What is Hypnosis?

What is Hypnosis?

I used to have a long and drawn out explanation of how hypnosis, trance, and the mind all worked, but it was pointed out to me that only hypnotists care about stuff like that so I decided change it for something more useful.

Hypnosis is the purposeful induction of a trance state, by whatever means is successful.

While this is quite simple, it still doesn't say much.

The key to all this is really what we call "trance".

Trance has many names that people use, everything from "zoning out" to "a profound mental state".

The way I explain trance now is very simple:

Try to sing your favorite song out loud, while counting to ten in your head at the same time.

When you realize you can't do it, you are ready to accept that the reason you can't do it is because for all the great problem solving and logical rational things your conscious mind can do, it can only do things one at a time.

The problem with this is that we have a survival need to do more than one thing at a time.

We need to be able to look out for threats while we are doing just about anything else

So how do we do it? The answer is Trance.

Trance is our natural ability to automatically react to outside input without conscious thought.

Just like when the doctor hits our knee with that little hammer, we automatically react without conscious thought.

An example of this I like to use is when you learned how to ride a bicycle.

When you first started, you tried to pay attention to what your feet were doing, what your hands were doing, and where you were going, all at the same time.

Because of what we learned above, there was only one result: Crash.

It wasn't until we learned how to automatically react to what our feet felt on the pedals, and what our hands felt on the handle bars, that we were able to just pay attention to where we were going, and crash...turned into...zoom.

Trance is how we are able to multi-task, by automatically reacting to outside input.

Hypnosis just takes advantage of this by realizing that the input that we automatically react to, can be in the form of a suggestion.

Hypnosis takes the natural trance states of ours and makes them stronger, more profound, or "deeper" as we like to say.

So that's it. That's what trance is, what hypnosis is, and why we can be hypnotized.