People describe the experience of hypnosis as highly pleasurable and often comment upon emerging that they feel like they’ve had a refreshing nap. You might feel any number of sensations while in trance. Most people’s muscles grow loose and relaxed. Many report pleasant feelings. Often the breathing grows deeper and slower as a result of increased relaxation. Feelings of warmth or tingling are common. Often people report an increased ability to visualize much like daydreaming. Some people’s perception of time is altered – the trance state may seem much longer or shorter in duration than it actually is.
While some continue to listen to the words of the hypnotist, others report that the mind drifts away to some pleasant memory or imagined scene. Because the conscious mind may drift away, some report only a general sense of what was said in the trance- just like seeing a movie but not perfectly remembering every scene. Each individuals experience of trance is unique.
What does hypnosis feel like?
Having completed the hypnosis test, you are now building up a concept of how hypnosis is a common part of your daily experience and how it has less to do with mystical mind control.
However, I recognize that you won’t really know what something feels like until you have experienced it for yourself. But in the meantime, here are some common hypnotic phenomena that can help you gain some idea of what to expect when you are hypnotized. Forget what you see on television; just because the subject’s eyes are closed, it doesn’t mean that they are asleep!
When you have a more realistic concept of what to expect, it will deepen your hypnotic experience because you are no longer waiting for that “something” to happen.
You may experience only a few or several of the following phenomena in hypnosis, all of which are natural and normal responses:
- Your breathing rate has slowed and deepened
- You may feel detached from your surroundings, as if floating or drifting or just deeply relaxed
- Your body temperature (or parts of your body temperature) may vary
- You can hear external sounds but are less bothered by them
- Parts of your body e.g. arms and legs, feel heavy and relaxed
- Your attention becomes more inward, focusing on internal sensations, images or memories
- With your eyes closed, your eyelids my flutter or move from side to side as if dreaming
- You can sometimes focus on the hypnotherapist’s dialogue, visualizing intensely, then drift onto something else, then come back to the hypnotherapist’s dialogue again
- Depending on the nature of your visualization, you may feel emotional and experience an ab reaction (release of emotion) when dealing with sensitive issues
- Time can seem distorted, so that at the end of the hypnosis, what was say thirty minutes may have seemed like five minutes (or vice versa)
- You can remember some suggestions vividly, others less so
- You may experience other personal responses e.g. tingling or numbness in your fingers and toes, that are there during one hypnotic induction and not there during another hypnotic induction
- Your hypnotic experience deepens with each consultation at around the third consultation (but not always!)
- What you experience with one hypnotherapist can be completely different to another hypnotherapist (so don’t place them all into the same category if you didn’t connect with your previous hypnotherapy treatment)
- You may also experience other personal responses that are unique to you depending on the specific suggestions used and how you interpret them.
