Episode 19, What the heck is Hypnosis?

What even is hypnosis? A look at this poorly understood phenomena—and why the parts of the human experience that we least understand might be the most interesting.

Transcript

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Hey there, this is Anthony Alvarado. You are listening to The Rough Draft. Today's episode is about hypnosis. And what exactly is hypnosis? Because it's kind of a weird, hard-to-define thing, and it's maybe not what you think it is. So a few months ago, I began this pretty interesting journey of learning how to become a hypnotist, of how to do hypnosis. I started taking classes and practicing on people. And yeah, it's just an area that I've been curious about for a really long time. I've always been fascinated by the areas of human knowledge that are kind of in this gray zone, the liminal, the woo, the twilight areas of things like qigong, kundalini yoga, lucid dreaming, paranormal activities. I mean, I did, after all, write a whole book about magic. Uh, DIY magic is a book that I wrote several years back exploring strange areas and trying to find practical uses for them because I feel like a lot of times there's this stuff that is kind of out there, maybe kind of uh woo, and maybe there's some like baloney mixed in there, you know. A lot of times there is, but then there's also like this hidden gold, this parts of it, parts of of anything like that, whether it's tarot or astrology or anything that's kind of out there. I feel like if you there's a reason that stuff has been around forever, and there's a reason why it works. And you have to be really careful though, because I think that mixed in with the part of it that works is stuff that is, you know, that science can't get at, science can't explain. And some of it is actually, you know, that is also an area where people uh like charlatans operate and fraudulent stuff happens. So, you know, it's just a very interesting mixture of things that are useful and things that are kind of baloney. And and that's always been an area that I've been fascinated by, trying to untangle that stuff, untangle what's useful and what isn't. That's what I was aiming to do with my book, DIY Magic. And I feel like hypnosis is one of those areas. It's been an area that I've been really curious about for a long time because it's something that some people say it can be life-changing and super useful, and then other people think that it's just hogwash. And so, whenever there's something like that, there's like this overlap between stuff that really does seem to work for some people some of the time, and really nobody can explain why and how it works and what the science is behind it. I always find that to be a very fascinating area to explore because to me that means there's room to discover something here if you if you dig deep with an open mind and also remain skeptical. Usually there's something that you can find that maybe uh isn't really understood completely. I mean, that's why science has a hard time understanding these areas. But you know, science has a hard time understanding a lot of stuff, like there's just so much about reality, about being alive, about consciousness, about existence that science does not have a handle on. And, you know, you can do a deep a deep dive into that, and you often will find when you do that there's a lot more questions than answers out there. But that's that's a bit of a that's a different direction. So I want to talk about hypnosis and what I've learned about it in the past few months. To start out with it, I got myself hypnotized a few times and I found that to be a really interesting experience. The first time you try it, you realize that it's actually a pretty familiar state, kind of like, oh, that's all it is. It's just kind of that spacing out, zoning out, daydreaming kind of awareness. So, like everybody's familiar with that. Everybody's experienced that kind of drifty, floaty state, but it's just accessing that state on purpose and then using it in a way that can be productive or therapeutic, using it for visualization, using it for unlocking maybe areas in your mind or your conscious that are that are knotted up, that are problematic, you know, anxieties and fears and stuff like that. Hypnosis is really great for dealing with stuff like that. But ultimately, all it is is it's like when you you lay down at the end of a really busy day and you're tired, and immediately you start to feel that kind of drifty, floaty sensation where you're not quite asleep and you're not quite awake. That's basically the state that it's all about. I honestly think that hypnosis is the same thing that people are working towards when they do all kinds of ancient practices in a lot of ways. Practices like yoga and meditation are very adjacent. And even a lot of creative practices, a lot of like creative writing or art making is very adjacent to this slightly altered state that uh some people call it hypnagogic. It's you're not quite asleep, but you're not your your conscious brain, the the verbal logical part of the brain is it's still there, but it's kind of offline, it's not steering. And that's a really interesting state to explore. And another