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Hypnosis is a highly focused state of mind, also known as an altered state of consciousness or "trance", whereby the unconscious mind is free to act without interference from regular consciousness. What’s more, trance is a totally natural state that you might find yourself in at various times throughout the day.
For example, when you get so engrossed in an activity that you lose track of time and you are oblivious to whatever’s going on around you. Maybe that happens when you’re reading a particularly gripping novel. Or watching the rain fall down the kitchen window that faces your garden. Or when you indulge in any hobby that occupies your mind completely. That's hypnosis and you are in a trance state when these occur.
When it comes to hypnosis, the human brain is often explained in two parts: a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. The conscious mind is the one you’re using right now to read this text. It’s your “wide awake” mind, your intellect and all the things you are aware of. The conscious mind can only deal with between 7 and 9 bits of information at any given time. That’s because you can only consciously focus on so many things at once before they start to get confusing or you lose track of some of them.
The unconscious is totally different. The unconscious mind is everything that’s happening in the background of your mind. It works automatically without any conscious help from you and can handle millions of pieces of data all at the same time.
An example of how the conscious & unconscious minds work in practice is driving. When you learned how to drive, there seemed to be so many things to remember. You’ve got to steer, signal, accelerate, brake, watch your mirrors, keep an eye on the road and try not to run over any pedestrians. Your conscious mind worked very hard to keep you and others safe.
At first it was confusing and difficult. Then, the more you practiced, the easier it became. And by now it just all flows together into one procedure called “driving” – something you just hop into the car and do automatically. You don’t have to go through the steps involved anymore. Your unconscious mind takes care of all of that for you. That’s how it’s possible to drive your car from one place to another and be unable to remember part of the journey and is a common example of an everyday trance phenomena referred to as "Time Distortion".
By tapping into the power of the unconscious mind, you can find answers to questions or situations that are causing you to feel “stuck” in life. Connecting with the unconscious mind also gives you the ability to heal from inside out as it allows you to process buried and unresolved negative emotions that have/are causing you pain.
The unconscious mind is also where your innate creativity lies and your ability to imagine those big, bold dreams. It’s also where all your memories are stored.
That’s how it’s possible to tap into memories and get rid of traumas from the past, or to resolve issues that are preventing you from moving forward. To do all of the above, the unconscious minds needs your absolute focus and attention. And this is where hypnosis comes into the picture because it gives you this directed focus.
When you can communicate with the unconscious, you can feed it with powerful suggestions to help make your life more productive and more enjoyable.
A cognitive hypnotherapist can help guide you in this.
Have you ever been in two minds about something?
You probably have, but it’s really just an expression. A metaphor for those times when you’re having trouble making a decision between two possible options.
The truth of the matter is, you’ve only got one mind.
So what about the notion of conscious and the unconscious minds. Doesn’t that suggest that there are two of them? The short answer to this is, yes. This is because explaining them as two separate minds makes it easier to explain something that is rather quite complex… Your mind.
What The Conscious Mind Can Do?
• The conscious mind can juggle 5-9 different things at once. That’s 5-9 bits of information. 5-9 activities. Or a mixture of both. You could call it multi-tasking. When the word “conscious” is used, it refers to the logical side of your brain. The side that analyses everything, criticises everything, and works in a linear way.
• It’s in control of your thinking while you’re awake.
• It’s in control of your voluntary movements.
• It’s in use whenever you speak.
• It powers your deliberate actions and enables you to choose goals.
• It’s the system you use when acquiring academic knowledge.
• It follows a sequential and logical pattern, whether that’s a thought pattern or a pattern of action. That’s what happens, for instance, when you’re trying to understand or work through a problem.
• It’s only aware of the here and now, and only experiences events in the present, its focus is limited.
So how is the unconscious different? A simple way to sum it up would be to say that it does everything else.
What The Unconscious Mind Can Do
• The unconscious can deal with all the information your conscious mind can’t handle. That’s everything you’re experiencing or dealing with on top of the 5-9 things your conscious mind can cope with. You could call it multi-multi-multi-tasking.
• It’s capable of absorbing and sorting through layer after layer of information. When the word “unconscious” is used, it refers to the intuitive side of your brain. The side that’s involved with memory, imagination, creativity and expressiveness.
