Practical Self Hypnosis Tips For Life Improvement

The Benefits of Self Hypnosis.

Self hypnosis is the process of giving your own subconscious mind suggestions with the aim of altering your beliefs, your feelings or even your performance.

Think of it as a little like inception: the planting of ideas that will ultimately help you to thrive and to get past road blocks that may have been your undoing in the past.

This is what self-hypnosis does on an abstract level, but let’s take a look at some of the specific advantages of using this excellent tool.

Changing Your Beliefs.

The power of all hypnotic induction is in its ability to alter your beliefs on a certain subject.

While this might not sound highly transformative on the face of it, it can actually be enough to completely change your life in the right circumstances enabling personal development.

This is owing to the role of placebo and the law of attraction which together conspire to ensure that your beliefs can shape your reality.

‘The law of attraction’ for instance shows us how believing something causes you to act in a certain way which in turn causes that thing to happen.

Think you’re unsuccessful? Then you’ll slouch and never put yourself forward.

Think you’re a winner? Then you’re going to telling people that with your body language.

And in countless studies, placebos have shown how our belief alone can even profoundly shape our health. Even coping with sleep disorders.

Knowing Yourself.

A hypnotist then can use these facts to help patients to think in healthier and more productive ways to in turn ensure they are psychologically as healthy as they can be and that they hold the unconscious beliefs that lead to success.

Ultimately they can ‘reprogram’ their patients to think in manners similar to the world’s most successful people.

But with self hypnosis you have the benefit of getting to do this yourself.

That means you can to choose precisely what you need to believe to go further and to then go about making that happen.

You live inside your own head and you know precisely how your brain works – and this puts you in the perfect position to make the most profound changes.

Plus you’ll know better than anyone when it’s working!

On top of that there are some other clear benefits to self hypnosis too – such as the fact that it can be used anywhere.

Or the fact that it’s completely free and can only take a few minutes.

Eventually you will learn to be constantly changing your beliefs and thoughts and this is incredibly powerful.

Teach a man to fish…

Self-hypnosis is of course hypnosis but carried out alone to treat yourself as the ‘patient’ or subject.

Rather than sitting in a hypnotist’s office and receiving guidance from them in the form of a script and instructions, you will instead simply be taking yourself through the same steps with the same goal of changing the way you think about a particular subject.

The problem with this, is that it can be easier to ‘second guess’ ourselves when we use self-hypnosis.

The objective of any form of hypnosis is to get ourselves to ‘believe’ the suggestions that we are being given and that can be difficult when we know that we wrote them down earlier that afternoon.

This is why self-hypnosis can often be carried out in the form of visualization instead…

How to Use Visualization for Self-Hypnosis.

As with any form of hypnosis, you first need to get yourself into a suggestible stage.

This means relaxing yourself so that you drop your guard and are more likely to believe what you see and hear.

With visualization though the next stage will involve visualizing something vividly in an attempt to almost make it real. Instead of listening to someone tell you that you are highly successful – you will instead attempt to see it in your mind’s eye.

Here you are actually going to visualize yourself being the person you want to be, getting the reactions you want to get from others and achieving the things you want to achieve.

What makes this so powerful is that our brains can’t always tell the difference between fantasy and reality enabling a wide variety of methods to impact or beliefs.

As long as the visualization is convincing enough, we will respond as though it were really happening on a neurological level. And what does this mean?

It means that our brain then believes the narrative of that visualization.

Other Uses of Visualization and Hypnosis.

Very often visualization is used to help us see our own success (specific or general) and to get us to really believe in it.

Likewise though, visualization can also be used for other things – for instance it is commonly used to help us feel calmer and to combat stress in the form of an imagined ‘happy place’. This may help with overcoming a fear of public speaking for instance.

This is a very powerful tool that you can return to whenever you are struggling with anxiety. Likewise, visualization can also be used therapeutically to change the way you ‘see’ a memory or a person.

Visualization is a key component in many forms of self-hypnosis. When you use self-hypnosis, it can be harder to use ‘suggestions’ using a script as you will be talking to yourself rather than letting someone else guide you.

Thus we need to find other ways to influence our unconscious minds and using visualization is one of the very best ways to do that.

In fact, if you are good at visualization and you try hard enough, you can actually fool your brain into responding as though what you were imagining were really there.

So if you can visualize yourself as successful – while in a highly suggestible state – then your brain will believe it.

But what if you aren’t very good at visualizing things? What if your mind’s eye can’t conjure real-feeling imagery? Here are some tips that can help:

Start Small.

Don’t start out trying to visualize entire places but instead imagine smaller items that are situated in the real world with you.

If you’re sitting at a desk right now, then imagine a mouse standing next to your keyboard waving at you. ‘Rendering’ something small and simple like this is often much easier.

When you do this, pay attention to the way it moves, the way it casts its shadows and what it looks like from different angles.

Practice this often and you can start to build up to bigger things.

Visualizing Places.

For places, important tips are to try drawing on memories (which will populate your visualizations anyway, with or without your say-so) and to focus on sensations other than your sight. Think about how you’re feeling, the temperature and the ambient sound and you’ll make your environment far more real and lifelike.

