call this future pacing. She used a script about breaking conditioning, which focuses on how elephants are trained. What they do is to tie the elephant when it is very young to a tree, so that it learns that the sensation of the rope means it has to stay still, when they are fully grown and could pull that tree right out by the roots, they still just stand there as they believe they cannot go anywhere even though they could if they tried, it is just conditioning. So, she challenged her conditioned response that she could not remember and expected to fail, she worked on the conditioned response of expecting to pass rather than to fail, seeing there was a choice of focus.

She felt more in control and was remembering things better but in a mock test she had still made some mistakes. Her tutor was giving her some extra coaching, but was still offering her the opportunity to pull out of the exam, which was sending out negative signals of failure to her. She was determined to take it anyway. The words that kept coming back to her were the story of the conditioned elephant who could have broken free, this seemed to have a powerful impact for her.

In the second session she planned for herself, she looked at the idea of how differently people react to a journey, some with anxiety, some with enjoyment and used it