When I first discovered self-hypnosis, it would sometimes take me hours to induce a solid trance state. It turns out that it doesn’t have to take anywhere near that long. In fact, these days, all I do is flip a switch inside my mind and I’m there in a flash.
To hypnotize yourself instantly, it’s necessary to install a hypnotic switch inside your mind to take you into hypnosis. This is achieved by inducing the desired hypnotic state and then creating an anchor or symbol to act as a triggering mechanism. Once the anchor has been set, you can easily hypnotize yourself in the future by firing it.
When I fire my own self-hypnosis anchor, the transition into hypnosis is near instantaneous. I see the symbol inside my mind, and in less than a second I’m there.
For example, earlier today I was sitting right here at my desk. I wanted to go for a walk, but the weather had a different idea. So I closed my eyes, flipped the switch, and looked out from inside my mind.
Right there before me was the front door. I zoomed through it, flying out through the gap in the trees.
As I allowed myself to be pulled along, I rapidly dropped deeper.
And by the time I got to the ocean a few moments later, everything around me seemed as real as real life.
The switch doesn’t get me all the way into deep hypnosis, but it does get me far enough that I can take myself the rest of the way in no time flat.
Now in my case, that’s a choice. I use self-hypnosis for a lot of things, and I enjoy the journey. Exactly the same process can be used to create a trigger that takes you directly into deep self-hypnosis in the blink of an eye.
Once you’ve set it up, it’s just a matter of flicking the switch.
If you prefer to listen, and you’d like what I hope is one of the easiest ways to get started, you’ll receive my Self-Hypnosis Audio mini-course as one of the bonuses when you sign up for my newsletter.
In it I walk you through an easy way to hypnotize yourself that’s almost unknown outside of hypnosis, then guide you through installing a trigger that you can use to hypnotize yourself on demand any time you choose.
The best part about this process is that there are so few moving parts. All you really need is a simple understanding of how states work, how to create them, and how anchors can be used to call them up on demand.
What Are Hypnotic States?
Hypnosis is often used to help people to change their mental state. You’ve almost certainly seen this when hypnosis has been used to induce states like relaxation, calmness, and so on.
In fact, there is such a strong perceived association between relaxation and hypnosis that they are sometimes confused with each other.
In reality, relaxation has nothing to do with hypnosis. However, it can be used as a gateway into hypnosis.
Not only that, but just as we can use relaxation to induce hypnosis, we can also use hypnosis to induce relaxation.
Confusing, right?
So what’s going on?
The human mind exists in a series of mental states. People commonly think of these states in terms of labels like happy, sad, angry, bored, and so on.
And beyond the emotional side, our mental state includes many other things, such as tiredness, focus, thoughts, sensations, memories, and so on.
At any point in time, the state of a human mind is the sum of everything it’s experienced up to and including that moment.
One of the main uses of hypnosis is causing these states to happen on demand.
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There are two parts to this. First, we cause the states to happen. Then we anchor them, so that we can manipulate them and cause them to happen on demand.
In this article, we’ll cover how to induce hypnosis and then anchor it so that you can hypnotize yourself instantly any time you might choose.
How Do Hypnotic Anchors Work?
Our brains are a lot simpler than they might appear at first glance. From our perspective as hypnotists, all they can really do is associate stuff with other stuff.
The complexity comes from the vast scale.
As we go through our lives, our brains are constantly updated. They form a map of everything we’ve ever experienced.
The operating principle is very straightforward. Everything we experience causes the associated patterns to fire up inside our mind and link with everything else nearby.
Things that are important to us, or that we repeat a lot, tend to be linked much more strongly.
If you’d like to know more about that, you might enjoy my article on How Human Memory Works With Hypnosis.
When we want to understand how anchors work, the most important thing is to appreciate that if we experience some part of something, our brains will automatically recall the rest of that thing.
For example, if we look at one key on a keyboard, inside our mind it’s associated with the entire keyboard, and so we can recall the entire thing.
And because this is the core operating feature of our brain, it works not only for physical objects but for everything we can experience.
What this means is that if we want to be able to easily return to a state, all we have to do is intentionally associate it with something we can easily do.
Make it easy to return to hypnotic states by intentionally associating each state with something unique you can do.
When you’re starting out, this is often a simple gesture. For example, you could tap the back of your hand and have that cause you to feel happy.
The problem with this is that when you’re working with others, you probably don’t want to have to be performing gestures.
Consequently, it’s most useful if you can call these states up on demand using a symbol of some kind inside your mind.
The anchoring process
To make this work with hypnosis we use a simple three step process.
First, we either hypnotize ourselves or have someone else hypnotize us.
Next, we intentionally create the anchor and attach it to the state of being hypnotized. This can be as simple as a symbol inside our mind.
Finally, we bring ourselves out of hypnosis and test.
How to Hypnotize Yourself The Long Way
There are lots of ways to hypnotize yourself. Here we’ll go over how to run a progressive relaxation induction on yourself.
This particular induction involves sequentially scanning through your body, intentionally relaxing every muscle group as you go.
