It depends!

If we're mixing cannabis with hypnosis, we should address three different sorts of imaginary meters for each and every hypnotic subject.

We have the potential susceptibility (which, in my opinion, is almost always very high if one were to break all of their emotional barriers), and then actual susceptibility. Lastly, we have ability to focus.

If we were to view marijuana as a stat changer, both potential susceptibility and ability to focus drop to some extent with marijuana use. In my opinion, if it is a light to moderate dose, that amount is actually very small, and it only becomes a hinderance once someone becomes far too high to keep track of the sort of hypnotic narrative.

Before that point, a light to moderate high, it should be beneficial overall for almost everyone.

Marijuana lowers inhibitions, increases practical susceptibility due to that and a few other things, and in moderation, comes at very little cost. You're losing some focus for an increased ability to dissociate temporarily and a suppressor to rational and anxious thoughts, which is more than a favorable trade.

Weed would be most effective for hypnosis if you're someone who has a strong metacognition (having that voice during trance that is anxiously checking if something is working, how you're feeling, if any of this is real, etc) and those who have a harsh internal critic towards hypnosis sessions.

I most certainly do not know enough about the differences to speak to anything comprehensive, but on the basic level, marijuana can certainly assist trance, and intense breakthroughs while high can translate to more effective trance when sober, too.

Be safe, and have fun.

"Conversational hypnosis" is what I do most of the time, but that label just kind of annoys me for some reason. I consider it essentially the same as "covert hypnosis" which is what I also do most of the time nowadays. In my opinion, all that these methods really are are regular manipulation with goals that resemble hypnosis' goals.

Many, many folks can attest to me being able to seemingly remove all of their barriers and set things up without them noticing. Much of conversational and covert hypnosis is about framing and priming. I often frame things as if I'm explaining a concept and teaching, be it hypnosis or not.

Priming is much like setting up a twist in a story. While subliminals do not work at all, there is a commonly confused concept similar to it called preconscious suggestions. While subliminal stimuli are things that even when someone is focusing as hard as they can they are unable to process it, preconscious stimuli are things that could be processed if someone decided to focus on it, but they're misdirected elsewhere, and it's received without them noticing.

When a twist in a story happens, it can't just happen. Every element needs to be separately set up beforehand, setting the sort of narrative ambush in a way that once it happens, all of the things we noticed but didn't suspect fall into place at the same time. Priming is doing that very thing, planting seeds of ideas into someone's head to affect their perception so that when you do finally give a more direct idea (still under a conversational tone), it makes sense to them and they accept it willingly. It is, essentially, verbal sleight of hand.

I find most overt hypnosis kind of boring nowadays, and mostly use hypnosis to help people open up, so I use "conversational" and "covert" "hypnosis" to do so. Though, again, it's just a nicer way to put "manipulating someone's perception". C'est la vie.

Aphantasia does not make hypnosis even the slightest bit less effective, or the difference is minimal at best.

A very important part of perception that you and many others would benefit from knowing is the effects of expectations and the systems we create for ourselves.

This most commonly happens with folks that struggle with productivity, like critters with ADHD. I am one such being.

I would, in the past, constantly try to create systems of incentives for myself that made things worse because what I was ultimately doing was creating a win state that didn't feel good and an arbitrarily set loss state that made me feel terrible.

Example:

If I work for 20 minutes and then take a break for 10, it didn't feel good to work for those 20 minutes successfully, but if I wasn't able to go back to working immediately after the 10 minute break, I failed and my shame response would compound my inability to work and would shut down my ability to do anything for hours.

What you are doing as a subject in this case is taking the concept of aphantasia and the word "visualization" and creating the idea that you need to actually visualize in order for it to work. You should treat it like you would descriptive writing in a novel. You don't need to visualize a setting in a novel to understand it.

If I say there's a neon sign hanging above a bar at night with the name "The Bottlecap", you are able to understand and conceptualize it without seeing it.

The point of visualizations is to compartmentalize something in your brain. We do this all the time and without visuals whatsoever, even giving a name to something like "stress" compartmentalizes it from other feelings. Visualizations in hypnosis link and isolate specific parts of the brain so they can be "narratively" affected and affect your perception as a result.

If I tell you to focus on these words that you've been reading for a long time already, and focus, and focus more, and then to use that focus to conceptualize a bubble representing your thoughts, then your brain has done that no matter the visualization.

