What Is Hypnotherapy? A Complete Guide to Hypnosis Therapy for Health

Entertainment media often paints hypnosis as a magic trick where a hypnotist controls a person and puts them into a trance. But hypnosis is not just for fun. In fact, it’s a major component of hypnotherapy, a form of psychological therapy that may help reprogram the mind and is a complementary approach sometimes used to support the treatment of a myriad of health conditions.

Let’s dive into what hypnotherapy is, how it works, and its potential risks.
What Is Hypnotherapy?

Hypnotherapy is a psychological therapy that uses hypnosis to treat health conditions, per the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Typically, hypnotherapy begins with a review of your medical history and a discussion of the condition you’d like to address with a hypnotherapist (there are no current standard licensing guidelines for hypnotherapists in the United States). From there, you’ll be guided through hypnosis, where the hypnotherapist will use a series of mental images and suggestions intended to help you change behaviors and possibly relieve your symptoms, according to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

But what is hypnosis? “It’s a heightened state of concentration and focused attention,” says Samantha Shaw, a Minneapolis-based certified hypnotist and health coach in good standing with the National Guild of Hypnotists and the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. During hypnosis, your attention is usually directed inward — to feelings, thoughts, and images, according to a 2019 editorial in the journal Palliative Care: Research and Treatment.

The idea behind hypnotherapy is that it can be used to reprogram the unconscious or primal parts of the brain that function to avoid pain and seek pleasure. These parts are known as the reptilian (lizard) and mammalian brains. The older “lizard" brain provides basic survival motivations, while the newer “mammal" brain improves our emotions and memory, per the American Museum of Natural History. You can also think of these regions as the more emotional, creative areas that communicate with symbols and images. These regions tend to take over when we become anxious and imagine worst-case scenarios.

According to the editorial article mentioned above, the primate brain — also known as the conscious mind — tends to be more dominant during our everyday lives. This part communicates verbally and is more intellectual and rational than the reptilian and mammalian brains. But it was also the last part of our brain to evolve, and it can take a backseat in our thinking when we become stressed. “It’s the little brother to the reptilian and mammalian brain, and while this younger brother is smart, he gets overpowered by the bigger, buffer brothers that have been around longer,” Shaw says.