Visualization Streaming.

One type of ‘training’ you can use to improve your abilities in visualization and thus self-hypnosis is ‘visualization streaming’.

Here you will visualize items or places and while you do you will speak them out loud. Perhaps this would mean saying ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘the grass is blowing slightly in the wind’.

All this will help you to cement these aspects of your visualization as ‘real’.

Practice!

Most importantly though, to get better at visualization you need to practice.

While you might not be able to convince yourself your visualizations are real just yet, with time they will become more tangible and thus far more effective in helping you to create your reality.

Self-hypnosis is potentially a very powerful tool that you can use to overcome fears, improve physical and mental performance and even help cure addictions.

But without our understanding of the unconscious mind, there would be no such thing as hypnotism, never mind self-hypnosis.

Here we will look at what precisely the unconscious mind is and how it relates to your sense of well-being and your personality at all times.

What is the Unconscious?

Many of us think of Freud as something of a whack job who accused people of fancying their parents.

Be that as it may though, he should also be remembered for the many incredibly contributions he made to the world of psychology and mindset health.

Before Freud there was no psychotherapy or counselling and before Freud there was no concept of an unconscious mind.

In Freud’s view, the unconscious mind was everything going on ‘under the surface’ throughout our waking lives. He often likened this to an iceberg – where only the very tip is visible with all the rest being murky and inaccessible. This understanding ushered in a new era for health care professionals.

So you might say one thing and think another… but on some level there is more going on under the surface that even you’re unaware of.

It’s key to note at this point that Freud only ever described an ‘unconscious mind’ because that was the part of the mind we weren’t conscious of.

He never used the term ‘subconscious’ which is really just a misnomer.

Complications.

Our unconscious is made up of all the things our brain believes to be inconsequential or too upsetting for our conscious mind to handle.

Thus we often ‘repress’ memories and thus can’t remember them, we deny things and we fail to notice things – but they are all still there working away under the surface.

And if there are unconscious associations we hold about something or beliefs about something – then these can hold us back and cause us not to perform at our best, or event to become mentally ill.

This then is the role of classic Freudian psychodynamic intervention – to help the individual come to terms and move past these unconscious road blocks.

Freud had many tools for doing this, from the ‘ink blot test’ to the interpretation of dreams (the ‘royal road to the unconscious’).

Hypnotism.

Another tool of Freud’s though was hypnotism, which aims to put patients in a ‘suggestible state’ where they are able to almost ‘switch off’ their conscious, critical mind for a bit. This allows the hypnotist, therapist or even the individual themselves to ‘talk’ to the unconscious mind directly and even to plant suggestions that might alter it.

Self-hypnosis is the name for hypnotism that is carried out by the patient on themselves.

This removes the need for a hypnotist which of course has some drawbacks but also has a number of distinct advantages.

For starters, self-hypnosis can be practiced anywhere and at any time and as an added bonus it’s also completely free of charge. Better yet though, self-hypnosis allows you to remain completely in control and to use suggestions that you know are going to effective for your particular psychology.

So it’s powerful stuff sure, but what can you use self-hypnosis to achieve? Read on and we’ll look at some powerful examples…

Combating Anxiety.

If you have an anxious personality and are constantly dealing with stress and anxiety attacks, then learning to stay calm and to deal better with stress can do a great deal for your quality of life.

In the short term, self-hypnosis can be used as a very effective relaxation technique, while in the long term it is very effective for preventing those stressful thoughts from arising in the first place.

Confidence

Self-hypnosis can be used to improve confidence which can have highly beneficial knock-on effects in nearly every aspect of your life.

At the same time though, you can also use hypnosis on yourself to train context-specific confidence.

Perhaps for instance you want to be more confident with members of the opposite sex? Or maybe you have trouble speaking in public?

Addictions.

One of the most common reasons people will often go and see professional hypnotists is to help them overcome addictions whether those be smoking addictions, sex addictions or even problems with eating.

In just the same way, you can use self-hypnosis to help you overcome your own addictions by reducing cravings and changing the way you feel about your own addictions.

This is a case of mind over body, going as far as even reducing the need for chronic medication and an alternative anesthesia in some situations.

Adherence.

Adherence is your ability to set yourself goals or ambitions and then stick to them.

A good example for instance is the ability to stick to a new training regime if you are trying to lose weight or build muscle, or to stick to a new diet.

No diet will work if you can’t stick to it after all!

Again, self-hypnosis can help with this and might be enough to ensure that you actually stick at the program you’ve set yourself.

Once you increase your own ability to stick at your goals – anything becomes possible!

In conclusion.

Experimental Hypnosis and various stages of self hypnosis seem to indeed be able to achieve a state of mind over body, reducing stress levels, similar to the results brought about by a meditation routine.

As such health care professionals advocate varying stages of hypnosis as a form of meditation affecting the mental health of the patient and using it as a means to assist with issues as diverse as labour pain, abdominal pain and other chronic pain.