A STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS INVOLVING FOCUSED ATTENTION AND REDUCED PERIPHERAL AWARENESS CHARACTERIZED BY AN ENHANCED CAPACITY FOR RESPONSE TO SUGGESTION*
*As defined by The Society of Psychological Hypnosis, Division 30 of the American Psychological Association
Or been watching a film and been so engrossed in it that you barely register that someone is speaking to you?
Or perhaps you’ve been browsing pages on the internet, so focused on what you’re looking at that hours slip by when it feels like only minutes have passed?
Or maybe you play sport, or paint, or engage in any other creative hobby and you fall into that state of flow where everything happens automatically and it feels amazing?
Or it might even be that you get so deeply engrossed in work, that all background sounds seem to fade away, and next time you look up the sun’s going down and you’d barely noticed?
Or it could be that you visit your parents and slip right back into being a petulant teenager around them. Then on your way home to your partner and kids, you wonder who that was that you just were, and why you acted like that again.
Hypnosis is a naturally occurring state that we all experience multiple times throughout the day. The everyday nature of trance means that everybody is able to be hypnotised, as we are dipping into and out of hypnosis all the time.
However, most people expect that being hypnotised is going to feel strange and unusual, rather than something that they experience regularly in their day-to-day lives.
Stage show hypnosis has led to people believing that they might do things they wouldn’t usually do while in hypnosis, that they can lose control or they might go so deep they don’t know what is happening to them.
This is not what you will experience with hypnosis in a therapeutic or coaching setting. It is not something you will experience working with me. Together, we agree on the goals for our work together, and each hypnosis session will be focused on working towards them.
When in the trance state, you may feel like you are very consciously aware some times, and at other times you may notice that you have forgotten to be aware of the words that I am saying. Trance is a continuum, and you will experience it in exactly the right way for you.
In hypnosis, your brain generates theta brainwaves. This is the state between waking relaxation (beta waves) and deep sleep (delta waves). In this state, your have access to your subconscious mind without the resistance of your conscious mind.
Many notable names from the past have taken advantage of this state to access their internal well of ideas. Thomas Edison would fall asleep with marbles in his hand, so that he could drop into the theta state and dream up his inventions. If he dropped too deeply into delta deep sleep, the marbles would fall and wake him up, so that he could get himself back into the theta state.
Hypnotherapy has garnered a lot of scientific attention from leading medical research institutions such as Yale and Stanford Universities, the Mayo Clinic, and X. The research verifies the benefits
My colleagues at Quest Cognitive Hypnotherapy took part in peer-reviewed research published in the Mental Health Review Journal. The results showed that in an average of six sessions, 71% of clients being treated for anxiety and therapy reported themselves recovered. This is compared to the average of 42% of people using other IAPT therapies such as CBT.
Alfred A. Barrios PhD (Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice) found that six sessions of hypnotherapy have an average recovery rate of 93%, as opposed to a recovery rate of 72% for 22 sessions of behavioral therapy and a recovery rate of 38% for 600 sessions of psychoanalysis.
Another study investigating the potential of hypnosis for pain management found that women with metastatic brain cancer who had used hypnosis doubled their survival rate in 10 years than those who didn’t.
A Harvard Medical School study found that surgical wounds and bones can heal faster when using hypnotherapy.
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