Hypnosis And The Benefit Of Deep Breathing

Essen­tially, the word hyp­no­sis is just another word for relax­ation. Yes hyp­no­sis is brought on by sug­ges­tion, but it’s that deep state of relax­ation that qual­i­fies hyp­no­sis. I some­times use the term cre­ative relax­ation. When I say that, I’m refer­ring to the fact that it’s the use of hyp­no­sis that I call ther­apy. I’ve always defined hyp­no­sis as just what it is, an altered state of aware­ness through deep relaxation.

Some peo­ple define relax­ing as just tak­ing time to read through a mag­a­zine or have a cup of tea. But really just chang­ing activ­i­ties is not relax­ation. When you reach a state of total relax­ation through hyp­no­sis, you will see the dif­fer­ence. And it’s in this totally relaxed state that you can bring some bal­ance back into your life. Some peo­ple call it recharg­ing their bat­ter­ies or use any other metaphoric term, but it all means the same thing.

Real, deep, relax­ation used daily or reg­u­larly has a ter­rific effect on all our inter­nal sys­tems, far beyond what a cof­fee break can do.

As to the ques­tion of whether sleep is equiv­a­lent to relax­ation, most of us know from expe­ri­ence that it is not. Experts even state that hyp­no­sis, or deep relax­ation, is actu­ally more ben­e­fi­cial to the over­all well-being than merely sleep­ing nightly. We know that sleep can be dis­turbed by stress­ful ener­gies and that we can wake up feel­ing even less rested, less ener­gized, than when we went to sleep. How­ever a delib­er­ately exe­cuted ses­sion in hyp­no­sis, or relax­ation, has you con­cen­trat­ing very point­edly on just that, relax­ing. You lie very still, and you let only pos­i­tive energy con­sume you. Essen­tially, when you prac­tice self-hypnosis, you con­trol the result by guid­ing the entire ses­sion. All hyp­no­sis is based on total relax­ation. This is cer­tainly more ben­e­fi­cial than just going to sleep because you are tired.

Power naps are use­ful in recharg­ing as well, and address­ing fatigue, but dur­ing deep relax­ation or hyp­no­sis, you are also cre­at­ing the oppor­tu­nity to reduce or alle­vi­ate a par­tic­u­lar ail­ment through con­cen­tra­tion. Sleep, whilst absolutely nec­es­sary, doesn’t allow this oppor­tu­nity. If you spend ten or twenty min­utes a day or sev­eral times a week, prac­tic­ing self hyp­no­sis, you are sure in a few short weeks to feel a dif­fer­ence in your life, to feel more bal­anced, and more relaxed, and more in tune phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally, and in every other way.

There are prob­a­bly hun­dred of ways you can achieve a deep state of relax­ation, but they have one com­mon ele­ment, which is deep breath­ing. It is a nat­ural human occur­rence that when you exhale, your body relaxes. This is a known fact, and a bio­log­i­cal cer­tainty. That’s why it’s the first thing that a med­ical pro­fes­sional will ask a patient to do when he wants his patient to relax.

In any type of emer­gency or panic sit­u­a­tion, the vic­tim is always instructed to take deep breaths. This is intended to calm, or relax the individual.

The more deeply you inhale, the more you will exhale, and there­fore the more you will relax. So when we want to induce hyp­no­sis, deep breath­ing is the first sug­ges­tion we make, typ­i­cally because it starts to bring on relax­ation. And when the per­son starts to relax and reg­u­late their breath­ing, they will become grad­u­ally more relaxed.

We know also that when we sleep, our breath­ing slows and set­tles into a quiet, deep rhythm. We seek to achieve the same thing in hyp­notic induc­tion, to slow the breath­ing rhythm, because slow­ing our breath­ing slows down our sys­tem, and helps to bring about a shift in aware­ness. We achieve this state by slow­ing a person’s breath­ing nat­u­rally and comfortably.

Start­ing an induc­tion with a few deep breaths imme­di­ately cre­ates a shift, and sends the mes­sage to the per­son that now it’s time to relax. When you add con­cen­tra­tion to the equa­tion, you have a ter­rific recipe for hyp­notic induc­tion. Because con­cen­trat­ing on your breath­ing helps you become more aware of your inter­nal expe­ri­ence. A person’s breath­ing pat­tern can often be a telling sign for a hyp­no­tist that a sub­ject has achieved a deep state of relax­ation, and slipped into a state of hypnosis.

In my hyp­nother­apy ses­sions I don’t impose any set tech­nique to deep breath­ing. What­ever a person’s nat­ural breath­ing method is what they should con­tinue to do. There seems to be a typ­i­cal pat­tern of breath­ing in through the nose, while exhal­ing out the mouth. If that’s the com­fort­able breath­ing tech­nique fro some­one, that’s per­fect. If it’s in and out through the nose, that’s also fine. What­ever you are used to or what­ever comes naturally.

You can prac­tice this on your own, at any time. Just con­cen­trate on tak­ing a few deep breaths, and you will feel your shoul­ders drop, and your heart rate will set­tle. This is relax­ation and the basis of hypnosis.