Is Your Success With Hypnosis All About Your Subconscious Mind?

Take a scroll through the websites of a few hypnotherapists and in no time at all you’ll come across many references to the subconscious mind. There are those in the hypnotherapy field who believe that hypnosis is all about communicating with the subconscious mind and you’ll find their websites and posts littered with references and claims that link everything about hypnosis to this purportedly powerful, yet generally inaccessible, part of your mind.

They will tell you how your conscious mind only controls about ten per cent of your behaviours, habits and beliefs, with the remaining ninety per cent being controlled by your subconscious mind (they may even chuck in a picture of the brain or an ice berg for good measure to illustrate this). You’ll read how ‘hypnotherapy works by bringing your conscious mind and unconscious mind into harmony’ (whatever that means), or how during hypnosis your subconscious mind will be busy working in the background to make positive changes in our life (which presumably means you are unaware of what these changes will be) and how working your subconscious mind gets to the root of the problem.

I remember when I first turned to hypnosis and hypnotherapy to help with my anxiety and low self esteem issues. I was so confused and frustrated by my thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions that the prospect of some miraculous changes going on somewhere in my brain (while I just sat there relaxing with my eyes closed) seemed very appealing. I honestly expected to be ‘put under’ (whatever I thought that meant!) and to be out of it for a bit and then to come around with a totally new mindset of confidence. Best of all, I wouldn’t have to even do anything because my subconscious mind would figure it all out and fix it. Happy days!

So with all the claims of subconscious mind greatness that are published out there, is achieving success with hypnosis all about your subconscious mind playing ball?

The Power Of Your Subconscious Mind

So is hypnosis all about communicating with your subconscious mind? Does it all depend on this undefined part of your mind being receptive, working busily and making changes that you have no idea about?

The plain answer is, no it’s nothing to do with some notion of a subconscious mind. At best these assertions are a weak metaphor or description for how we seemingly do things we don’t want to do, like your unwanted habits, behaviours, thoughts and so on. You may feel you aren’t in control over parts of what you think, feel and do. They may seem to happen non-consciously in some way. At worst, hypnotherapists lauding the power of the subconscious mind are ill-trained, lack understanding and are devoted in blind faith to whatever their trainer told them (often about a particular method or system that they then buy into without any critical reasoning).

Certainly we all do things ‘non-consciously’ like our habits and patterns that repeat in similar situations. It can feel like elements of your thinking, feeling and behaving go on without you being able to stop them or take control over them. Yet that doesn’t mean we need to invent some mysterious part of the brain (that doesn’t appear in any medical textbooks). Far from it. Everything that you are experiencing, including anxiety, fears, low self esteem, smoking and eating habits, can be explained much more clearly and helpfully using ordinary psychological principles and processes.

In every area of life we use a combination of our imagination, motivation, expectation, self talk, beliefs, emotions, identity and so on. How we orchestrate these things affects the end result. Sometimes we develop certain patterns or habits of thinking, feeling and behaving from a young age and through repetition they become part of ‘us’ and who we think we are and what we think we are capable of. Sometimes we develop patterns and habits later in life that are somehow problematic yet they keep happening.

We are all creatures of habit, pattern and repetition. In any situation, we pretty much do the same things that we did in a similar previous situation. We do the same stuff over and over and that can become seemingly automatic. It may be something positive like feeling good before going into a situation similar to one you’ve enjoyed before. Or it can be unhelpful, like anxious thoughts and feelings that fill you with dread and lead to imagining worst case scenarios and avoiding things.

Rather than a mysterious, vague notion of a subconscious mind, it’s far easier to break things down into the types of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that are going on and then to learn how to change these aspects in ways that are beneficial. Rather than just living in hope that your subconscious mind listens and changes, you can actively take control over how you do things and put yourself in control of what you do and how you do it. This leads to beneficial outcomes for you now, and means you understand better how your mind works and develop effective strategies for handling any future challenges too.

Why Hypnotherapy Works

Hypnotherapy works by helping you to orchestrate, manage, direct and take control over your thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions. Whether you struggle with anxiety, low self-esteem and confidence, unhealthy eating habits, fear or something else, you will currently have certain psychological patterns and processes that lead to the same results. Now, it may seem that these happen at some unconscious level and that will be because at some point they became habitual and normal and you began to expect them and think of yourself as the sort of person who gets anxious or who can’t do certain things and so forth.

