Hypnotherapists utilise hypnosis to help people solve personal problems. Hypnosis is a state of mind, typified by deep relaxation, a narrowed focus and heightened sensory awareness. This state of mind occurs naturally and people slide in and out of this state, known as 'trance', all the time, in everyday life.

Examples of trance states include fantasising about someone you are attracted to, becoming deeply absorbed in reading a book, being anxious about an event causing you to re-live what could go wrong over and over in your head and daydreaming. As you may see from the examples given, trance states can be positive or negative, depending on what is being focused on.

Hypnotherapy is based on the philosophy, that trance states can be helpful and utilised to bring about positive change. This is because, when a person is deeply relaxed, as they are during trance, access to the unconscious mind is enabled. Hypnotherapists believe that learning, behaviour and change, occur at an unconscious level.

Categorising the mind into unconscious and conscious is just a conceptual model, a way of describing different aspects of the mind. The concept of unconscious and conscious mind is generally accepted in the western world. These different aspects of the mind are believed to have different functions. For example, the conscious mind is logical, rational, and sequential in thinking. It is also analytical, it uses words and numbers and stores short-term memories. The unconscious mind is intuitive, non-sequential in thinking, more creative, uses symbols and feelings and stores long-term memories.

If you imagine your mind as operating on a sliding scale, at one end, you have highly alert states, towards the other end, you have more relaxed states such as daydreaming and further towards the this end still, deep trance and finally sleep.

Often when people present with problems at Hypnotherapy Herts, they have attempted to solve their problem through conscious effort and have struggled with this. For example, the insomniac, who finds that trying to consciously fall off to sleep, just seems to make things worse. At hypnotherapy Herts, the hypnotherapist will use hypnotherapy to gain access to the unconscious mind. This type of therapy can be very useful for treating habits. For example, there are often unconscious issues associated with smoking that are best dealt with through hypnotherapy. Most people do not consciously decide to continue poisoning and damaging themselves through smoking on a day to day basis.

The conscious mind, although strong at logical thinking and the other functions mentioned, tends to be much more rigid in thinking. The unconscious mind is much more flexible and as it stores all your life's learnings, it is in the unconscious mind where habits are created and maintained. Through hypnotherapy Herts, the hypnotherapist is able to make habit changes much easier and more naturally, by working with the unconscious mind.