While it is far from the fastest method of reaching hypnosis, it is one of the most reliable. And the state that you’ll be in afterwards is one that many people associate with hypnosis.
This means that if we can induce this in ourselves, our hypnosis subjects will have something that looks like hypnosis for them to emulate.
If you’d like to know more about the progressive relaxation induction, I’ve written about it in my article in which I also give you a Progressive Relaxation Hypnotic Induction Script.
To run progressive relaxation on yourself, take the usual precautions to build a suitable environment by putting any pets out, turning off notifications, TV, radio, streaming media, and so on, and asking any humans to not disturb you for a while.
As always, set an alarm in case you fall asleep.
Next, lie down somewhere comfortable and follow these steps.
Step 1: Close your eyes
Step 2: Take 3 slow deep breaths and allow yourself to feel centered
As you’re doing this, pay attention to the sensations associated with your breathing.
Step 3: Identify the physical tension
Start at the top of your head and scan through your entire body down to your toes and back to the top of your head. On the first scan, notice where every piece of tension is located but don’t try to do anything with it.
Step 4: Progressively relax every muscle group in your body
Scan through your body from the top of your head all the way down to your toes. This time, allow each muscle group to relax completely. Then scan back up to your head, allowing each muscle group to relax further.
Continue scanning down and up until your body is feeling completely relaxed. This doesn’t usually take more than 3-5 minutes.
Step 5: Allow Your Focus To Widen
From this place of trance, allow your eyes to open and allow your attention to start to bring in things in your peripheral vision. Aim for a soft de-focus.
When you’ve trained your eyes to go into that state, allow your body to move. It can move slowly or normally. Let your unconscious choose.
This is the state you’ll be in when you hypnotize others.
Step 6: Attach the act of de-focusing your eyes to Self-Hypnosis
In order to hypnotize yourself instantly, you need an anchor to bring you back to this state.
Now you could create a symbol and attach that, and you should feel free to do so. As a rule, it’s useful if you can access just about any state within yourself on demand.
In this case, you’re usually going to want your eyes a little de-focused when you hypnotize people in person, so it makes sense to use the act of de-focusing your eyes as an anchor.
Here’s how to do it.
Focus your eyes on something in front of you. Then, quickly scan through your body noticing that you’re hypnotized. As you notice that, allow your eyes to de-focus and allow your attention to bring in everything in your peripheral vision without looking at any of it. Intentionally associate that feeling of going into hypnosis with the act of de-focusing your eyes.
Repeat that exercise of focusing and de-focusing until you find that you automatically go into hypnosis when you do it. Depending on how robust your state of hypnosis is, you may find that this is enough, or you may find that you have to repeat the entire induction and anchoring process a number of times.
Step 7: Practice
Naturally, you’ll want to be able to hypnotize yourself instantly any place and any time. So make a habit of practicing the focus/de-focus exercise in many different places. Practice it sitting and standing, since you’ll usually be doing one of those when you hypnotize other people.
After doing this a few dozen times, you’ll find that it becomes almost effortless to hypnotize yourself instantly regardless of what you’re doing.
How to Hypnotize Yourself Instantly
Congratulations!
If you’ve followed the steps in the earlier sections, you should be well on your way to being able to hypnotize yourself instantly on demand.
To recap: Once you’ve run through the process a few times, you should find that you can go into hypnosis by simply intending to go into hypnosis and allowing your eyes to de-focus.
There are a few things to be aware of around this.
The process above is specifically for those who want to have their eyes open while they are in hypnosis. This is perfect for when you want to hypnotize others.
How to quickly go into deep self-hypnosis
If your aim with instant self-hypnosis is the exploration of your own mind as opposed to hypnotizing others, practice the steps above until you can do it flawlessly. Then lie down somewhere, allow your eyes to de-focus to take you into hypnosis, and then close those eyes and go deeper.
For deep trance work, the easiest way to get there is by fractionating your hypnotic state a few times. To do this, go into hypnosis and close your eyes. Then allow a symbol to form in front of you and intend that when you think of that symbol with the intention of going into hypnosis, you’ll go deeper than ever before.
Repeat a few times to make sure your symbol is solidly embedded in your mind.
Then bring yourself out of hypnosis.
Next, close your eyes and call up your symbol, noticing how quickly you drop into deep hypnosis now.
When we do this repeatedly, what tends to happen is that we get better at going into deep hypnosis every time we do it.
If you’d like more help with this, I cover an exact process designed to induce deep trance self-hypnosis in my book The Self-Hypnosis Formula.
The process in the book has been designed to take someone from not knowing what self-hypnosis is to being able to go so deep into self-hypnosis that they can construct and explore hypnotic realities on demand.
I also cover topics such as how to use self-hypnosis for honing your skills, and how to carry out hypnotic change work on yourself.
Naturally it takes a little practice to get there.
If deep trance is something you’d like to explore, or even if you just want another way to hypnotize yourself, go check out The Self-Hypnosis Formula right now!
