All hypnosis is SELF-HYPNOSIS

There are some perceptions about hypnosis.

From the classic “The Twilight Zone” series to your high school graduation night in which willing participants were plucked from an audience to eat an onion on stage thinking it was an apple: there’s a key word within these scenarios – willing. With true hypnosis, there’s no just sitting back in a chair while a hypnotist dangles a swaying watch in front of your face telling you how sleepy you’re getting. There are no unwanted subliminal messages piped into your mind that inadvertently make you return to your office as a slacker, like in the movie “Office Space.” Unless, of course, you’re willing to see a hypnotist for that reason.

The point is, hypnosis helps you unlock your willingness to make better choices. Whether it’s to lose weight, to quit smoking or drinking or to reduce overall anxiety, the choice is always ours, and hypnosis helps us become willing to make those decisions.

We Have The Power

“I don’t have powers over anyone,” said Michelle Holman, hypnotist and owner of Bayside Hypnosis. “A lot of people when I tell them I’m a hypnotist, their eyes get really big and say ‘I’ve never met one of you before,’ like I’ve got powers.”

Holman elaborated that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis.

“I can’t do anything to you. I can’t make you quack like a duck when it rains. I can’t make you do anything that you do not want to do.”

This goes back to a desire to achieve something, or to be willing. Hypnosis helps us store and sort those desires into our individual belief systems. These belief systems are influenced by a number of factors, and as we take in information from the world, we, in turn, begin to act and live according to that information.

What do we call this storage system? Our subconscious.

“It’s your control center – your subconscious mind,” Holman said.

In addition to storing information like when to blink and breathe, the subconscious mind also stores memories and the feelings attached to them as well as your habits, good or bad.

“Your subconscious mind is your feelings and how you feel about something,” she said. “So when you learn something, you have to make a decision how you feel about it.”

This is ultimately how those good or bad habits are formed, along with repetition, repetition, repetition.

“For example, let’s take someone who wants to lose weight. If you need to lose weight, you know exactly what to do. And if you don’t, you can Google it,” quipped Holman. “You can Google anything.”

Her point is that information such as healthy recipes, exercise routines, blogs, articles and podcasts is far and wide, but what is keeping us from making those arguably “easy” choices among this wealth of information?

“If you don’t believe you can lose the weight, if you don’t trust yourself to lose the weight and feel as though if you lost the weight, you’d have to hold yourself accountable, then it’s going to be hard for you and you’re going to have selfdoubt,” she said.

FORGIVE BUT DON’T FORGET

We can all admit that we’re often hard on ourselves. Societal standards are changing at breakneck speed, and sometimes we find ways to cope, which can ultimately lead to bad habits. But no one is unique in developing a habit, but the reason for developing it certainly is.

“Everyone’s habits and belief system worked at some point in their life, or they wouldn’t have it,” said Holman. “Say you have someone who’s smoked for their entire life, and now they want to quit smoking and they don’t believe that they can because they believe they are addicted.”

Maybe you just wanted to be part of the “cool crowd” as a teenager or you went through a stressful time in your life, our reason for developing a habit is definitely a personal one.

“Once you realize that maybe you ‘needed’ the smoking and that maybe you needed that to relieve some stress in your life because you were going through a lot of negativity, you used smoking as a tool to change the way you feel at that moment,” she said.

But just with any aspect of life, there’s always room for improvement, especially with ourselves. It’s just important to go easy on ourselves while we make those improvements.

“You don’t have to beat yourself up over it. You don’t have to feel as though you’re such a bad person because of the way you used to do things,” she said. Which brings us a perfect opportunity to truly forgive ourselves. To understand that those choices aren’t working for us now and that we’re incredibly strong for even coming to that conclusion. Forgiveness provides a foundation to sorting through that belief system and moving in the direction of forming better habits.

“What if you knew that to stop smoking was just a decision,” asked Holman. “And what if you made a decision now that you would like to live a smoke-free lifestyle and just forgive yourself for ever doing it in the first place? You can now see what life would really be like if you didn’t smoke. You would smell good; you would be able to kiss your partner; you would probably live longer. You can breathe and go on walks.”

Thus, by forgiving ourselves, it gives