The Hypnotic State: A Natural Part of Everyday Life — and a Powerful Tool for Healing
When most people hear the word hypnosis, they imagine something mysterious or staged. In reality, the hypnotic state is something you drift in and out of many times every single day. It’s a natural, focused state of mind where your attention turns inward and your subconscious becomes more accessible.
You may recognize this state in everyday life:
- When you’re deeply absorbed in remembering a past conversation and miss your highway exit.
- When you’re daydreaming and time seems to slip by.
- In the drowsy, dreamlike moment just before falling asleep or as you’re waking, not quite “back in the room.”
- While gazing out a window in quiet inner reflection.
- In the deep focus of meditation.
- During the dream state at night.
These are all forms of light hypnosis. Hypnotherapy simply uses this natural state with purpose and guidance.
Hypnotherapy: Turning a Natural State Into Healing
In hypnotherapy, we intentionally guide you into this calm, inward-focused state. Once there, the subconscious — the part of your mind that drives emotions, habits, and even some body functions — becomes easier to access. Working at this level allows for understanding, re-patterning, and change that conscious effort alone often can’t achieve.
Some of the ways hypnotherapy uses the hypnotic state include:
- Dialoguing with the body — Communicating with a symptom or body part to discover the underlying cause and find resolution.
- Healing past memories or trauma — Reprocessing events that have kept you stuck or blocked from moving forward.
- Re-educating the immune system — Teaching the body not to overreact to allergens or even its own tissues.
- Breaking habits and behaviors — Shifting patterns such as procrastination or forgetting to follow through.
- Changing deep core beliefs — Rewriting long-held ideas like “I’m not worthy” or “I’m not safe.”
Hypnosis and Control: Clearing Up the Myth
Many people worry that hypnosis means “losing control.” In fact, the opposite is true.
“One of the interesting ironies about hypnosis is that old fantasy that it takes away control,” says Dr. David Spiegel, professor and associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and a leading expert on the practice. “It’s actually a way of enhancing people’s control, of teaching them how to control aspects of their body’s function and sensation that they thought they couldn’t.” — Newsweek, “Altered States”
Hypnosis doesn’t make you powerless — it helps you harness your own power in ways you might not have realized were possible.
Why This Matters for Healing
Because the subconscious influences how the body responds to stress, pain, and even the immune system, learning to work in this state can be transformative — especially for chronic illness and autoimmune conditions. Hypnotherapy helps you move from simply coping to actively guiding your mind and body toward healing.
The hypnotic state is a common occurrence that happens throughout your day. Such as:
- when you are focused inwards remembering a previous conversation (and forget to take your exit off the highway)
- when you are daydreaming
- the state right before falling asleep or just as you are waking and you’re not quite “back in the room”
- the state of inner reflection while looking out the window
- the focused state of meditation
- the dream state
Hypnotherapy Uses the Hypnotic State to Gain Understanding and Create Change
What happens in hypnotherapy is that we utilize this hypnotic state to:
- to communicate with your symptom or a body part and find the underlying cause and their resolution
- to resolve past memories and traumas that are blocking you from moving forward
- to re-educate your immune system to not over-react to allergens or your own body
- to break habits or behavior such as procrastinating or forgetting to check your calendar
- to change a deep core belief such as “I’m not worthy”
“One of the interesting ironies about hypnosis is that old fantasy that it takes away control,’ says Dr. David Spiegel, professor and associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and a leading expert on the practice. ‘It’s actually a way of enhancing people’s control, of teaching them how to control aspects of their body’s function and sensation that they thought they couldn’t.‘” Newsweek, Altered States