How to Hypnotize Yourself | A Self-Hypnosis Tutorial

In this article, you will learn how to hypnotize yourself easily and effectively using my 5-step process. I will guide you through these 5 steps so that you can use self-hypnosis to reprogram your subconscious mind.

Learning how to hypnotize yourself is a wonderful skill to acquire. It allows you to change unconscious habits, banish limiting beliefs and release or resolve troublesome emotions. It feels great too!

All hypnosis is self-hypnosis, so even when you are being hypnotized by a hypnotherapist, it is actually you that is doing the hypnosis. This may seem hard to believe, especially if you have seen hypnosis on stage or on TV. I’ll explain how this works shortly.

Keep reading and you’ll discover how to hypnotize yourself so that you can make lasting changes to your life right now.

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What is a Hypnotic State?

Every thought you have is a form of self-hypnosis. Why? Because every thought is either taking you towards or away from some desired outcome.

The characteristics of a hypnotic state include a more focussed concentration or attention on one idea and a greater internal focus with less awareness of the external world. It’s also characterized by slower brainwave states.

You have been in a hypnotic state many times in the past. For example when reading a really captivating novel and you’re completely unaware of what is happening around you. Or when watching a movie that you get completely involved with emotionally.

I believe that addictions are a form of negative hypnosis. People think so much about their next cigarette or alcoholic drink that it becomes their focus of attention. Once they have it, their mind returns to normal for a while before the same thing happens again.

The Different Brain Wave States

In normal everyday awareness, your brainwaves are at the beta level. This is a fairly fast brainwave state and is required for taking action, keeping safe and mental alertness.

However, at certain times during the day, your brainwaves slow down to the alpha level. This often happens when daydreaming, reading a book, watching a movie or when in hypnosis. In the alpha state, your concentration improves and you learn and remember things more easily.

When your brain waves slow down even further, you reach the theta level. This is close to falling asleep and is associated with rapid eye movement and that light dreamy sleep feeling. In hypnosis, people often reach the theta level too.

When asleep, brain waves slow down to the delta level. This can occasionally be achieved in meditation too, after many months or even years of practice.

Purpose of Self Hypnosis

So the purpose of hypnotizing yourself is to reprogram your subconscious mind. This is the part of your mind that is responsible for your feelings, emotions and impulsive behaviors. By consciously hypnotizing yourself, you start to reprogram the subconscious mind so that you naturally do the behaviors and actions that you want to do.

The 5 Steps to Hypnotizing Yourself

To learn how to hypnotize yourself, follow the 5 step process that is covered below.

Step 1 : Slow Down Your Brain Waves

There are a few parts to slowing down your brain waves that I will cover below:

Develop Peripheral Vision

With your eyes open, focus on an object in the room that is directly in front of you. Now, without moving your eyes, notice what you can see above, below, to the left and to the right of the object that you are focussing on. This is known as peripheral or side vision.

As you do this, your brain is forced to take in more information from your eyes. Your brain can only hold around 6 to 9 pieces of information at a time. Therefore, whilst you hold the peripheral vision, your brain is forced to slow down other processes in your brain, including your internal dialogue or self-talk.

Relaxation Breathing

Now start breathing in deeply. Ensure that your stomach or diaphragm expands as you breathe in. This is known as diaphragmatic breathing and is how we naturally used to breathe when we were babies. When you breathe out, make your out-breath slightly longer than your in-breath.

Repeat the word “relax” as a mantra

Now repeat the word “relax” either out loud or silently to yourself every 3 seconds for 1 minute.

Close your eyes

If you haven’t already, now is the time to close your eyes. You are now in a state of hypnosis. You may notice yourself being less attached to, or involved with your thoughts. You will be more internally focussed and less aware of what is happening around you. You will feel relaxed and be in a great state to learn and take in new information. Your subconscious mind is now much more receptive to new information.

Step 2 : Suspend Existing Beliefs

A key step in learning how to hypnotize yourself correctly and effectively involves understanding how the critical faculty works and the importance of suspending existing beliefs to keep this part of your mind out of the way.

