Hypnosis is a lot like daydreaming. When you daydream, you alter your state of consciousness to the alpha frequency region and engage your imagination. All the while you are conscious and aware, yet you remain oblivious to external distractions. Daydreaming is a perfectly normal, safe and healthy phenomenon that we all engage in from time to time.
Hypnosis is a technique that enables you to achieve this altered state of consciousness deliberately and direct your attention to specific goals in order to achieve them and not to fantasy.
These beneficial goals include quitting smoking, dieting, improving self-image overcoming phobias and fears, improving memory - the list of uses is limitless.
Self-hypnosis is a valuable tool to enrich your life and easy to learn, you can break undesirable habits, create desirable habits and constructively deal with and resolve all kinds of human problems.
Hypnosis traces back to Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) an Austrian physician. Yet there is evidence that it has been practised for thousands of years. There are Sanskrit writings that speak of the use of healing trances and healing temples in India. The Ancient Egyptians also had papyrus scrolls telling of trance inductions used for healing.
Mesmer sparked controversy by using the term "Animal Magnetism" and although his methods were popular and his work successful he was often challenged by the medical community of the time. It was a young surgeon called James Braid who in 1840 became interested in the phenomena and wrote the first book of his findings entitled Neurypnology in 1843.
Later a Doctor Liebault in France developed a system of therapy using hypnosis, a medical colleague named Bernheim sent a patient with sciatica to visit him and the patient was cured overnight, they formed the Nancy School of Hypnosis.
The school was attended by a young Sigmund Freud who went on to develop his talking therapy later to become known as "Psychoanalysis".
At the time there was another field of development that was a reaction against Freuds process, called Behaviourism, noting the stimulus-response effect of the knee-jerk. Intrigued, was a young Russian researcher called Ivan Pavlov went on to document and explain through his work with dogs, just how we all have the ability to be conditioned to respond in ways that are not always helpful, but that the human mind can be rehabilitated. So came about the idea of suggestion under hypnosis as being a powerful, natural and highly effective way to produce beneficial change in patients behaviour.
More recently it has been psychiatrist Milton Erickson,( who practised hypnosis during a long illness, and went on to practise it for the rest of his life) who without doubt has led the field in therapeutic hypnosis, seeing up to 14 people a day for 60 years. Now accepted by the medical profession, both psychoanalytic and behavioural hypnosis when performed by qualified therapists, has taken its place today as an acceptable and useful method of creating positive change in peoples lives.