You can conceptualize that it is slightly purple-ish, that it is translucent, and even without seeing it, each dedication to detail makes you focus on that concept more. This bubble represents your thoughts. And so, if I were to gently bring a claw up to its surface, I could easily make it...

Pop!

...that's the idea anyhow. Try to be aware of the systems you create in your head, and to realize when one is more harmful than helpful.

Have a nice day.

I would say this is a fairly common concern for more stubborn or newer subjects, but it speaks to a misunderstanding of what hypnosis is.

"Self-imposed daydream" is actually a somewhat accurate way to put it. When it comes to hypnosis, the actual practical effects of it come from conditioning: you create or isolate a concept in the mind and then associate it with something else and build that association. These are the concrete effects of hypnosis.

HOWEVER, importantly, you don't need hypnosis to achieve these same effects; or, rather, that hypnosis is not a special effect of the mind. There is no actual line between our regular state of being and being hypnotized. We draw an arbitary one based on feeling different than normal, and in fact have many names for similar or the same effect: daydreams, immersion, meditation, flow states, but none of these, hypnosis included, is special.

The only things required for hypnosis is focus and suggestion, and those are things we always have. I recently did a little experiment where I conditioned a reward trigger to a subject without them ever being aware I was doing it. They were made aware after the fact and were very happy and denied the offer of any removal of said trigger.

I used suggestions they would not notice, made them focus on my words when I had to, and the trigger ended up just as strong if not stronger than if I did an overt session.

Were they hypnotized when I installed it? The simple answer is no, the real answer is that we're always in a state of trance: we just call the regular amount of hypnotized "normal".

As for the weird and spectacular perceptive effects, they are not really needed for it to work. Spectacle definitely helps sell things and might make trance more effective for the simple reason that perspective inherently alters how suggestions are recieved, but you can feel "normal" and absolutely have heightened focus and, as a result, suggestibility. The only way you can make it so things are conditioned and work worse is by believing that if the spectacle fails, the trance itself does too. Things might still be enforced, but much much weaker.

This question falls into the incredibly common conceptual pitfall that hypnosis is something special or different than any other part of our brain. You don't go into a "state of trance", you are always in a state of trance, because you are always exercising the process of guiding focus and being suggested by the information presented to you.

Immersion is trance, daydreaming is trance, meditation is trance, and just existing is some form of trance. You can not be focused on everything at all times, so our minds function like a heatmap, and those things we focus on more take up more of our conception of reality at that moment. That is trance to an extent. Hypnosis does nothing that isn't done a million times a day in more common situations.

Just in the same way that placebos still work despite knowing it's placebo and in the same way that films or television with specific agendas like war movies can still be enjoyable despite you likely disagreeing with the military industrial complex, you can enjoy an ad and have it appeal to you despite it being an advertisement.

What you're describing in this ask, with things like, "manipulating the mind to a happier place to associate those feelings with their brand" is just advertisement placed into the terms and thought structure associated with hypnosis and calling it some special kind of manipulation. Yes, they do that, but no, it is not special. You were no more hypnotized or manipulated by it than any other media product that elicits emotion.

We do not have "hypno ready mind states", we are always "in trance".

We are never unsuggestible, because suggestions are anything that changes your perception.

We are never immune to advertisements or propaganda because they introduce information to us that we will process so long as we perceived it.

You were interested in manscaped, so you watched an ad, they did a good job of appealing to you, and then you were more interested. That's just how our brains work.

I think that it faces the same problem to a lesser extent that self-hypnosis does: knowing what is going to be said and done ahead of time reduces the impact of things.

This is not referring to general ideas, but rather the timing of moments, the surprise factor, and how much one needs to focus on everything.

If you are rewatching a show, you can easily let your mind wander and still be quite aware of what is happening. You have no need to maintain a consistent focus on everything being said and everything happening.

Similarly, it takes a much more active effort to keep focused on every millisecond of a file.

That being said, it can still be quite effective, so long as you have some sort of suggestion that lessens focus on memory recall, focuses on existing in the moment, or just generally enacts amnesia triggers. It won't be 100% the same, but maybe 90%, and that can be more than strong enough.

^w^

I try very hard to learn as much as I can about hypnosis and to link it in with the rest of my understanding so that I can adapt it to any idea I wish. I really love sharing knowledge, and I'm happy so many critters are enjoying it!

