Maximizing Your Brain and Body Potential: Tapping into the Power of Your Mind Through Hypnotherapy

By Erin Del Toro, Registered Clinical Hypnotherapist, ACHE

Until about thirty years ago, the scientific community was widely convinced that after humans reached adulthood, the brain didn’t have much ability to change: the belief was that an addict would always have the brain of an addict, and a stroke victim with impaired function was unable to repair or heal their injured brain.

It wasn’t until recently that this thinking began to change when scientists observed neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to change) in adult lab rats and began to excitedly explore opportunities for brain change in humans. Today, research continues to prove that human beings are able to rewire their brains well into mature adulthood. This means that changing our behaviors—even overcoming lifelong habits—is more doable than we think.

If the mind is so flexible, you may be wondering why on earth it’s so hard for you to stop habits you’ve acquired: snacking when you’re not hungry, over-reacting when you’re angry, bingewatching when you know you should be accomplishing, or feeling anxiety and shutting down when you wish you could be confident.

You may also wonder why you are unable to stop your mind from racing so that you can fall asleep at night or why you can’t seem to overcome an illness you know is emotionally driven when you’re so ready to be done with the old negative emotions.

The likely answer is that your conscious goals are at odds with your subconscious beliefs and programming. The subconscious part of your mind houses and stores everything that has ever happened to you. It banks experiences and emotions and then runs programs based off of those experiences. Your brain also controls involuntary processes like breathing, hormone production, and metabolism. As the programming from your stored experiences takes hold throughout the course of your childhood and adult years, your subconscious mind shapes your beliefs, your fears, your habits, your behaviors, the things you feel confident in, and the things you feel unsuccessful at.

This can be particularly frustrating if your conscious goals keep running up against one of the previously-formed belief systems in the subconscious mind. In order to get on board with changing the program, the subconscious mind needs to be accessed and taught what the conscious mind would like it to do. However, the subconscious mind is a little trickier to get a hold of.

Have you ever heard the statistic that human beings can only access 10–15 percent of the brain? That statement is mostly true. During day-to-day operation, most of us only work with a small percentage of our minds: the conscious section of the mind. The other 85–90 percent of the brain is run by the subconscious mind, and while we aren’t able to access it during our normal waking state, the treasure trove of power held in the subconscious part of the brain can be easily and naturally retrieved by allowing ourselves to relax into a deeper state of consciousness.

As foreign—or even scary—as “relaxing into a deeper state of consciousness” may sound, those deeper states are experiences that our minds and bodies are familiar with as we go down to sleep every night and wake up every morning. Most of us just don’t spend enough time in those states to know that we are actually familiar with them and that they, in fact, evoke very calm and peaceful experiences where we’re able to connect more easily with our deeper feelings, intuitions, and subconscious understandings.

When we think only with our conscious minds, it’s tempting to believe that we’ve tried to use every imaginable solution to solve our own problems, but when we access the power of our subconscious, we connect with the true powerhouse of our brains and bodies, the real head honcho running the deep subconscious programs that control what we consciously experience and act upon.

In hypnotherapy, we harness the power of the subconscious to change emotions, feelings, bad habits, addictions, and even physical symptoms stemming from emotional issues.

I had one client recently who described what accessing the subconscious mind was like during hypnotherapy: “It’s like I’ve been looking at myself in a funhouse mirror all my life, and I’ve just been given a real mirror for the first time!”

We help children, teens, and adults change everything from overeating to pornography addiction to difficulty concentrating to physical ailments caused by emotional trauma to bedwetting to low self-esteem to hundreds of other things. Essentially, if your mind is producing an issue, hypnotherapy can help you overcome it much more quickly than you’d be able to in your conscious thinking state. Amazingly, the subconscious portion of the brain is able to change behaviors at almost 400 times the rate of a conscious mind.

So if you’re thinking of trying hypnotherapy to access the power of your mind, what can you expect as you enter into the deeper states of consciousness during hypnotherapy? I look forward to discussing this and much more about the hypnotherapy process in the next issue of St. George Health & Wellness Magazine. If you’d like to know more now, please visit www.balancemodernhypnotherapy.com.

About the Author

Erin Del Toro is an ACHE Registered Clinical Hypnotherapist and owner of Balanced Modern Hypnotherapy. She’s passionate about changing the effects of trauma, rewriting unwanted habits and behaviors, and helping others unlock the power of their true potential. Erin lives in St. George with her twin daughters and enjoys participating in the ninja warrior sport and playing in the beautiful outdoors of southern Utah.