What Can Hypnosis Be Used For?

There seems to be two main uses for hypnosis. One is for entertainment in the form of stage hypnosis, the other is for therapy in the form of hypnotherapy.

Stage hypnosis usually involves an audience and participants. The hypnotist will pick out volunteers, who are usually the more extravert type of people.

A hypnotist will often do ‘tests’ to the volunteers to see how suggestible they are. He may for instance ask then volunteers to clasp their hands together and suggest that they cannot pull them apart. He will often make it clear that they must return to the audience if they can pull their hands apart. Without trying to sound too cynical, this gives an incentive for those extravert people who want to join in the show to not be able to pull their hands apart.

The stage hypnotist will then have a selection of extravert people who want to play along with the show. It then becomes far easier for him to suggest entertaining things to them. Think about this – if you’d come that far in the show, are you really going to say ‘Actually I don’t feel compelled to dance like Elvis’ when the rest of the volunteers and joining in, and the audience and hypnotist are watching you and expecting it? The show largely works through expectation and peer pressure – plus picking the right people who are most likely to play along.

Although the two are often confused, hypnotherapy is a very different discipline altogether. A skilled stage hypnotist cannot do therapeutic hypnosis without adequate training and experience. Similarly a hypnotherapist cannot do a stage show without the knowledge and training either. Some people do learn both however.

Hypnotherapy is quite well known for being effective at treating things, such as smoking addictions, weight loss, and phobias. However the scope of hypnotherapy is actually far wider than this, and is growing all the time. Hypnotherapy can actually be used to help with almost anything you can imagine.

Hypnotherapists seem to be becoming more and more creative with the therapies that they are able to offer. For instance it is perfectly possible for them to very closely replicate the effects of a Botox procedure, by relaxing the muscles of the face. I have seen this for myself and can tell you that a relaxed face under hypnosis does definitely have a reduced amount of lines. Hypnotherapists can also help sufferers of hay fever by suggesting images of snowy mountains – the exact opposite of the images that trigger hay fever. They can even help people become more confident with members of the opposite sex, by having them mentally rehearse being just that.

Of course hypnotherapy has its limits. It cannot cure cancer or HIV for example. Although it can be used to help strengthen the immune system, ease pain, and feel more relaxed, so it can still help.

In a similar way hypnotherapy cannot magically make weight fall off someone. However it can influence our behaviour so that we eat less and exercise more. The result would be weight loss, but it cannot be achieved without a behaviour change, which can be facilitated by hypnotherapy.

There are also other new fields of hypnosis besides stage and clinical, that seem to have emerged over the past few years. There is the rapidly growing field of erotic hypnosis that is used for fantasy and enhancing sexual pleasure. There is also hypnobirthing to help with child birth, marketing hypnosis for business messages, covert hypnosis for sneaky people, and even pet hypnosis.

The internet has helped hypnotherapists from all over the world talk to each other and share ideas. As well as the usual social networks, there are many that are dedicated solely for hypnosis practitioners. With this new growth in communication, people are realising that there are more and more possibilities with hypnotherapy. Statistics show that the internet is still growing, meaning that the scope of hypnotherapy will probably continue to grow for some time to come. So don’t be surprised if something that you want changing or improving about yourself has a legitimate solution in the discipline of hypnotherapy...and if it doesn’t yet, then it probably soon will.