I've done it a good few times in casual sessions, but it doesn't greatly interest me personally, perhaps because I only have a weak sense of it so I don't quite know how it feels to those who have a stronger one.

I do find it interesting as a concept. It seems to me that it's a simple act of accessing sensory memory as a suggestion. Our minds store sensory data very strongly, to the point where I could simply ask the person reading to imagine how a carpet feels in your hands, and you could easily imagine it.

You may even be able to feel it on your hands a bit. That slightly rough, fibrous texture, one that gives easily to pressure, but eventually meets your hand if you press down enough. The way it rumbles against your hand if you run it along the surface, how that feeling changes depending on the direction you go.

Descriptive writing mixed with suggestion can light up those same neurons in the brain you'd feel while you're actually touching it, so you can summon some sort of ghost of the real thing.

A collection of all of my hypnosis advice, ideas, and experiments.

These are rather unsorted, but enjoy.

Most hypnotists really undervalue focus suggestions.

Focus is the entire point. Hypnosis is the process of guiding someone's focus, hence guiding their perception, and by doing so, guiding their sense of reality. Some people don't even do any, and some do a few then forget about it the entire rest of the trance.

You first grab territory over all of their focus, their sense of reality, and then you put it to use (note: there is nuance to this and you don't need to follow any structure for trance, but this is a general principle that you learn how to effectively break with experience and understanding).

Relaxation is not even necessary for trance, but is necessary for practical purposes. You are essentially using relaxation to free up more focus to allocate to you. That's to say, if you don't actually grab that newly allocated focus, you're not really utilizing anything. At most, the spectacle of the relaxation effects would make them feel more susceptible, which may help, but you're leaving so much on the table.

Your induction's primary goal should be to grab as much focus as you can. If you have all of their focus, dropping them is insanely easy and very quick to do.

Even in the future, I've found that if you do just one insanely strong focus-centric session, that person can be suggested while awake pretty decently. I often just set up triggers on friends without inductions and they work more than fine so long as you account for it being a touch weaker than if it was installed in trance.

The secret is that they are in trance, immediately so, whenever I wish. They're trained to have their focus be drawn to me the moment I want it.

This is all to say, hypnosis is focus and suggestion. If you don't focus on focus, you are missing half the picture.

There seems to be a lot of unquestioned arbitrary rules inserted into place for what people think a trigger is in hypnosis.

The actual definition is very simple, at least from my perspective. A hypnotic trigger is anything that causes recall of a hypnotic suggestion. Anything.

The trigger itself doesn't need to be reinforced or have even been said before for it to be a trigger so long as it causes recall, it does not have to be a word or a sound. So long as the subject's brain can recognize it as a distinct thing, then it counts. It's closer to ontology than anything.

That being said, you need to understand properties of triggers and how every single aspect of a trigger will affect how the conditioned suggestion is received.

One of the most common and baffling mistakes I see both in trances and in triggers is the "active time" of the trigger; that's to say, the amount of time the brain needs to be acting on that suggestion.

I've always despised visual of an elevator or an ice block, because the subject needs to be hyperfocused on a very slow climb and fall which is near impossible to maintain the consistency of, especially if they need to focus on other things too.

In contrast, a trigger or suggestion that takes place near-instantly or over a few seconds only requires a moment of making an active change, which is simpler and more consistent, and allows for variability in the strength of the effects since you don't have the last minute of change to compare it to.

If this drop trigger only worked 80% as well as the last one, it's a lot harder to notice with a chunk of time of nothing happening between them. Even consistent, small bursts are better than a constant change, like stepping down stairs instead of going down an elevator.

Snaps are the most common form of signifying a trigger because we can make it with our hands, but more importantly, because they're sudden and loud.

The aesthetic of a sudden and loud sound translates to the subject's brain how to interpret the feeling of that trigger. This also means, though, that if you have a trigger that isn't meant to be a burst, that you may not want to use a snap at all.

This also extends into the idea of "suggestion equivalency", as I would call it.

Essentially, you want the aesthetics and potency of the trigger to reasonably match up to the effects of the suggestion itself. The reason a snap is powerful is because you're condensing a very strong effect into one moment. However, if you try to stretch that intense potency to multiple seconds, it'll simply fail. There is only so much focus, there is only so much trigger potency.

One of the myriad reasons I despise key elman inductions is the suggestion of "doubling trance" every time you blink. There is a cartoonish, absurd potency required for that idea that anyone who knows hypnosis at all from the hypnotist or subject side (or just like, the wheat and chessboard tale) would get severe cognitive dissonance from attempting to follow it.

