Hypnosis

[Joseph Rodriguez]

John McCallum wrote a 3 part article on concentration that I have found useful ever since I was a high school wrestler. The idea is to relax using meditation techniques and then run mental rehearsals of you successfully accomplishing the task that you plan to undertake. I do this the night before I plan to hit a big PR in the weight room. I even do it at work when we’re in the engine on our way to a run. Whether you are responding to a fire or a cardiac arrest, you are more effective at your job when it is time to perform if you can calm down your adrenaline response a little bit, and visualize beforehand the tasks that need to be executed in order to resolve the situation.

The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban: Concentratration, Part One - John McCallum (1965)

[danomite!]

This was an interesting Tedx talk. Whether you 'believe' or not the history of hypnosis is covered and.... of course there's people acting like chickens for our viewing pleasure. YouTube

[Geoff Bischoff]

The Suggs article is helpful. I'm familiar with the techniques used there, but not from the category of "hypnosis." Hypnosis as I've encountered it ... well, I think Rip's first reply said it best.

The Suggs techniques I've recently been learning in the context of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, as tools for managing anxiety. Having a specific image in your head about how you intend to look, feel, and act when you encounter a specific situation is valuable mental training. I think this is true whether the specific situation being mentally trained is a drive downtown for a combat-stressed veteran, or a heavy rep under a squat bar for a healthy lifter, or a public speaking engagement for a homeschooling mom.

[Frankie]

You may be confusing meditation with hypnosis. That’s not really how hypnosis works.

I saw a psychiatrist some years back who was very expensive and very well credentialed and claimed to be on the forefront of cutting edge hypnotic psychiatry and felt it was a 'very valuable tool' and 'misrepresented by the media'. We did 3 sessions wherein I was 'hypnotized' for about 30 minutes but as far as I could tell the experience was 100% exactly the same as guided meditation.

I believe there is a soup of things going on there between relaxation, placebo, quieting the mind, focus, flow state. Plenty of different cultures and healing professions ascribe different names to some variations of it. I do feel that in terms of evolutionary psychology it all has about the same effect as picking berries in the wild for 14 hours, hunting, fishing, gardening or lifting weights.

As far as the treatment goes I remember feeling pretty good but as I recall each session was $480

[Nockian]

A good sleep is pretty efficacious I find.

I have been hypnotised many times and hypnotised others many times. Also meditated twice a day, every day for around 8 years. I have no firm conclusions about the process, except that if someone really wants to get over some irrational fear, then some 'magik' ego stroking can work-but then, so can a big stick.

I worked with a woman who wanted to go to trafalgar square but was terrified of birds so had avoided anywhere there might be pigeons. Having taken her history I used a mild hypnotic technique which took less than a minute. Two days later she came to see me all smiles and told me she had picked up and rescued a pigeon that she had found in her street. Yet, I fear spiders and no amount of hypnosis therapy has ever removed that fear, but it didn't stop me walking in the Amazon forest and getting within inches of tarantula, nor did it prevent me wiring homes full of house spiders, nor caving when confronted with walls absolutely covered with large specimens of garden spider that I had to brush past on regular occasions.

I watched a colleague of mine hypnotise a student therapist who was apparently very deaf. She had worn two hearing aids since she was young, but doctors had never found any physical cause for deafness. After about an hour she announced she no longer required the hearing aids at all.

I worked with several business people who had multiple failed businesses. The root of their failure seemed to be their belief that money was evil. I used a simple hypnotic script to change their value hierachy. Several went on to become very wealthy because they then changed their behaviour accordingly having seen the error in their thinking. That wasn't the case with everybody by any means. Why didn't they just figure that out for themselves ?

My sense of it is that many people have a deep seated belief in woo woo and will accept advice if they believe that some kind of magik is at work which gives them permission to alter their behaviour and make progress in whatever they have chosen to do. I can't explain medical hypnosis for anaesthesia, other than to say that pain is usually far more intense as a result of the expectation of pain than it actually is.