Hypnotherapy is the therapy modality I have fallen in love with fourteen years ago, and I have never looked back: it is the practice of utilising hypnosis for the purpose of therapy to help you change unhealthy behaviours, thought-patterns, symptoms and feelings, and improve wellbeing. Hypnotherapy works whether we are working in person in my London hypnotherapy clinic or through online hypnotherapy on Zoom, Skype, FaceTime or Whatsapp.

What is hypnosis ? Why is hypnosis good for me?

Hypnosis is also the oldest western form of a psychotherapy, meaning a therapy which addresses psychological and psychosomatic conditions and issues through the use of verbal communication and interaction rather than medication. It is a legitimate therapeutic approach, according to the American Psychiatric association, and one that has been practiced, tested and studied over the past 250 years.

A hypnotic state is a natural occurrence we experience every day, when daydreaming, when playing sports or playing music, when immersing ourselves in a film or a novel. The world around you appears to dissolve, or become less important, and whatever it is that you are focusing on takes on your undivided attention, feelings and perception.

In hypnotherapy we utilise this natural resource of our mind and invite the process further in a controlled and focused therapeutic context. There is a difference between imagination and hypnosis, in hypnosis you are not simply perceiving, you are actually experiencing in a way that allows you to potentially modify what you are experiencing, be it a sensation, a feeling, a worry, or a behaviour. This is why hypnotherapy is a very powerful and effective tool to affect positive change and healing.

How does hypnosis actually work?

According to science:

Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness which naturally increases our capacity to attend and engage with a task, without being deflated and distracted by familiar worries and mental noise. This is because hypnosis significantly affects brain activity, particularly in regions associated with attention, emotional regulation, and fear suppression. Hypnosis increases functional connectivity in brain regions like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, part of the executive control and salience networks, while reducing connectivity in the default mode network, directly affecting emotional control, focus, somatic control and decision-making.

We also now know that hypnosis affects changes in brain wave patterns, and is closely linked to increased power in the theta band and changes in gamma activity. These brain oscillations play a critical role in memory and emotional processing. The hypnotic state also feature a decrease in slow brain wave activity, such as delta waves, alongside an increase in alpha and beta waves, which are typically associated with focused attention and cognitive processes.

Is hypnosis good for me?

Once in hypnosis you can fully attend to the issue at hand, while your fear responses are significantly lowered, which means you can think very clearly and very well about the problem, the feeling, the experience, or the behaviour. This significant increase in mental and emotional clarity means you can understand and face what is important and not be distracted or confused by what is not important.  You can then recognise patterns and ‘loops’ that make up the invisible walls that are keeping us stuck.

The immediate result is insight and clarity and greater authority over your thoughts and your mind. As you engage in a hypnotherapy process, you will experience a sense of renewed resourcefulness and trust in your abilities to discern and meet what is asked of you in the present.

The other immediate by-product of this changes in brain waves and connectivity is a significant increase in cognitive-emotional flexibility, which means you can be psychologically and emotionally creative. Hypnosis does this by de-automatising thought processes and reducing automatic associations.

To be cognitively and emotionally flexible means to access new resources, and find new perspectives, that were simply out of reach until then. As I make positive suggestions, your mind can integrate them organically bringing out new understandings, novel ways of feeling that sometimes had been closed off for a very long time. This is the opposite experience to being stuck or rigid and fixated into a certain pattern of emotions or thoughts.

In this highly focused emotionally and cognitively flexible state of hypnosis you also experience a positive dissociation, meaning you let go of what you think you can do and cannot do, of your limiting beliefs, and detach yourself a lot more easily from the self-story you have been locking yourself into over the years and, in a non-judgemental way, experience and integrate new solutions, new points of view, new emotions, new meanings and connections.

As i said earlier on, hypnotherapy is not imagination, it is not thinking, you are not just perceiving, you are experiencing, and as you experience you are able to modify what you are experiencing, be it sensations, feelings, unhelpful behaviours, thought patterns, traumatic content.

Narrowing your focus and zooming in to what matters, you are experiencing being able to let go of your fears and limiting beliefs, you are experiencing increased clarity, cognitive flexibility, and emotional regulation, thus your perspective and experience of yourself and your life is changing. 

What are the effects of hypnosis on the body? 

So far I have focused on your mind, what about your body, the physical and physiological effects of hypnosis are remarkable and fundamentally capable of promoting health and wellbeing.

Hypnosis directly influences the body’s autonomic nervous system, helping to modulate heart rate, breathing, reduce muscle tension and stress responses. Studies have shown that under hypnosis, the body can shift from a state of heightened arousal to one of deep relaxation, with measurable effects such as reduced blood pressure, reduced stress-related hormones such as cortisol, and decreased pain perception. This makes hypnosis a powerful tool for managing physiological conditions linked to stress, pain, and anxiety, emotional eating, panic attacks etc.

The measurable shift from a heightened sympathetic state (fight-or-flight) to a calmer, parasympathetic state helps the body to heal, by regulating the nervous system, improving immune system function, and reducing stress effectively. Such physical effects have made hypnosis a valuable intervention to manage pain, reducing pre-surgical anxiety, to accelerating post-operative recovery and healing, offering a mind-body approach to physical health that moves beyond medication.

Across the past 15 years, I have seen truly remarkable results on clients physical and psychosomatic symptoms; clients who had often tried various other therapies, with little results, whether working on panic attacks, back pain, muscular issues, recovery from surgery, migraine, insomnia.

Can I be hypnotised ? 

You do not need to understand any of the above to be hypnotised, and do meaningful work in hypnosis, in fact you do not need any special gifts or qualities to experience the benefits of hypnotherapy. Anyone who can have a thought can be hypnotised, and my experience across the past 15 years has been that out of the thousands of clients I have worked with, only a handful were not an effective match for hypnotherapy, everyone else was.

As I said earlier on, these effects are not just imagination, or thinking, hypnosis actually alters perception, and does so very pleasantly I must add, as anyone who has been hypnotised in a therapy context will confirm to you. We alter perception every night when we transition into sleep and dream, it is a very natural process of our bodies and mind. And equally natural is the process and experience of hypnosis.

As a qualified trained hypnotherapist my role is to guide you to access a helpful healing hypnotic process, creating a dynamic hypnotherapeutic alliance in the service of your goals as a client in which both yourself and I are active partners, to help you make positive meaningful changes for your mental and physical health and wellbeing.