In everyday life you enter a state of hypnosis without even noticing. How many times have you jumped in your car to complete a journey and before you know it, you’re there and haven’t paid any attention to what’s happening around you, it’s not necessary to concentrate on the route, you know it off by heart, your mind just drifts off to other places and events, ruminating about what you have to get done today, or the conversation you had last night.

When watching TV, you become completely absorbed in a film, mesmerised by the story and feeling the emotions that the characters are experiencing, joy, sadness, laughing with them or crying! It’s as if you are there with them, living the experience, shouting at the screen, telling them what to do!

Consider the times when you are caught up in a daydream. Completely detached from your immediate surroundings, contact with reality is blurred and partially substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.

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All these states of altered reality are characterised by a state of relaxation, which we allow ourselves to enter to influence decisions we want to make, we ruminate, dream and imagine the desired outcomes of events that have already passed or how we see our futures, what we wish we had done.

Every night when we dream we reach different levels of relaxation which are measured by our sleep wave patterns, you have probably heard of  Beta, Alpha and Theta. Most dream sleep is mostly linked to Theta brainwave activity, the level we aim to reach during relaxation and hypnotherapy is Alpha, this is the frequency of brain activity you are at, directly before you fall asleep and we then utilise this altered state to by giving beneficial suggestions to your subconscious to change patterns or behaviours that you  are unhappy with or have been cause you anxiety.

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Most of our habits and learnings, like driving, reading and writing are so second nature to us that it is not our critical mind (our conscious minds) that steer them but our subconscious. They are learnt, habitual, we do not have to think about how to walk, speak or drive for that matter, we know how to do these things, it is second nature. You may or may not be aware that 90% of our behaviour is governed by our subconscious minds, our learnt behaviours, only 10% of our behaviour is consciously, logically determined by our conscious minds. With this knowledge, you can understand why this is the area of the brain that we as hypnotherapists want to connect with. With hypnotherapy we aim to bypass the conscious, rational part of the brain to communicate with the subconscious which influences your mental and physical functions, without your recognizing it or even being aware.

I accomplish this firstly, by relaxing you, you are aware of everything going on around you and are in complete control. If at any time you choose to come out of your state of relaxation, you are able to do so. What you choose to do is to enjoy this state of comfort and relaxation and to allow your concentration to listen to the suggestions that are being given to you and to interpret them.