Hypnotherapy - A Complete Guide
What is Hypnotherapy - A Complete Guide
What is hypnotherapy and how does it work?
Before we delve into the world of hypnotherapy, it’s important to understand what hypnosis is. Simply put, hypnosis is a state of mind, one we all pass through naturally many times a day. It can also be brought about using a set of relaxation techniques.
What is hypnotherapy?
There are different ways a hypnotherapist will use hypnosis or else you can always try self-hypnosis to get yourself into that lovely relaxed state of hypnosis. One of the most popular ways is to use a Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR), which is used a lot in hypnotherapy and is not too dissimilar to a guided meditation.
So, the difference between hypnosis and hypnotherapy is simply this: Hypnosis is the tool and hypnotherapy is the use of the tool. Hypnotherapy is the practice of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes. In other words, if you are a hypnotherapist, professional mental health therapist or medical doctor, and you’re using hypnosis to help an individual overcome a mental condition or issue, you’re practising hypnotherapy.
We have a superb in-house hypnotherapist and author, Hazel Gale, who is a Master Practitioner of Cognitive Hypnotherapy and a Master NLP Practitioner – she has HEAPS of incredible experience. She works closely with us to create all of our hypnosis sessions.
In our sessions, we like to use a modern approach that draws on recent theories and discoveries from evolutionary psychology, positive psychology and cognitive theory, and which utilises practical and technical elements from a broad range of therapeutic styles such as neurolinguistic programming (NLP), traditional hypnotherapy and skills taken from Gestalt therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
Hypnosis and hypnotherapy are simply about being taken into a deep-enough hypnotic state of relaxation to access the subconscious and affect positive change.
Many people use hypnotherapy to stop smoking or hypnotherapy for weight loss or hypnosis for anxiety. It can actually be used to help with a huge array of issues. Though we don’t tend to focus on hypnotherapy to stop smoking nor hypnotherapy for weight loss. (Though our sessions will be helpful in other ways for people stopping smoking and with weight loss.) Clementine is all about supporting good sleep, stress, anxiety, confidence, impostor syndrome, busy lives and body confidence. By allowing people to take control and improve these aspects of their mental health on their own, the need for more invasive therapy and treatment can be reduced.
Does Hypnotherapy really work?
There are a plethora of studies that have been conducted into hypnotherapy and its variations, so much so, it has become a popular approach used within the NHS and among GP practitioners across the UK. In fact, one of the largest studies ever undertaken in hypnosis, New Scientist came out with the verdict: “Hypnosis is proven to work”.
How does it work?
Hypnotherapy can train you to practise thoughts and feelings that you want to have so you can practise the feeling of calm, which makes you better at creating the calm when you need it. It can also improve your emotional awareness and emotional literacy because you’re experiencing your feelings mindfully.
There are many things that can happen throughout a hypnotherapy session.
Hypnotherapy can be different for every individual, and it will include all sorts of things from a range of different therapy styles, including questioning processes, visualisation processes, processes to help people reframe and reorganise their thought patterns, memories and emotional patterns in order to achieve the goal they want.
A session of hypnosis can also help you to mentally rehearse better patterns of behaviour. An example of this is someone suffering from social anxiety. One thing that they know that they want to do is to speak more clearly and confidently in a social situation, and through hypnotherapy you can get them to visualise themselves doing it and practise it, and the more you practise it more familiar and easier it becomes to do that.
Another is associations, which is a big part of hypnotherapy, and in an NLP this technique is called anchoring. We use anchoring in lots of the recordings and the courses, and it involves repeatedly linking an emotion that you want to have, say confidence, with a certain cue. The cue could be a colour you imagine, an action such as pinching your thumb and forefinger together, it could be a word that you think over or a song that you play in your head.
It’s important to practise these associations in our recordings, and if you listen to the recordings repeatedly, and therefore practise your association repeatedly, it can become strong enough for you to use in everyday life to interrupt negative patterns of something like anxiety and replace it with something like a feeling of confidence.
Often, hypnosis recordings are taken away by the client to listen to in between their therapy sessions. It is believed that they make an enormous difference to the rate of improvement with some clients using them more than others, and those who do, tend to get better, faster. So what we're doing with Clementine is using that part of hypnotherapy, where we're making suggestions around certain topics that we know to be problems with large groups of women.
We use hypnotherapeutic suggestion at the end of virtually every session to help train the mind into better thought processes and patterns of behaviour and emotion, so the mind makes better associations.