• It doesn’t analyse or criticise; it just soaks it all up. It takes a holistic view, unlike the conscious mind’s limited linear approach.
• It’s where your feelings and perceptions emanate from.
• It’s in control of your involuntary movements.
• It contributes to your non-verbal communication.
• It powers your automatic behaviours like breathing and helps you achieve goals.
• It’s the system you use to acquire knowledge from your experiences.
• It’s capable of simultaneous thought and action. While your conscious mind searches for answers to problems, it’s your unconscious mind that finds them.
• It’s aware of the past and the present and can deal with both of them at the same time.
• It’s the storehouse of all your memories and experiences, and records absolutely everything you do.
• It has an almost limitless capacity.
Now, these two “minds” aren’t separate entities. They’re part of the same mechanism and that means they work together, side by side, to help you make sense of the world.
Given that the unconscious is responsible for doing so much to keep you functioning as a human being, keeping you safe and alive, it’s hardly surprising that it has such a significant impact on your behaviours. Some of your behaviours, although driven by your unconscious for what it believes to good intentions, may in fact be undesirable for you in reality. So by engaging directly with your unconscious mind it is possible to make changes within it that will result in changes in your behaviours.
One of the easiest ways to do it is through hypnosis and that might be a session of cognitive hypnotherapy.
When humans face a perceived challenge or threat, they have a partly physical response, known as the stress response.
The unconscious mind triggers the body to activate resources that help people either stay and confront the challenge or get to safety as fast as possible or to stay as still as possible. Stress is the body’s natural defence against predators and danger.
Through the release of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, the fight-flight-or-freeze (commonly just referred to as fight or flight) response has rapid effects on multiple bodily systems. Some things are increased: heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, perspiration, narrow focus of attention and food seeking behaviour (for energy).
Some things are decreased: such as digestion and immune function. As the name suggests, the fight or flight response was designed for a short-term physical response to a paleolithic stressor; a threat to life such as a predator or an angry enemy with a spear. By increasing heart rate and redirecting blood flow and energy to limbs and away from digestive and immune systems, the fight or flight response helped our ancestors battle the predator or run really fast away from it.
Our ancestors who were successful in fighting or flighting gave birth to our great-great-grandparents (approximately), and so the fight or flight response was part of the evolutionary advantage of the fittest people who survived and procreated. All going well so far, thank you sympathetic nervous system, thank you ancestors.
Fast forward to the stressors of this modern day, and you can see that our stress response is not quite so well adapted to them. Stressful work-life, cyber bullying, rising house prices and the pressure to discover your “authentic” self and live the life you really want. None of these really benefit from being able to run from a tiger or fight an angry cave-man. Not only that, but our modern stressors cannot be solved in an afternoon, or even within a week.
So what happens when our well-intentioned but unsuitable fight or flight response tries to help us with long-term modern stressors? With the prolonged release of stress hormones, blood pressure goes up, the cardiovascular system is taxed to do its job, the immune system is weakened, digestion doesn’t happen properly, you get headaches and have trouble winding down. Not to mention a reduced ability for learning and memory, partly because the resources of the attentional system are being directed rigidly towards immediate threats, rather than flexibly and curiously to all the other interesting things going on in life.
So our stress response is doing pretty much the same things as it was doing for our ancestors, but for longer periods. A short burst of adrenaline gives us motivation and energy for the challenges in life, but a steady stream of it just makes us run down. It turns out this takes a serious toll on the body. Chronic stress plays a sizeable role in mental illness and many physical conditions.
Hypnotherapy can be used to help a person relax and manage the thoughts and emotions that affect us on a physical, mental and emotional level, in everyday life. Simple techniques such as breathing exercises can help with specific events that may trigger anxiety or cause undue stress. There may be a deeper issue that is causing you to be more upset in certain situations and this could be something you are not even consciously aware of. However the repressed anxiety is like a beach ball held down under water; every time you try to let go it’s there, trying to float back to the surface.
Hypnotherapy can help identify the root cause of issues like this and a therapist can show you how to deal with this in an effective way.
A cognitive hypnotherapist can help you manage and reduce the affect the stress response has on your life.