What Self-Hypnosis Is — a Tool Already Within You, Simply Never Used

A question I hear often: does a hypnotist always have to be present for hypnosis to happen?

Not at all.

In truth, everyone already has the capacity to enter a hypnotic state on their own. Most people simply never knew they could, or never practiced using it with any direction.

What self-hypnosis is

Self-hypnosis is the process of bringing yourself into deep relaxation, where the conscious mind softens and the subconscious becomes more open to learning a new pattern — without a practitioner leading the way.

It sounds remote, but we come close to this state more often than we realize. Drifting on a familiar road until you lose track of time. Absorbed in a book or a film until the room disappears. The moments before sleep, not yet asleep. These are all near neighbors of the hypnotic state, and self-hypnosis is a way of using that natural state with purpose.

Several studies have found that self-hypnosis can reduce anxiety, stress and perceived pain across many groups — medical staff, patients, and people in general.

One clear example is clinical research with nurses and healthcare workers during the COVID-19 crisis, who faced sustained and considerable stress. Training in self-hypnosis significantly reduced anxiety and burnout. What is striking is that these staff asked to learn the technique themselves, so that they could manage stress without depending on continuous psychological support.

A systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology, covering two decades of hypnosis research, found high-confidence evidence that hypnosis reduces perceived pain compared with standard care, and moderate-to-large effects on anxiety. Most of that research studied practitioner-led hypnosis, but the underlying mechanisms in the brain are shared with self-hypnosis.

How it is practiced

The heart of self-hypnosis is not one particular technique but bringing yourself into the state called trance — the middle ground between waking and sleep, where the conscious mind softens and awareness narrows into deep focus on one thing.

Generally it involves three elements: relaxing the body, focusing on inner experience, and using suggestion or imagery aligned with what you want.

That focus on inner experience rests largely on visualization — imagining a calm place, or yourself as you would like to be. The suggestion, or auto-suggestion, is only one of the instruments used in that final stage. It is not the whole of self-hypnosis.

If you would like to practice, we have a separate article setting out the steps in detail.

How self-hypnosis differs from hypnotherapy

The difference lies in who leads. Self-hypnosis is what you do yourself, suited to daily self-care — easing everyday stress, building confidence. Hypnotherapy with a practitioner suits difficulties settled deeper: entrenched patterns of personality, phobias, severe anxiety, or behaviors that need detailed work with a specialist guiding.

The two are not in competition; they complement each other well. Self-hypnosis is a tool you carry anywhere, while hypnotherapy is a deeper space for working with more complex patterns.

Everyone already has this capacity. The only question is whether we practice using it with direction, or leave it working unnoticed.

For the principles of auto-suggestion, which is used alongside self-hypnosis, see “What Auto-Suggestion Is”. And for how the subconscious learns and changes its patterns, “Hypnosis Is Subconscious Learning” makes it clearer.