Self hypnosis

Description Hypnosis is not that, what you can see in bad Hollywood films or TV shows, where somebody only has to click one's fingers and a person do what he wants. It is a kind of meditation where you try to get in a state, which allows you to communicate with your subconscious mind. You almost forget what happens around you and focus on you. When you are in self hypnosis you can tell your subconscious mind things to get some misunderstandings out of the way.

Conscious and subconscious mind

Every person has a conscious and a subconscious mind. With the conscious mind we do things, where we realize that we are doing them and the subconscious mind does things like breathing. They both have a different logic.
The subconscious mind is limited to deductive logic, which means that it reasons from the general to the specific. For example, let\'s say that you have known 10 or 15 people with red hair in your life and every one of them was hot tempered. If you were then introduced to a person with red hair, it would not be illogical of you to think that this person might also is hot tempered.
The logic of the conscious mind goes in the reverse direction. It is the logic of science in which you go from the specific to the general. You make a number of observations and then generalize what you see to the rest of the population. This is called inductive logic.

Purposes

Self-hypnosis is a powerful instrument. You can increase your concentration or creativity, you can stop smoking and you can cure deceases. Here are some examples:

- increase academic abilities (concentration, memory, learning, creativity, presentation skills, .)

- cure addictions
- cure fears and phobias

- fitness (motivation and performance)
- control habits (nail chewing, smoking, .)
- medical (skin conditions, tinnitus, pain reduction, .)
- increase social abilities (shyness, self-esteem, .)

- cancer (only in some cases)
- weight loss

- .

There are more reasons to hypnotise yourself than you think, but there is no magic by which any of us, without effort, can fix everything that is wrong with us. It can do much, but nobody will become a strong, good looking genius through self-hypnosis if he wasn't it before.


Induction

First of all self-hypnosis is a skill, that means the more you do it the more you can do with it, but you shouldn't make it too intensive. From 20 to 30 minutes a day would be the best. You should make a schedule to ensure that you do it really almost every day, otherwise it won't work.


Preparation

At the beginning of the hypnosis you will have to find a comfortable and silent place, for example your bed. Then you should lay down, take your arms beside your body and if it's possible don't cross your legs. After that it would be time for yoga or other breathing practices, but if you don't know one just take a few deep breaths and hold the air some moments in your lung.


Relaxation

The second step is to relax your muscles. You can close your eyes while you do that. You just have to imagine that each muscle becomes limp and completely relaxed. Start with your toes and think your way up your body and especially mind your neck muscles. If you are more skilled in hypnosis you will be able to relax more quickly, but at the beginning you should give you plenty of time to get really relaxed and this can be up to half an hour.


Deepening procedures

The next step is to get deeper in hypnosis. The most popular method for that is the count-down technique. You just start to count from 100 to 0, but don't count loud, because you should avoid as much physically movement as possible. The counting speed should be natural; not too fast; not too slow. That means normally one count for each two or three seconds. While you are counting you can imagine that you go down stairs or jump down from a very high point. Feel free to use your own metaphor, the main thing is that it goes downwards.

If you have finished the deepening procedure you should be and will be in a hypnotic state. You can normally notice that by feeling absolutely relaxed. In this state your subconscious mind is ready to accept your suggestions.


Suggestions


Suggestions are the things you want to tell your subconscious mind. In the state of hypnosis your mind is suggestible and you can tell him something you want to change. For example, if someone wakes up every night although he is still tired he would formulate his suggestion like this: "Every night I will go promptly to sleep and stay restfully asleep until it is time to get up in the morning".






Application

The easiest way to apply suggestions is to have them worked out before, properly prepared, worded, and memorized. It should not be too difficult to remember them because they should rather be short. Then you just have to talk or better think to yourself, but don't say you in your suggestions, you should rather use the first person form.

Formulation
First of all your suggestions should be possible. That means that nobody can change his or her eye colour by hypnotising himself. Such suggestions won't work and they reduce the subconscious acceptance of self hypnosis. That changing the eye colour is impossible should be clear to anyone, but there are some things, which sound impossible, but they aren't. An example for that is enlarging a woman's bust size, sounds impossible but it worked in several cases.
Another rule for formulating suggestions is to make it positive. You should avoid using negative words like "not", "will not" or "can not". For example don't say "I will not have headache in the morning", a better formulation would be "My head will feel free in the mourning". It's not forbidden to use negative words, but the result is better when you use the positive way.
Also suggestions, which are very strict and are formulated like commands provide worse results than if you would say "I can". This is a point which can also appear in the other direction. It depends on the person, because some people have a subconscious want for commands or things like that.

If you don't know how to solve a specific problem, it might help to use ideomotor questioning, which will be described in the next chapter.

Ideomotor questioning

Ideomotor questioning is a technical term for asking your subconscious mind why it does what it does. It will answer you by trigger small muscle reactions. A very common method for this is to use a pendulum. You can make your own pendulum with a piece of thread and a ring or something like that. You also so need a sheet of paper, on which you have to draw a big "x", a big "+" and a big "o" like this:





Hold the end of the pendulum in your finger, with your elbow resting on a table and try to hold it over the centre of the drawing. The pendulum has 6 directions to swing: left-right, up-down, left-diagonal, right-diagonal, and the two circular directions, clock- and counter-clockwise
First of all you have to find out which direction is assigned to which answer. The possible answers are "yes", "no", "maybe", "don't want to answer" and "rephrase the question". The sixth direction is an escape place for the remaining unanswerable questions. Now start with looking at the pendulum and ask yourself which direction will mean "yes" and repeat that for the other answers. Maybe you should write the assignments down, but you have to do this procedure every time you do ideomotor questioning.
After determining the assignments you can start ask questions. You can only get a "yes" or "no" so you have to ask many questions to get for example the reason for a specific chronic decease or something like that.