The Clementine hypnosis recordings are ways of encapsulating key ideas, better perspectives, better patterns of feeling and behaviour that can help support you in your movement towards whatever your particular goal is. The other thing we're doing, of course, in the recordings, is helping people answer those key questions that they would answer with a therapist in a session – like, what's blocking you? And where do you actually want to get to? These can be done on the fly in sessions and they are also done in more detail in the courses.
How does online hypnotherapy compare to in person?
A typical in-person hypnotherapy session tends to be between 60 - 90 minutes long, and the main suggestive portion of this session will last around 10 - 15 minutes. That's why in our Clementine sessions, we use the key part of hypnotherapy sessions, which are the use of suggestions, and within our courses, we utilise more of the techniques used in an in-person session.
Although in-person hypnotherapy allows you to have that all-important human contact with your hypnotherapist, actually, hypnotherapy works just as well in most cases online and remotely. Since the pandemic, hypnotherapists around the world have embraced the digital platform and many have realised the benefits of online sessions.
In a nutshell, both online and in-person are effective and the range of treatment a therapist may be able may be enhanced by working with the client in both forms.
I think we’ve all noted some of the other benefits of working online and remotely too. Firstly, you don’t have to travel. You are in the comfort of your own home, and for a session, you can sit on a reclined chair, sofa or bed even. You can participate in a session in the same exact way you would do in a hypnotherapy room. Better still, directly after your session, you can relax (or fall asleep).
Clients can also gain access to professional hypnotherapists from around the world, not limited by distance. With enhanced treatments and therapy being developed constantly, being able to share new ideas and approaches can help increase the effectiveness of this treatment.
What is self-hypnosis?
Self-hypnosis is where a person gives him or herself hypnotic suggestions. In order to master the techniques needed to use self-hypnosis. You can learn self-hypnosis independently or you can use apps like Clementine, which are designed to be a therapist in your pocket where there is someone to guide you through it all so that you don't have to do it for yourself, but where you can learn the techniques through repetition.
There is a vast range of tools, including the sessions on Clementine, and you'll be talked through each of them step by step. So all you have to do is close your eyes, find a few minutes, and by repeating these guided sessions, some of these tools will become things that you can learn to do for yourself.
This is a form of self-hypnosis where you experience a progressive relaxation, for example, a way of relaxing the muscles in your body, group by group. With self-hypnosis you can also learn how to use anchors for calm, anchors for confidence, you can learn how to close your eyes and engage with some kind of metaphor that helps you to let go of troubling thoughts before bed.
Benefits of Hypnotherapy
Hypnosis can provide a number of benefits as a form of therapy, without the risk of side effects that medicated solutions for mental health issues can potentially provide. The approaches hypnotherapists use can help to treat a number of conditions.
Sleep
Hypnotherapy recordings help with sleep by interrupting the disturbing mental chatter that often occurs when we try to go to sleep. Through listening to a recording, you're listening to another conversation, meaning that you're not giving your mind the opportunity to go off on those disruptive spirals. So that's why it's really good for sleep.
If you start to fall asleep during a recording, you don't give yourself a chance to get panicked and go into fight or flight mode, which would stop you from sleeping. And over time, with repetition of this, you could build up a better sleep routine, which has been proven to work, and which also makes a massive difference to overall health. The relaxation elements of the sessions also mean that you are more likely to have improved quality of sleep by becoming more relaxed before you sleep, thus encouraging deeper sleep.
Check out our guide to sleep to find our top tips on how to improve your sleep quality through sleep hypnosis.
Stress
Hypnotherapy can be a great way to tackle stress. A hypnotherapy session can help you cope with stress and work with feelings that are causing you to feel stressed and irritable, and instead, guide you to let go and feel freedom while accepting those feelings.
In our Clementine sessions, we often instil new responses to old situations. The sessions may also help to identify hotspots in your life where you can cut down on stressful aspects. Making it easier to remove some of these stressors or find other strategies for reducing stress.
For those stress stimuli that are not as easy to reduce, such as parenting or certain jobs, it’s possible to use hypnotherapy to reframe these stresses and responses into a positive new response. Ultimately, relaxation and guiding people to access relaxation and calm is what our sessions aim to do.
Anxiety
It’s sometimes tricky to pinpoint the cause of anxiety but there are ways you can learn how to deal with anxious feelings. Hypnotherapy can really help with anxiety. Reframing helps put the problem in perspective but also reworking that perspective.
For example, a coping strategy for panic attacks may require some uncovering techniques, but in some cases suggestions around the specific cause are helpful. An appropriate word or action or visualisation can be chosen.
