Hypnosis

What is Hypnosis? The exact answer for this question is still unknown. You will get several answers for this question. But, there are certain fundamental characteristics identified by all the experts. The characteristics include intense concentration, extreme relaxation and high suggestibility.

The Process of Hypnosis

Hypnotism involves a hypnotist and a person, who needs to be hypnotized. However, it is possible for a person to hypnotize himself through self hypnosis. Under hypnosis, a person enters in trance like state.

During this hypnosis stage, the person gets highly focused and become more open to suggestions. Through out the process of hypnosis, the person is aware of the presence of the hypnotist.

What Happens When a Person is Hypnotizes

Some experts describe hypnosis as an alternative state of consciousness. During this, focus of a person’s attention is moved from present reality towards certain pictures, thoughts, feelings, motivations, and your behaviors of another time.

A person when hypnotized, that person is more able to access his or her creativity, limiting the influence of self consciousness, and work to reprogram the way you think and behave. The person is more open to suggestions in this stage. Moreover, the critical judgment of the person weakens and the response to the suggestions strengthens.

This state of unconsciousness resembles sleep, but it is induced by suggestions. Therefore, it is incorrect to call it as “sleep” or “Hypnos”. In fact, during this stage the hypnotized person instead of being in a drowsy state of sleep, he or she is hyper attentive, completely concentrating on the words of the hypnotist. 

This is similar to your feeling of a person, when he is daydreaming or when you are reading an interesting story. In such situation, you will be fully conscious but can tune out of the most of the things around you, focusing completely on the movie you are watch, for example.

You will be experiencing panic, fear, sadness, or happiness with the imaginary events that you are thinking about such as reading an interesting story, or watching a movie. You will lose your other thoughts and sensations when you are intently focusing on something in your hand. This is similar to what you will be experiencing when you are hypnotized. In fact, this is a kind of self hypnosis.

Hypnosis terms

There few hypnosis terms that you need to get familiar with so as to fully understand the practice of hypnotherapy. The following are some of the hypnosis terms.

Delta Waves

When a person is under hypnosis, the level of activity of his brain tends to change. During average night sleep, a person will go through different types of brain waves.

  • Beta waves will occur when a person is awake, active and alert
  • Alpha waves will when a person is relaxing, that is generally before bedtime
  • Theta waves occur after alpha waves. During theta waves the person will feel drowsy
  • Under delta waves, a person’s brain will be active, while he or she will be sleeping or under deep hypnosis trance

It is during delta waves that dreams occur. And it is the delta waves stage that the hypnotist will try to get the patient into, so that they are open to suggestions making the work of hypnotist easier.

Association:

This is a procedure which is used by the hypnotist in order to change the way of thinking of the patient with regards to particular object. In association, hypnotist suggests the patient that one action such as a sensation or feeling is associated with another action, making the patient to behave in a particular way, which is more or less depending on the goal of treatment.

For this reason, association in hypnosis is used for treating the patients who want to stop smoking. Are you familiar with Pavlov’s dog experiment? According to this experiment Pavlov associated the sound of door bell with the delivery of food, which would make the dog to salivate when the door bell rung just like it would if the food had arrived.

Misdirection

This another hypnosis technique used by the hypnotherapists in order to put the patient into deeper level of hypnotherapists in order to put the patient into deeper level of hypnotism. Under misdirection, the patient thoughts are moved towards to particular direction, in reality the patient is moved in a totally different direction.

Rapport

It is the relationship, which is shared between the hypnotherapist and individual who is seeking treatment. The more healthy the relationship is, the more easy for the hypnotherapist to do hypnosis.

Hyper-Suggestibility

This is the term used by the hypnotherapist for referring the main problem that many people face in the real world. The problem mentioned here is that many people are prone to being altered by the suggestions, causing them to exist at the whim of their environments.