What is hypnosis state shifting?

There I crossed it out. Hypnosis - I don’t like the word ( no offence to the late Mr Braid).

From the Greek ‘Hypnos’ - meaning ‘sleep’...it just doesn’t quite cut it.

‘Hypnosis’ is simply an attempted nomalisation of something that doesn’t exist in physical form and is fluid in nature. Something that we all experience and go through EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Case in point: you are driving home from work. You have just left the office and it’s Friday. You need to grab some more pasta for dinner on the way. It’s little Josh’s first football match of the season tomorrow and you need to make sure his kit is clean - on that note, there’s a tonne of laundry to do and you’ve got a birthday meal to go to tomorrow night and still haven’t got them a gift. You’ve also got to look over the new home insurance quotes on Sunday to make sure……you're home. All of a sudden…you are home. You can’t remember anything of the journey but you are sitting in your car on the driveway, you are home.

What happened?...’Hypnosis’, or my preferred description, a state shift.

Driving is a learned behaviour embedded in your subconscious through all that repetition. Your conscious mind or critical factor had nothing it actually needed to process in real time so it switched your focus to all your future to-dos and in doing so, it shifted your state and put you into a form of trance. Your subconscious, wanting to keep you alive, just carried on with what it knows, driving the car - completely in control.

What didn’t happen is that YOU WERE NOT ASLEEP (no hypnos).

Now to give you a bit of science.

We know that our brains emit brainwaves. We can measure them, and we know that these brainwaves change frequency throughout the day impacting our mental and physical state.

Beta - we are alert and fully conscious.

Alpha - we are daydreaming/ distracted by or focused on something ( light trance)

Theta - we are in deep thought/introspection/ meditation ( deeper trance)

Delta - we are asleep and completely unconscious.

So you see in driving home you started somewhere in the Beta range, then your conscious mind became distracted with all the things you needed to do and put you in the Alpha range. Next thing you know you are back home and back in Beta.

Your mental and physical state were shifted as they are many times throughout your day.

This is the very core of what we know as hypnosis/hypnotherapy - this state shifting. Moving the attention of the conscious mind where we want it to change our brainwave frequency, our ‘state’, so we can add, remove or change things in our subconscious powerhouse to bring about the changes we want on the outside.

Well - that’s the ‘what is it’ covered.

The ‘how's it done’?...there a few basic principles but for now lets just say we are really talking artistry here - limited only by the experience, creativity and skill of the change agent - in this case, me.