Similarly to treating stress, hypnotherapy can work with anxiety in the same sort of fashion – hypnosis can help access relaxation and feelings of calm, through suggestions and visualisations.
When it comes to treatment for either stress or anxiety it helps to place coping strategies, visualisations, affirmations and suggestions that are rooted strongly within the realms of calm, relaxation and space. We do this within our sessions so you can access a sense of relaxation easier than you did before, and once you are in inhabit that space more often, you will be more resourceful and able to deal with anxiety, stress or fear, ultimately leading to a change in behaviours to help control your response to anxiety when it occurs.
Imposter syndrome
So what is imposter syndrome exactly? Well, it’s usually connected to feelings of self-doubt. If someone gets into a pattern where they doubt their talents, skills or accomplishments or they have a fear of being exposed as a "fraud", this is likely to be imposter syndrome.
Imposter syndrome can feel like you don’t deserve what you have achieved. It can be quite common among high-achieving women, though impostor syndrome can affect both men and women equally.
Hypnosis can help you overcome these misplaced self-doubts. As you relax and listen repeatedly to our sessions, you'll notice that you: Feel a great lessening of tension, develop a new respect for yourself and what you are capable of, relax and get on with what you do with full focus and accept yourself as a person with many different aspects - all you.
Confidence
So first of all, what is confidence? It’s a positive feeling that stems from an appreciation of one’s own abilities, which means that you feel able to overcome challenges or face your fears.
By working your unconscious mind, a hypnotherapist can help you take control of how you are feeling about yourself, helping you to discover what may have caused you to develop low-confidence and helping you to feel more confident.
Confidence can have a knock-on effect on other aspects of our life and can sometimes lead to low self-esteem or anxiety. However, acting confident teaches your subconscious a new behaviour, in a natural way that integrates into your normal way of life. More confidence is something we can all do at various times. Hypnotherapy for confidence unfolds the confidence you were born with.
We all face different challenges, from relationships, work, education and health. If we don’t have enough confidence, we can find that small things might throw us off track, slow us down and cause anxiety. So confidence is key and anxiety is something that you learn. Clementine uses hypnotherapy for confidence and we can help you to release old beliefs and boost your confidence.
Find out how to build your confidence and techniques to change your habits and approaches with our confidence guide.
What are the benefits of self-hypnosis?
One of the biggest benefits of self-hypnosis is to be able to have things that you can do for yourself, when you need them, without being dependent on anyone else. So self-hypnosis is a really empowering tool to have in your armoury! Learning tools that can be repeated in any situation to make yourself feel better, as well as helping you become more mindful and learning to be aware of your own thoughts.
How does Clementine help?
We have included a variety of ways to access the benefits of hypnotherapy within Clementine. Our sessions, use the key tool of suggestion and help tackle issues such as sleep, to our in-depth courses, our Pick Me Up sessions for on-the-go and our mantras. Each element has been designed to help with repetition, which is a key element to benefiting from hypnotherapy, to improve your overall mental health.
The mantra sessions we include are about patterning in positive belief systems that are associated with better mental health. Then there are the mantras that show up on your screen, which again, is about repetition and keeping you constantly coming back into a positive mindset.
Our Pick Me Up sessions help users to troubleshoot anything you are going through. If you have fifteen minutes spare in your day to help to pattern-in better thought processes and practise thinking and feeling like the person you want to feel like.
And our courses utilise other hypnotherapy techniques to enhance particular areas that women struggle with. We've created all these different ways because different people will have different preferences and because hypnotherapy is not just one thing that happens in one way.
How does it work?
Hypnotherapy can train you to practise thoughts and feelings that you want to have so you can practise the feeling of calm, which makes you better at creating the calm when you need it. It can also improve your emotional awareness and emotional literacy because you’re experiencing your feelings mindfully.
There are many things that can happen throughout a hypnotherapy session. Hypnotherapy can be different for every individual, and it will include all sorts of things from a range of different therapy styles, including questioning processes, visualisation processes, processes to help people reframe and reorganise their thought patterns, memories and emotional patterns in order to achieve the goal they want.
A session of hypnosis can also help you to mentally rehearse better patterns of behaviour. An example of this is someone suffering from social anxiety. One thing that they know that they want to do is to speak more clearly and confidently in a social situation, and through hypnotherapy, you can get them to visualise themselves doing it and practise it, and the more you practise it more familiar and easier it becomes to do that.
