Hypnotherapy may be used to treat issues resulting from automatic unconscious processes such as those arising from habits and beliefs. It may also be effective at working with parts of the human mind-body system that are controlled unconsciously by the brain. Hypnosis may help with sub-optimal habits, weight loss or gain, stress and anxiety, smoking and other addictions, insomnia, fears and phobias, pain, confidence, motivation, and many other issues.
As if all of that weren’t enough, hypnotherapy is often used to help with virtually all areas of personal development, to the extent that coaching is largely constructed from covert hypnosis techniques.
Common Uses of Hypnotherapy
1. Anxiety and Stress Management
Hypnotherapy is commonly used to help people with management of stress, anxiety, panic attacks, self-worth, and a range of associated issues.
Relaxation is effectively the opposite of stress, and is one of the gateways into hypnosis. And hypnosis can be used to build hypnotic triggers inside the mind of the subject.
When these are put together in the right way, it becomes possible to significantly decrease rates of stress and anxiety.
There are a range of processes within hypnotherapy and NLP that may be used to help with things associated with stress and anxiety.
At their core, these processes all work in the same way:
Identify the states that occur when the stress or anxiety pattern starts. Create a more useful alternative. Attach a hypnotic trigger to the start of the problem pattern to redirect the subject to that more useful alternative experience.
Now, not all stress and anxiety patterns are created equal. Sometimes it’s necessary to dissociate the subject from the experience. Other times, not so much.
Depending on the nature of the specific stress and anxiety, anything from 1 to 12 or more sessions may be required.
Given the prevalence of generalized stress and anxiety in our modern society, it should come as a surprise to no-one that helping with the management of anxiety and stress is a very common use of hypnotherapy.
2. Weight Loss
One of the most common reasons people see hypnotherapists is to lose weight and keep it off. There are a range of techniques available, from the quick and highly effective virtual gastric band, through to comprehensive programs in which the hypnotherapist sticks with the subject throughout their entire weight loss journey. At the other end of the spectrum, even simple hypnotic suggestions have been known to be effective.
3. Smoking Cessation
Hypnotherapy has been used for decades to help people to stop smoking, with success rates of over 90% not being uncommon.
The smoking habit is built out of nicotine addiction, habits, and misguided beliefs.
With hypnotherapy, it’s possible to minimize nicotine withdrawal symptoms, change the habitual component into more useful habits, and reframe all of the beliefs and reasons for smoking.
Quit smoking programs range from a single session, through to comprehensive programs covering the entire time required for the former smoker’s brain to recover from nicotine damage. Typically this is 1 to 3 sessions, with additional sessions as required.
A comprehensive quit smoking program will cover helping the former smoker appreciate how smoking works so they do not become demoralized, hypnotherapy to help with nicotine withdrawal, alternative habits, reframing of beliefs, and building reasons to not smoke, along with one or more check-ups while the former smoker’s brain recovers from nicotine.
4. Pain Management
One of the early uses of hypnosis was in the alleviation of pain during surgery. These days, there are multiple techniques that can be used to help reduce both chronic and acute pain of all kinds.
Pain is an important signal within the body. It tells us when there are issues we need to deal with, so that we can prevent them from getting worse.
But sometimes that system goes astray, and we end up with pain that doctors can do nothing about.
Once medical interventions have been exhausted, and an appropriate medical professional has said it’s okay to use hypnotherapy to manage a specific pain, hypnotherapy has been known to be highly effective.
Hypnotic pain management includes teaching the body to automatically move in ways that minimize further damage, helping with relaxation to prevent physical stress from causing more pain, and changing the subject’s experience so that the pain they feel is minimized.
Effective pain management with hypnosis may require as little as one session.
5. Overcoming Fears and Phobias
Hypnotherapy and NLP may be used to overcome fears and phobias of all kinds, and there are well-defined processes for doing so.
Common fears and phobias that are addressed include fear of flying, fear of spiders, fear of heights, fear of open spaces, fear of closed spaces, stage fright, and many more.
The overall process typically involves some dissociation to prevent making the fear worse. Then desensitization is applied, and the subject’s reactions to the stimulus are systematically changed.
Usually only a small number of sessions are required to deal with most common fears and phobias. Naturally, larger and more complex fears and phobias may require more.
List of Things Hypnosis Can Help With
Here we list the things hypnosis and hypnotherapy can typically help with. The number of sessions is an estimate to overcome the specific issue. This number may vary significantly, so it is generally best to discuss with your hypnotherapist.
Many issues can be mitigated within 12 sessions. Some require ongoing processes.
It is necessary to seek medical advice for some conditions. Depending on the condition, this may be from a GP or specialist. As a rule, do not book in for a hypnotherapy session for anything requiring medical advice without first discussing with an appropriate medical professional and with your hypnotherapist.
Some specific conditions require the hypnotherapist to have specialized training.
| Problem | Number of sessions typically required |
| Achieving Goals (Ongoing coaching) | 12+ |
| Addictions (Medical advice required) | 1 – 12 |
| Anger / Rage | 3 – 12 |
| Anxiety | 1 – 12 |
| Cravings | 1 – 3 |
| Creativity | 1+ |
| Depression (Medical advice required) | |
| Fear of Closed Spaces | 1 – 2 |
| Fear of Dogs | 1 – 3 |
| Fear of Flying | 1 |
| Fear of Heights | 1 |
| Fear of Missing Out | 3 – 6 |
| Fear of Open Spaces | 1 – 2 |
| Fear of Public Speaking / Stage Fright | 1 – 3 |
| Fear of Snakes | 1 – 3 |
| Fear of Spiders | 1 |
| Habit Change | 1 – 3 |
| Hypno-birthing | |
| Insomnia / Sleep | 3 – 12 |
| Lucid Dreaming | 3 – 12 |
| Migraines (Medical advice required) | 1 – 3 |
| Motivation (Coaching) | 3 – 12 |
| Nail Biting | 1 – 3 |
| Pain Management (Medical advice required) | 1 – 3 |
| Panic Attacks | 1 – 3 |
| Paranoia | 3 – 12 |
| Phobias | 1 – 12 |
| Psoriasis | |
| PTSD (Medical advice required) | 12+ |
| Self-Consciousness | 3 – 12 |
| Smoking Cessation / Quit Smoking | 1 – 3+ |
| Social Anxiety | 3 – 12 |
| Social Media Addiction | 3 – 12 |
| Stress | 1 – 12 |
| Sugar Addiction | 2 – 3 |
| Stuttering | 1 – 3 |
| Tinnitus | 2 – 6 |
| Trauma (Medical advice required) | 12+ |
| Weight Gain | 1 – 6 |
| Weight Loss – Virtual Gastric Band | 5 |
How to Tell If Hypnotherapy Can Help
It’s possible to determine whether hypnotherapy might help with 2 simple rules. If the issue has a mental or emotional component, hypnotherapy can potentially help. And if the issue is partially caused by the brain’s influence on the body, hypnotherapy may be able to help.
As you might imagine, these 2 rules cover just about anything it’s possible for a human to experience within themselves.
The core of all hypnotherapy lies in generating positive resources, and then applying these to change automatic unconscious processes. And since just about everything we do is driven by either habit or emotion, hypnotherapy can potentially impact just about anything.
Multiple studies suggest that hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis can even help with the immune response.
If you’ve got an issue and you’d like to discover whether hypnotherapy can help, you can contact me to discuss.
And if you’re ready to get started, you can book your online hypnosis session right now. Sessions are conducted via online video calls, so you don’t even need to leave home.