way of putting it is it's basically just getting like really deeply relaxed and then using that relaxation on purpose. So it's a useful state for working on problems because a lot of times our own kind of like logical verbal side of the brain, you know, that what gets called the inner critic, that can be overactive and it can be turned up higher than it needs to be. And so hypnotherapy is kind of a way of like getting past that, and it's used for all kinds of stuff from overcoming social anxiety to performing better at sports and whatnot. So I went and got myself certified as a hypnotherapist over the past few months, and in to do that, I practiced a lot on a lot of different people, and I found that the act of hypnotizing people itself is pretty straightforward. It's essentially progressive relaxation. And you know, if you've done if you've ever done uh Yoga Nidra, it's very similar to that actually. So it's like progressively letting yourself become more physically relaxed from head to toe. You could also compare it to guided meditation, which is actually pretty similar in a lot of ways, but it's all very different from what you see with like stage hypnosis or you know, on TV and movies where somebody maybe like uses like a gold pocket watch and is like, you're getting very sleepy, you know, and and then people get turned into like zombies and do all kinds of crazy stuff. It doesn't really work that way. Funny how a lot of stuff in in movies isn't actually uh reality, you know, total tangent, but another thing that apparently doesn't happen, except for movies and TV, is people getting knocked out, like you know, in in every other movie, somebody might get like punched and and then they're knocked out for like 10 minutes and then they're like, Whoa, what happened? That's totally fiction. Apparently, that doesn't happen nearly as often, or that's very rare. I don't know. That's so being knocked out and and getting hypnotized so that you like just lose control. Uh, those are just movie fictions. In the case of hypnosis, it it gets a bad rap, which is unfortunate because people associate it with like stage hypnosis and this caricature that's in the movies, but it it really is a useful thing with useful outcomes for helping people overcome stuff like anxiety. Uh, I've used it to help people overcome anxiety and to move through procrastination and to deal with stressful situations at work and overcome phobias about speaking out in public. So it's really good for working with the parts of the mind that are maybe not logical, you know, the stuff that you can't fix just by thinking through it logically. Um, I think that's that's where hypnosis really shines. And ultimately it's more of a collaboration between the person being hypnotized and the hypnotist. So it's a pretty incredible tool for basically all kinds of situations where maybe we humans can get in the habit of holding ourselves back. Um, public speaking is like a really good example. Like nobody wants to have a fear of speaking in front of groups of people or getting anxiety in social situations. That's not a rational thing, it's a problem that you can't just like use logic to solve. And so the solution to a problem like that is kind of upstream of logic, it's deeper in the brainstem, deeper in the psyche uh of the individual. And hypnosis is like a way of like getting at that kind of upstream stuff that is going on pre-logic. I don't know, it's been a really interesting thing to explore. Yeah, just wanted to share my observations about it. So it kind of feels like a cheat code, it feels like uh a way of getting pre-rational, you know, and I think that humans are a lot more pre-rational than we give ourselves credit for, and maybe we always have been. I think that's a part of what we are as like tribal like creatures or pack animals, you know. We're not just like these robots that are pure logic. And ultimately, I I will say this too: after months of doing hypnotherapy and learning how to do it and studying it, it still remains kind of mysterious and kind of like it's weird. It's a weird thing, it's weird that it works at all. And so that's one of the hallmarks of the kind of things that I find really interesting and worth exploring, you know, stuff that ties into that and creativity and dreams and the subconscious. Um, I just think there's a lot there that is what makes us human. And I'll end on this note. I think that as we continue to go into this kind of like weird future where like more stuff is becoming automated with AI and yeah, just like the weird internet, everything connected, everything online all the time. Uh, future. I think that there is a lot of really interesting stuff worth exploring that makes us human, that is not fully understood still, and is tied in with the subconscious and with creativity and dreams and all of that. So, yeah, that's the show for today. This is The Rough Draft with Anthony Alvarado. And as always, you can go and check out old episodes of the show and future episodes of the show on Anthonyalvarado.net. There's links on there to find the show on X-ray FM, of course, as well as Spotify and Apple Podcasts and all that stuff. So check it out and thank you so much for listening.