Another is associations, which is a big part of hypnotherapy, and in an NLP this technique is called anchoring. We use anchoring in lots of the recordings and the courses, and it involves repeatedly linking an emotion that you want to have, say confidence, with a certain cue. The cue could be a colour you imagine, an action such as pinching your thumb and forefinger together, it could be a word that you think over or a song that you play in your head.
It’s important to practise these associations in our recordings, and if you listen to the recordings repeatedly, and therefore practise your association repeatedly, it can become strong enough for you to use in everyday life to interrupt negative patterns of something like anxiety and replace it with something like a feeling of confidence.
Often, hypnosis recordings are taken away by the client to listen to in between their therapy sessions. It is believed that they make an enormous difference to the rate of improvement with some clients using them more than others, and those who do, tend to get better, faster. So what we're doing with Clementine is using that part of hypnotherapy, where we're making suggestions around certain topics that we know to be problems with large groups of women.
We use hypnotherapeutic suggestion at the end of virtually every session to help train the mind into better thought processes and patterns of behaviour and emotion, so the mind makes better associations.
The Clementine hypnosis recordings are ways of encapsulating key ideas, better perspectives, better patterns of feeling and behaviour that can help support you in your movement towards whatever your particular goal is. The other thing we're doing, of course, in the recordings, is helping people answer those key questions that they would answer with a therapist in a session – like, what's blocking you? And where do you actually want to get to? These can be done on the fly in sessions and they are also done in more detail in the courses.
How is it online compared to in person?
A typical in-person hypnotherapy session tends to be between 60 - 90 minutes long, and the main suggestive portion of this session will last around 10 - 15 minutes. That's why in our Clementine sessions, we use the key part of a hypnotherapy session, which is the use of suggestions, and within our courses we utilise more of the techniques used in an in-person session.
Although in-person hypnotherapy allows you to have that all-important human contact, actually, hypnotherapy works just as well in most cases online and remotely. Since the pandemic, hypnotherapists around the world have embraced the digital platform and many have realised the benefits of online sessions.
In a nutshell, both online and in-person are effective.
I think we’ve all noted some of the other benefits of working online and remotely too. Firstly, you don’t have to travel. You are in the comfort of your own home, and for a session, you can sit on a reclined chair, sofa or bed even. You can participate in a session in the same exact way you would do in a hypnotherapy room. Better still, directly after your session, you can relax (or fall asleep).
What are the benefits for:
Sleep
Hypnotherapy recordings certainly help with sleep by interrupting the disturbing mental chatter that often occurs when we try to go to sleep. Through listening to a recording, you're listening to another conversation, meaning that you're not giving your mind the opportunity to go off on those disruptive spirals. So that's why it's really good for sleep.
If you start to fall asleep during a recording, you don't give yourself a chance to get panicked and go into fight or flight mode, which would stop you from sleeping. And over time, with repetition of this, you could build up a better sleep routine, which has been proven to work, and which also makes a massive difference to overall health. The relaxation elements of the sessions also means that you are more likely to have improved quality of sleep by becoming more relaxed before you sleep, thus encouraging deeper sleep.
Stress
Hypnotherapy can be a great way to tackle stress. A hypnotherapy session can help you cope with stress and work with feelings that are causing you to feel stressed and irritable, and instead, guide you to let go and feel freedom while accepting those feelings.
In our Clementine sessions we often instil new responses to old situations. The sessions may also help to identify hotspots in your life where you can cut down on stressful aspects. Making it easier to remove some of these stressors or find other strategies for reducing stress.
For those stress stimuli that are not as easy to reduce, such as parenting or certain jobs, it’s possible to use hypnotherapy to reframe these stresses and responses into a positive new response. Ultimately, relaxation and guiding people to access relaxation and calm is what our sessions aim to do.
Anxiety
It’s sometimes tricky to pinpoint the cause of anxiety but there are ways you can learn how to deal with anxious feelings. Hypnotherapy can really help with anxiety. Reframing helps put the problem in perspective, but also reworking that perspective.
For example, a coping strategy for panic attacks may require some uncovering techniques, but in some cases suggestions around the specific cause are helpful. An appropriate word or action or visualisation can be chosen.
Similarly to treating stress, hypnotherapy can work with anxiety in the same sort of fashion – hypnosis can help access relaxation and feelings of calm, through suggestions and visualisations.
When it comes to treatment for either stress or anxiety it helps to place coping strategies, visualisations, affirmations and suggestions that are rooted strongly within the realms of calm, relaxation and space. We do this within our sessions so you can access a sense of relaxation easier than you did before, and once you are in inhabit that space more often, you will be more resourceful and able to deal with anxiety, stress or fear.