You develop certain patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours as you go through life and these become seemingly automatic, consistent and problematic. You’re ordinary psychological processes, the same ones that you also use for positive outcomes, become a pattern that you expect, experience and repeat. These psychological processes include things such as your thoughts, emotions, imagination, self-talk, motivation, values, beliefs and expectations.  How you do these things in any given situation will affect the outcome you get.

And when people come to me for hypnotherapy to help them to overcome an issue, it’s always useful to keep these things in mind. Rather than relying on some vague, unscientific notion of a subconscious mind in our quest for change, we can seek to influence and change existing psychological processess to things that are much more useful.

After all, with something like anxiety, it isn’t the specific situation that causes the problem, it’s the thoughts, feelings and other psychological things that you do that cause the end anxious result. For example, it isn’t speaking in front of others that causes anxiety, fear and dread, it’s things like imagining the worst cases, telling yourself you can’t do it, worrying about others judging you, expecting failure and so forth that leads to your anxiety. If there wasn’t an internal, personal, psychological element then everyone would fear public speaking (or other anxiety provoking situations) and we know not everyone does dread it, some people love it and enjoy it!

If you are relying on communication with your subconscious or some sort of harmony to come about, then you are forced to be a passive passenger in this process and have to hope for the best that something good happens to change things. Once you recognise and identify that it’s things like your imagination, thoughts and feelings maintaining the problem, then you can learn how to manage and change these things and you can be much more active and in control of what goes on inside of your own head and the results you experience in your own life.

What The Hypnosis Science Tells Us

And if that isn’t enough to convince you that anyone claiming to talk to your subconscious is probably talking pseudo-science, then we also have the real science to support things.

I’ve written more about the normal psychological processes underpinning hypnotherapy in previous articles, such as this one: Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy – what it is and how it can help you combat anxiety. Incidentally, we also have the evidence that shows adding hypnosis to cognitive behavioural therapy increases the likelihood of more positive results, which also tends to support the benefits of addressing normal psychological processes to successfully achieve goals: Hypnosis Enhances Results Of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Updated Science and Evidence.

Even more so, research has demonstrated that hypnosis is conscious and voluntary (rather than subconscious, passive and mythical).

Therefore, rather than being the function of the ‘subconscious mind’, hypnosis is a conscious process. Rather than being something done to you or that happens outside of your awareness, it is a process you actively and voluntarily engage in to achieve positive results.

I wrote about this research a while back here: Hypnosis is Conscious and Voluntary

As well as enhancing the effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy, hypnosis has a strong evidence base in the treatment of many issues, such as pain, irritable bowel syndrome, post traumatic stress disorder symptoms, depression and anxiety.  For example, scientific research has shown the effectiveness of hypnosis in the treatment of anxiety (more on anxiety help here: The Effectiveness of Hypnotherapy as a Treatment For Anxiety). and there’s evidence in many other areas too, for example, in treating IBS (Hypnotherapy for Irritable Bowel Syndrome: The Evidence for the Effectiveness Of IBS Hypnosis), pain relief (Hypnosis For Pain Relief and Management), depression (Cognitive Hypnotherapy For Depression – How Effective Is It?), sports performance (Hypnosis For Sports Performance – Research and Evidence) and in helping with many other things (many of which I’ve also covered through various posts and articles).

And more research has show that the way your brain processes information is fundamentally altered during hypnosis. During a normal waking state, information is processed and shared by various parts of the  brain, but this research found that during hypnosis the brain shifted to a state where individual brain regions acted more independently of each other (Tuominen, Kallio, Kaasinen and Railo, 2021. More on this here: Hypnosis Changes The Way Your Brain Processes Information).

Learning how to engage your normal psychological processes in particular ways can help you to end what you are currently experiencing and to establish a new, more beneficial, pattern of thinking, feeling, acting and reacting.

To your success with hypnotherapy,

Dan Regan

Hypnotherapy in Ely & Newmarket

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