Have you tried everything you know to stop smoking and haven’t been able to quit? Have you been on every diet plan you’ve ever heard of and still can’t quit overeating? Do you get anxious in certain situations such as test-taking or riding an elevator, and you can’t seem to overcome your fear? Do you just have an inexplicable negative outlook on life, but want to change your mindset to positive? All of these situations and many more can be solved with hypnosis. Hypnosis is a trance state characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation, and heightened imagination. To be hypnotized, you have to enter an almost dreamlike state. You’re not actually asleep, but your brain waves are functioning as if you almost are asleep. That’s where the word “hypnosis” comes from, the Greek god of sleep, Hypnos. If you’ve ever been driving somewhere, and all of a sudden you’re there, and you don’t really remember how you got there, you’ve been in a state of mind similar to the one you will need to be in to undergo hypnosis. When you were driving in this state, your mind shut out most of the stimuli around you except for the most important subject at hand, your actual driving. So, you got where you were going safely, but you didn’t remember too much about anything else along the way. That’s exactly what it feels like to be hypnotized. To get into this state of suggestibility, you have to be totally relaxed. Every hypnosis session begins with relaxation methods of some type before the suggestions are offered to you. You can either have someone perform hypnosis on you, or you can hypnotize yourself. It just takes some practice.

You may have heard that some people can not be hypnotized. While it is true that some people have a higher inclination to being hypnotized than others, all people can be hypnotized. The really difficult ones just have to rely on a professional and be ready and willing to undergo hypnosis. If you don’t really want to do this, just like anything else, you won’t be able to. But if you’d like to try hypnosis to help with a problem that you really want to change, it will work wonders for you. Many people claim that nothing worked to help them stop smoking before they tried hypnosis. I know that hypnosis helped me lose 60 pounds with ease. Both Athena and I took a course in hypnosis, and we both learned to right hypnosis scripts and to perform hypnosis on others and on ourselves. We’ve both had good success with making changes in our lives by listening to tapes we’ve recorded that put us into a hypnotic state where our suggestions to ourselves were easily accepted by our minds. Once the mind accepts something as true, it helps control the body to act in the same way.

Here’s how it works: When you are sufficiently relaxed, you are in a state of suggestibility. That means that anything the hypnotist tells you will be accepted by your mind completely. That is what makes hypnosis done for entertainment so much fun to watch. Even a very shy person, under hypnosis, will sing and act crazy with enthusiasm. But while the person will do things that he or she might not otherwise do in front of an audience, the person will still retain his or her sense of safety and morality. Hypnosis can’t change that, and a hypnotist can’t make you do anything you truly do not want to do. Thus, if you don’t really want to modify your eating habits or exercise more to lose weight, then you won’t benefit from the hypnotism. Or if you don’t want to quit smoking, even after hypnosis, you won’t be able to. That’s why I said you have to really want to do this to make it work.

The suggestions a hypnotist gives your subconscious mind will be believed by the subconscious mind, and your subconscious is what makes it easy to make changes in your life. You could come out of hypnosis believing that you love fresh vegetables and prefer them to candy, cake, and cookies. Thus, if you really believe that, you will buy those things at the grocery store and eat them for meals and snacks instead of buying and eating the sugary things that offer you no real nutrition, but make you fat and lethargic. So, your hypnotism has been successful. Likewise, if your subconscious, after hypnosis, believes that cigarettes make you feel bad, and you don’t like the taste of the smoke in your mouth. Instead, you enjoy fresh, clean air, and after meals, you want to take a walk and breathe in that fresh, clean air. So, instead of lighting up a cigarette after mealtime, you will find yourself craving a walk and breathing in clean, fresh air after dinner. Again, your hypnotism has been successful.

With hypnotism, it’s best to work on one change at a time. Let your subconscious mind focus on exercising more. When you’ve mastered that concept, then you could work on changing your eating habits. After that, maybe you’d like to focus on quitting smoking. Or maybe you’re ready to conquer your fear of taking tests. It’s up to you. Your subconscious mind holds many beliefs that influence everything you do in your life. And your subconscious mind can change to new beliefs. Once your subconscious mind has a new belief, you behave in a new way. And, voila! You’re a new person!