Imposter syndrome
So what is imposter syndrome exactly? Well, it’s usually connected to feelings of self-doubt. If someone gets into a pattern where they doubt their talents, skills or accomplishments or they have a fear of being exposed as a "fraud", this is likely to be imposter syndrome.
Imposter syndrome can feel like you don’t deserve what you have achieved. It can be quite common among high-achieving women, though impostor syndrome can affect both men and women equally.
Hypnosis can help you overcome these misplaced self-doubts. As you relax and listen repeatedly to our sessions, you'll notice that you: Feel a great lessening of tension, develop a new respect for yourself and what you are capable of, relax and get on with what you do with full focus and accept yourself as a person with many different aspects - all you.
Confidence
So first of all, what is confidence? It’s a positive feeling that stems from an appreciation of one’s own abilities, which means that you feel able to overcome challenges or face your fears.
By working your unconscious mind, a hypnotherapist can help you take control of how you are feeling about yourself, helping you to discover what may have caused you to develop low-confidence and helping you to feel more confident.
Confidence can have a knock-on effect on other aspects of our life and can sometimes lead to low self-esteem or anxiety. However, acting confident teaches your subconscious a new behaviour, in a natural way that integrates into your normal way of life. More confidence is something we can all do at various times. Hypnotherapy for confidence unfolds the confidence you were born with.
We all face different challenges, from relationships, work, education and health. If we don’t have enough confidence, we can find that small things might throw us off track, slow us down and cause anxiety. So confidence is key and anxiety is something that you learn. Clementine uses hypnotherapy for confidence and we can help you to release old beliefs and boost your confidence.
How does Clementine help?
We have included a variety of ways to access the benefits of hypnotherapy within Clementine. Our sessions, use the key tool of suggestion and help tackle issues such as sleep, to our in-depth courses, our Pick Me Up sessions for on-the-go and our mantras. Each element has been designed to help with repetition, which is a key element to benefiting from hypnotherapy.
The mantra sessions we include are about patterning in positive belief systems that are associated with better mental health. Then there are the mantras that show up on your screen, which again, is about repetition and keeping you constantly coming back into a positive mindset.
Our Pick Me Up sessions help users to troubleshoot anything you are going through. If you have fifteen minutes spare in your day to help to pattern-in better thought processes and practise thinking and feeling like the person you want to feel like.
And our courses utilise other hypnotherapy techniques to enhance particular areas that women struggle with. We've created all these different ways because different people will have different preferences and because hypnotherapy is not just one thing that happens in one way.
Hypnotherapy vs Meditation
Self-Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy
What is self-hypnosis?
Self-hypnosis is where a person gives him or herself hypnotic suggestions. In order to master the techniques needed to use self-hypnosis. You can learn self-hypnosis independently or you can use apps like Clementine, which are designed to be a therapist in your pocket where there is someone to guide you through it all, so that you don't have to do it for yourself, but where you can learn the techniques through repetition.
There is a vast range of tools, including the sessions on Clementine, and you'll be talked through each of them step by step. So all you have to do is close your eyes, find a few minutes, and by repeating these guided sessions, some of these tools will become things that you can learn to do for yourself.
This is a form of self-hypnosis where you experience a progressive relaxation, for example, a way of relaxing the muscles in your body, group by group. With self-hypnosis you can also learn how to use anchors for calm, anchors for confidence, you can learn how to close your eyes and engage with some kind of metaphor that helps you to let go of troubling thoughts before bed.
What are the benefits of self-hypnosis?
One of the biggest benefits of self-hypnosis is to be able to have things that you can do for yourself, when you need them, without being dependent on anyone else. So self-hypnosis is a really empowering tool to have in your armoury! Learning tools that can be repeated in any situation to make yourself feel better, as well as helping you become more mindful and learning to be aware of your own thoughts.
What are the benefits for sleep / anxiety / weight loss / smoking? Include a session for each of these?
If people use sessions from Clementine for things like calm, confidence, sleep and more, you will learn skills that will help you, even without the app, to tackle issues such as anxiety and sleep better.
People seeking hypnotherapy to stop smoking or hypnotherapy for weight loss would all benefit from Clementine. Although these people may like to explore specialist hypnotherapy to help with specific things such as stopping smoking and weight loss, the calming and confidence boosting Clementine sessions will still be of benefit and a supportive tool on your quest.