Your “Door Policy” for New Ideas

Imagine your critical faculty as being like a bouncer in a nightclub. The queue of people waiting outside really want to get into this wonderful place where all the fun, excitement and enjoyment is. However, the bouncer decides who to let in and who to turn away.

If you directly challenge the bouncer, he will block the door, so you have absolutely no chance of getting into this amazing nightclub. If you could make friends with the bouncer or distract him, then you could make it into this club.

So think of your new positive ideas and suggestions as being the queue of people. Your critical faculty (your internal bouncer), decides which ideas and suggestions will be accepted by your mind (so are let in) and which are rejected (kept out).

Directly challenge your critical faculty with a new suggestion such as “I am a millionaire” and it will probably be rejected because it won’t be believable. Your door policy for new ideas will reject it.

One way to make friends with your critical faculty, your door policy for new ideas, is to use a suspend belief statement. Its a way of compromising with your mind by saying that you only need to accept these new ideas for the duration of the self-hypnosis session. When done regularly, this is long enough for the new ideas to become embedded in your unconscious mind.

The Suspend Belief Statement

Here is the suspend belief statement that I recommend that you use.

“I consciously, deliberately and willingly suspend my existing beliefs about (the desired outcome), Instead, I accept these new ideas as if they are completely true right now. My desire and belief are completely aligned just for now and that feels good.”

The suspend belief idea originally came from “The Nature of Personal Reality” by Jane Roberts.

Step 3 : Reinforce Core Beliefs

In Step 3, you will reinforce up to five core beliefs. This is key to learning how to hypnotize yourself effectively. These five core beliefs provide a firm foundation for the unique positive suggestions or visualizations that will follow in step 4. The five positive core beliefs are:

1. I am good enough

Behind any limiting ideas such as I’m not intelligent enough, smart enough, extravert enough (or pretty much anything else ending in “enough) is the core belief that I am not good enough. This is why it is so important to reinforce the positive core belief that “I am good enough”

2. I am worthy enough

If you feel that you are not worthy of love, money (or something else) or you feel that you don’t deserve to have something, then you will want to reinforce the core belief that “I am worthy enough”

3. The world is a safe place for me

If you feel that you could get hurt mentally, emotionally or physically, then repeat the positive core belief of “the world is a safe place for me”. However, do exercise common sense with this one, and don’t knowingly venture into places or situations that could cause physical harm.

4. I am powerful and can influence my world

This one is super-important if you have been trying to change part of your life for a while without success. The more times you try something new and fail, the more it reinforces the core belief that “nothing will work for me”. I see this happen a lot in people that struggle to find solutions to chronic health issues. It can also happen if you spend a lot of time and money on self-development activities, but find it hard to change.

Reinforce the core belief of “I am powerful and can influence my world” to help increase your belief that whatever you are learning, applying or getting outside help for will work for you. It’s also a great core belief to have to increase your ability to influence others in a positive way.

5. Love and Relationships = Pleasure

This is only relevant when working with love and relationship goals, especially if you have been heart-broken or suffered mental, emotional or even physical pain from relationships in the past.

If you keep attracting people that cause you pain and unhappiness, then you need to reinforce this core belief strongly, so that it becomes part of your identity.

It’s not necessary to use all of these five core beliefs. Just pick the ones that resonate with you or would help you the most.

Step 4 : Introduce New Positive Ideas

The next step is to create new positive ideas about the thing you want to change. This should be about something that you don’t have right now, but you want in the future. The new positive ideas could be affirmations or mantras that you repeat, visualizing what you want to happen or asking yourself self-hypnotic questions.

Self-Hypnotic Affirmations or Mantras

The simplest way to introduce new positive ideas is by creating affirmations or mantras that you repeat during self-hypnosis. It’s super important that these new positive statements are believable. Here are 2 examples of positive statements that are not believable.

• I am a millionaire (for a person that is broke and in debt)
• My body is in perfect health (for someone with a chronic and perhaps life-changing disease).

