Depending on your goals, hypnosis can consume a significant amount of time each day. Or almost none at all.
So how often should you do hypnosis? As a rule, hypnosis recordings should be listened to 1-2 times a day for at least 30 days. Self-hypnosis can be practiced constantly, with longer sessions daily. And as with self-hypnosis, hypnotizing others can be practiced constantly. In this article, we’ll go over how much time to spend for each form of hypnosis.
With any form of hypnosis, there’s a bit of a trade-off.
On the one hand, more hypnosis is generally better, up to a limit. And on the other hand, if we were to spend all our time in deep hypnosis, we probably wouldn’t achieve all the other things we need to in life.
As with all things, balance is important.
How often should you listen to hypnosis recordings?
Typical hypnosis recordings are comprised of a hypnosis induction, some hypnosis to cause the desired change, and something to bring you out of hypnosis, or send you to sleep.
They tend to be between 30 minutes and 90 minutes long.
If the hypnosis recording is designed to send you to sleep afterwards, you should listen to it once per day. And if it is designed to bring you out of hypnosis when it ends, you can listen anywhere from 1 to 3 times per day.
Beyond that, and you’ll be starting to consume time that probably should be spent doing other things, such as your job.
Not only that, but a lot of hypnotic change requires time to take effect. If all you do all day is listen to hypnosis recordings, your brain might not have the time necessary to actually make the desired changes. This means that listening to hypnosis recordings too much may potentially cause them to take longer to work.
That said, there are no known negative side-effects to listening to hypnosis recordings designed to help you with some aspect of your life.
Evidence of this is that there are people in various parts of the world who spend days, months, or years meditating from shortly after they wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.
In terms of the effect on the brain, meditation is virtually indistinguishable from hypnosis.
In practical terms: Most people can safely listen to hypnosis recordings for as many hours as they have available during the day. But it’s generally best to limit it to 1 to 3 times per day.
Why use hypnosis recordings?
Hypnosis recordings provide easy access to hypnotic change without the need to pay for a large number of sessions with a hypnotist.
They are known to be the least effective form of hypnosis. The trade-off is that they are cheap to buy, and because it costs nothing to play them, you can play as many times as required.
This means that it’s possible to achieve quite significant changes over time through listening to hypnosis recordings.
If you’d like any kind of change that may require ongoing work over time, such as changing habits, overcoming anxiety, increasing motivation, and other similar things, hypnosis recordings can work brilliantly.
How to use hypnosis recordings
To use your hypnosis recording, it’s a good idea to set up somewhere peaceful where you’re unlikely to be interrupted.
I usually listen to them lying on my bed, but you can also sit in a comfortable chair.
Wherever you are listening, it’s important to make sure that you won’t come to harm if you fall asleep. Never listen to hypnosis recordings while driving or carrying out any task where loss of focus might be dangerous.
Hypnosis recordings can be a bit hit-and-miss at inducing hypnosis, because the hypnotist has no way to get feedback from you.
I find that I generally get better results from hypnosis recordings when I use self-hypnosis to drop myself into hypnosis, rather than relying on whatever’s embedded in the recording.
The overall process looks something like this:
1. Turn off notifications on your devices, turn off distractions like TV and radio, ask other people not to disturb you for a while, and put any pets out of the room.
2. Make yourself comfortable and set up your device to play the recording. You can use either a headset, or the speakers on the device.
3. Press the play button to play the hypnosis recording.
4. Use self-hypnosis to induce hypnosis. Or just follow along with the recording.
5. Experience the recording. Don’t try to do anything unless it specifically tells you to. Just allow the words to wash over you.
6. Either come out of hypnosis and proceed with your day, or drift off to sleep.
Do not expect to see results right away. When a change is spread out over a month or longer, the results on any particular day are likely to be so small you cannot notice them. Even though the daily changes might be tiny, the cumulative effect over the course of one or more months can be enormous.
Usually it’s recommended to play a recording daily for at least 30 days to start to achieve meaningful results. This is because it takes that long for our brains to start to form new habits by this method.
How often should you do self-hypnosis?
