I was skeptical. I was in the middle of reading a book on scientific experiments that no-one yet knew how to explain. And where it was cheap enough to do so, I was running the experiments, just to see what happened.
I was getting some unexpected results. In short, everything in the book worked just like the author said it would.
As a budding scientist, this was fascinating to me.
Then I came across the most outrageous experiment of all. Do this one thing, it claimed, and you will be able to experience visual hallucinations.
Ridiculous! I thought.
But I ran the experiment anyway.
You can imagine my astonishment when less than 2 hours later, I was experiencing full-blown visual hallucinations. In the beginning, it was just something tiny. With my eyes closed, I could clearly see an orange that wasnt there. But it was a start. And I was hooked.
The process that was outlined in that book was a simple self-hypnosis induction. Essentially it was advocating what hypnotists would view as a variant of the eye fixation induction.
While it worked for me, and got me started down the path to hypnosis, there are other pathways to self-hypnosis that Ive found to be much more effective.
In this book, well cover what Ive found to be the easiest and most reliable way to induce self-hypnosis on-demand. Well also go over what kinds of things you can do with self-hypnosis, and how to do them. And finally, well cover how to make those changes stick and how to verify that its worked.
My aim with this book is to get you started with self-hypnosis fast, so Ive made it as short as I possibly can.
Why use self-hypnosis
So there I was. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. My breathing was all over the place, quick and shallow. And my thoughts were a total mess. Running around in loops.
I was in the grips of a panic attack. Totally freaking out.
And then I remembered something.
I am The Hypnotist.
Capital T. Capital H.
I took a slow, deep breath, and allowed my attention to move to the physical sensations within my body.
I noticed how my hands were clenched into claws, and became curious about what that was like.
I explored how the sensations changed as I noticed different parts of my body.
I became aware of the tension in my shoulders, and noticed that in that moment even my toes were tense.
As my attention wandered through the various physical sensations I was experiencing, I felt peace begin to spread over me.
And within less than 3 minutes, I had fully restored my usual calm.
All the tension was gone, my heart had stopped trying to escape from my chest, and I was feeling serene.
The process that I followed was a simple self-hypnosis technique.
Milton Erickson is generally regarded as one of the greatest hypnotists of all time. Throughout the course of his life he ran countless hypnotic experiments. He wanted to know exactly what kinds of problems could be helped with the use of hypnosis.
Ultimately his work resulted in what we know today as hypnotherapy.
In hypnotherapy, we use our knowledge of hypnosis to help people to overcome all kinds of problems.
The scope here is vast. In essence, any problem that is in some way caused by a pattern inside the mind can potentially be helped.
To give you some ideas, this includes things like:
- Overcoming social anxiety.
- Overcoming all kinds of fears and phobias such as:
- Fear of heights.
- Fear of dogs.
- Fear of flying.
- Fear of missing out.
- Stopping in-progress panic attacks.
- Changing compulsive behaviors.
- Building motivation.
- Building confidence.
- Achieving goals.
- Losing weight and keeping it off.
- Quitting smoking.
- Breaking other addictions.
- Pain control.
- And much, much more.
Beyond fixing problems, hypnosis itself can be used for fun.
When were hypnotizing others for entertainment, generally we want them to act out something. This could be gluing them in place, having them talk like an alien, having them perform strange activities such as playing an air piano, or just about anything we can imagine that seems like it might be funny.
When were hypnotizing ourselves for our amusement, the fun takes on a different quality. While we could hypnotize ourselves to act out any of those things for the entertainment of an audience, a big part of a hypnosis show is that the audience thinks the hypnotist is making them do it.
Naturally its nowhere near as compelling to an external audience when we make ourselves do something.
So how can we use hypnosis in the context of our own entertainment? As with overcoming problems, the possibilities here are near endless.
Again, to give you some ideas, the entertainment possibilities include:
- The vacation of our dreams.
- A gateway into lucid dreaming.
- A gateway into meditation.
- Modifying our perception of video games to make them seem real.
- Making ourselves drunk on water.
- And much, much more.
Now it might seem like fixing problems of the mind, and massively extending our repertoire for fun might be reason enough.
But wait! Theres more! As they say in the TV commercials.
Not only can we use self-hypnosis to overcome a vast array of problems, and for our own entertainment, we can also use it to hone our skills in just about any area we might choose.
With self-hypnosis we can increase our focus, and distort our perception of the flow of time, which makes for a learning environment in which we can quickly get massive results.
Need to study for an exam? Simply drop yourself into hypnosis, engage a bit of time distortion, and spend a few hours mentally revising the entire course in detail. All in the space of a few minutes of clock time.
Want to practice a piece of music? Once again, drop yourself into hypnosis, engage your time distortion, and methodically work through that piece over and over again until youve got it perfect.
Perhaps youd like to run through a critical presentation? Youd never guess this, but all you do is drop yourself into hypnosis, engage your time distortion, spin up a hallucination, and do the presentation over and over again, until youve got it just right.
Youre probably beginning to spot a pattern here.
So to recap, there are three huge areas where self-hypnosis can rapidly lead to huge gains:
- Overcoming problems of the mind.
- Enhancing the fun things we do.
- Supercharging our ability to learn new things.
And of course, theres one final place where self-hypnosis excels: when youre a hypnotist and want to hypnotize others, its always a good idea to go into hypnosis yourself first.