Another issue to consider is the generality and widespreaded-ness of a conditional trigger.

One file from MissLilith that I think was rather silly (and I'm only ragging on her here because I like her work) tries to give the suggestion that any time you see any plant at all, you get aroused. Furthering the idea of keeping up intensity over time, if a stimuli is so ubiquitous that someone experiences it constantly, the spectacle of it is simply gone. That suggestion will, optimistically, exhaust itself within hours.

That's not even to mention that fact that seeing something does not have nearly as much of a spectacle and intense impact as a sudden sound or word. There's a reason why movies have stingers to signal sudden scary moments or realizations.

From a community perspective, you should also avoid the most common trigger words unless you want someone to be dropped accidentally or have your suggestions lumped in with ones from other hypnotists and files.

The last issue is another practical one, the idea of stimulus generalization.

Shortly after an intense session I had involving snaps one time, I watched a 2 hour long video by Nexpo about Petscop (good and atmospheric overview, though Nexpo is terrible when it comes to actually analyzing media himself).

Thing is, the text changing sounds in the game sound a scary amount like a snap. So, every single time there was gameplay audio, I'd get triggered by it, essentially fractionating myself due to continually bringing myself up right after it happened.

Clicker sounds can be set off by pens, snaps by other sudden, high-pitched single noises, even general obedience suggestions can be triggered by another person to your subject if they act similar or have a similar sounding vocal tone to you, among other things. One must always consider that possibility.

Overall, words as triggers are common for a reason, but you can do essentially anything, so long as you recognize many of the common shortfalls of doing so.

Good luck, and happy hypnotizing.

This might sound a bit braggadocios. but I truly don't mean it like this: I have never found a subject that I failed to put into trance.

Hypnosis uses a bunch of functions of our minds that we use thousands to millions of times a day outside of trance, and we just utilize them intentionally. All the pieces are there outside of extreme exceptions.

That being said, some respond better than others, and each person requires a long pre-talk.

The method I almost always use is explaining my methodology and understanding of hypnosis while simultaneously doing it to them in order to demonstrate. It informs them of how it works which is cool, gives me an excuse to rant about a special interest, and clears up misconceptions that would create cognitive dissonance in the subject if it didn't align with what they were feeling.

It serves the additional purpose of giving a "proof of concept" as it were to the subject, showing that it's not some far off thing, and it's in fact very possible to drop into trance.

For new subjects, I stick to a few visuals or methods I know work for me.

One is a bubble visual, another is having them focus a lot on my voice and trying to "recreate" it in their mind to echo me, another is using the visual of forming focus into an orb in their mind that stirs their thoughts around.

I don't tend to form too many triggers the first time around, but I do explain the importance of memory recall in returning to trance, then use the visual of a polaroid camera to "snap" pictures of their state in their mind and store it in memory, making it far easier for them to return in the future.

fun little tip for my fellow hypnotists:

if you want a suggestion to have a stronger effect than usual but don't wanna make another trigger that you reinforce and strengthen just for the one effect, you can just borrow one of your existing triggers!

if you take a trigger that has already been deeply reinforced, something like Good Puppy, you can, for example, start building a sleepiness suggestion by saying "the next time I say Good Puppy, you'll feel a wave of calm start to wash through your body, sweeping up all of that energy, as it goes back, and forth, and back, and forth..." etc etc.

and then, when you finally say

that suggestion will feel stronger than it would otherwise because you linked it to an idea that has not only already been reinforced, but the subject understands the "spectacle" of, so to speak. it's like the subject's understanding of that trigger's power can just be plucked and used for another purpose.

if you wanna be sure it doesn't get funneled in with the rest of the reinforced effects, just do it once, or specify that these effects will melt away at the end of the session if you want to use it more than once.

hope this helps! ^v^

been thinking today about an invisible hypnotic crank.

any time you and your subject are hanging out, you can go, "Attention!" and snap your fingers, and your subject automatically snaps to your finger that's now pointing upwards

and then, you just...

spin it around,

and around,

and see your subject's head start to lower,

shoulders relax,

just barely keeping themselves from falling over, only so they can keep looking at the tip of your finger.

and once you stop pointing, you can just move close to them, slowly, and...

Boop!

and their body goes limp into your arms, mind entirely dedicated to making your words their reality.