Self-hypnosis is one of the most effective forms of hypnosis. The challenge with it is often finding the time to hypnotize yourself on a regular basis.
What I find works best is if I have a large number of very short instances of self-hypnosis throughout each day, combined with the occasional longer self-hypnosis session.
Micro-mindfulness
If you’re into lucid dreaming, these very short instances of self-hypnosis can easily double as reality checks. Similarly, if you’re into mindfulness, very short periods of mindfulness spread throughout your days are effectively the same thing as self-hypnosis.
Just how short?
I find that the micro-mindfulness sessions are typically just a few seconds long. I go into hypnosis, make some mindful observations of the environment around me which double as reality checks, and then come back out of hypnosis.
And I do that constantly throughout the day.
The end result of this is that in any given day I have anywhere from dozens to hundreds of instances of very short self-hypnosis sessions. This effectively builds and maintains my ability to go into hypnosis on-demand any time and any place.
If you’d like to explore that idea further, you might enjoy my article How to Meditate When You Have No Time.
Self-hypnosis
On top of the numerous micro-mindfulness sessions, it’s useful to have one or more full self-hypnosis sessions each day.
The optimal number of self-hypnosis sessions depends on exactly what you’re wanting to achieve.
Overall, one full session of self-hypnosis per day is a good target to aim for.
Naturally, you can have as many full self-hypnosis sessions as you can fit into your day. And as with listening to hypnosis recordings, sometimes less is more.
There’s a simple self-hypnosis process that you can follow in my article on How to Hypnotize Yourself.
How often should you practice hypnotizing people?
As with all skills, when we’re learning to hypnotize others, it’s important to practice regularly.
There is generally a direct correlation between the amount of practice and the level of success.
In short: The more you practice something, the more quickly you become good at it.
And the really cool thing about hypnotizing people is that you can practice different parts of it without having to send someone all the way into hypnosis.
How to practice hypnotizing people constantly
The more you can find ways to fit practicing small components of hypnosis into your life, the better.
There are countless ways this can be done.
For example, if you’re in sales or marketing, hypnosis is a natural fit. Both give ample opportunities to practice hypnotic language patterns. And if you’re talking to real live people, that’s the perfect opportunity to practice building rapport and agreement frames.
If you’d like to know more about that, you might enjoy my article How to Use Agreement to Build Rapport Even if You’re an Introvert and Hate Small Talk.
Similarly, anchoring can be practiced in just about any interaction with people. If you’d like to know more about the sorts of things that I’ve done with that, I give a few practical examples of this my book Artful Hypnotic Anchoring.
Becoming a hypnotist involves building a lot of skills, and almost all of them can be practiced outside of hypnosis.
It’s just a matter of figuring out the details.
So for every skill that you want to practice, take a few moments to think through your day-to-day life and notice ways that you can incorporate practicing that skill on an ongoing basis.
How often to hypnotize people
As mentioned earlier, the more you can practice any skill, the more quickly you’ll get good at it.
How often you can practice depends on far more things than we can cover here. As a rule though, so long as it fits into your life and you can find the right subjects, practice as often as you can.
Each week I have a certain number of hours that I dedicate to hypnosis. Over the years, I’ve found that I spend more than half of that working directly with hypnosis subjects, guiding them into hypnosis, and helping them to change.
The rest of the time is spent doing things like learning new stuff, coming up with new theories, teaching hypnosis (like I am in this article), and getting feedback from people I’ve hypnotized.
If you want to get good at hypnosis fast, the best thing to do is decide on a regular schedule that fits in with your life. And then stick to it.
Make sure it’s realistic.
You’ll get far more value from hypnotizing one person every week than from intending to hypnotize someone every day, and actually ending up with just one session a month because you’ve been feeling overwhelmed.
On that note, if you’re interested in learning to hypnotize people, and don’t know where to get started, you might enjoy reading my article How to Hypnotize Someone Easily next.
Conclusion
So that’s all there is to it.
Depending on the nature of the hypnosis in question, the amount you should do it can range from all the time for things like micro-mindfulness and building component skills for being a hypnotist, to once or twice a day for self-hypnosis and safely listening to hypnosis recordings.