In both these examples, the person’s critical faculty will challenge these new ideas and not let them inside, just like a bouncer would turn this person away from a night club. The new ideas will simply not be accepted.

To make your new positive suggestions more believable, use the following phrases.

• I want to…
• I can…
• I am learning to…
• Every day I am getting better at…
• I take action every day to become one step closer to…

Here is an example of how to apply these statements to help your body heal from a health condition.

• I want my body to begin to heal itself and feel good once again.
• My body can begin to heal itself and feel good once again.
• I am learning to find ways to help my body heal itself so that I can feel good once again.
• Every day, my body is getting better at healing itself.
• I take action every day to become one step closer to healing myself and feeling good once again.

Can you see how much more believable these positive statements would be to a person that wants to overcome a health condition or disease.

Creative Visualization

Instead of repeating affirmations or mantras, you can visualize the goal or outcome. See yourself having already achieved the thing you desire. Creative Visualization is covered in greater detail in another blog post that you can access here.

However, the key points are to imagine visualizing on a large cinema screen (rather than the back of your eyelids) and to use all your senses. Imagine what you hear, feel, taste and touch as well as what you see. Also, include the positive internal dialogue of self-talk that you will notice when you have achieved this outcome.

Self-Hypnotic Questions

Asking yourself questions encourages your mind to find or seek an answer automatically. When done in hypnosis, the answers can come more directly from your subconscious mind or intuition. As a result, they will often be more powerful and accurate.

Here are some great self-hypnotic questions to ask yourself.

• How can I increase my ability to do… (desired action)?
• How can I do this even more?
• How can I motivate myself to do (desired action)?
• What would be the best way to achieve (desired outcome)?
• What other ways would help me more easily achieve (desired outcome)?

Allow your mind the time and space that it needs to answer these questions. Sometimes, the answers will come after the self-hypnosis session, so be aware of your intuition and new ideas or answers that come to mind in the next few days.

Step 5 : Return to Normal Waking Awareness

The final step is to come back to normal waking awareness. The easiest way to do this is to count from 5 to 1 and become more aware of different parts of your body as you do so. Then open your eyes and have a stretch.

How to Hypnotize Yourself More Effectively.

Here are a few tips to help make your self-hypnosis sessions even more powerful and effective.

1. Repeat the self-hypnosis session every day for around 30 to 40 days. It can often take a few repetitions to plant the new ideas firmly in your subconscious mind.
2. Focus on one desired outcome only during the self-hypnosis session.
3. Focus on one new positive affirmation, mantra or visualization for at least 20 seconds. Holding one idea for 20 seconds or longer is unusual in today’s fast-paced world, so your brain will see these new ideas as important and build new neuro-connections in your brain. The technique of holding only one idea in your mind for 20 seconds or longer is called “monoideism”.
4. Use your emotions. The subconscious mind really takes notice of emotions. The more you can feel the positive emotions behind your suggestions or visualizations, the more this will imprint the new positive ideas into your subconscious mind.
5. Do self-hypnosis first thing in the morning or just before going to sleep at night. At these times, your brain is likely to be in the more receptive alpha brain wave state, so your new positive suggestions or visualizations will go in at a deeper level. This also means that you can skip step 1 and jump straight to step 2, as your brain waves will already be slower than normal.
6. Record your self-hypnosis session and then use the recording to guide you through it. It can be quite difficult to guide yourself as your mind can wander off. When you use a recording, your brain can focus on the recording and you can immerse yourself completely in the process.

Although learning how to hypnotize yourself is very effective, there may be times when you need an experienced hypnotherapist to work through your specific issues, habits or mental blocks. I can help you do that, so if you would like me to hypnotize you, then click on the link below.

https://selfhelpforlife.com/hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy can be delivered very effectively online from the comfort of your home or office using Skype, Facetime or Zoom.

Thank you for reading this article.  If you enjoyed it and found it useful, then please share it with other people, or on social media.

Hope you are having a wonderful day!

Paul