Hidden in the noise of London, quiet conversations are happening. Listen closely, and you’ll hear people talking about it in The Economist , in The Financial Times, and in the BBC’s magazine, Science Focus. Cross the Atlantic Ocean and whispers of that same conversation are taking place in newspapers like The New York Times, in podcasts like The Tim Ferris Show, and in scientific journals like Cerebral Cortex, Brain Sciences, and Nature Scientific Reports.

Talking are authors and doctors, researchers and patients. Discussed traditionally clinical with the therapist, discussed self-guided with an app. It turns out that all these different people are talking about hypnosis. And that’s why, using Reveri, I tried out doing self-hypnosis for a year.

Developed by the Stanford Psychiatrist and hypnosis pioneer Dr David Spiegel, Reveri is a self-hypnosis app which aims to share the clinical benefit of hypnosis with people beyond the therapy room. I say that I have used for a year. That needs some clarification. Because, according to Reveri, which helpfully keeps a record of my sessions, I only used the app for 261 out of 365 days.

In fact, I completed 427 self-hypnosis sessions, for a total of 45 hours and 46 minutes. Some further quick calculations tell me that - in the last year alone - I spent nearly two full days in hypnosis and practiced on 72% of all the days in the year. All that is to say, in the last year, I did a fair bit of self-hypnosis. So, what’s it like?

“In hypnosis, not only do you connect more deeply to your body and get absorbed in clearer ideas, but you become more cognitively flexible, which lets you try out new versions of yourself, new solutions to old problems”

After one year, above are my self-hypnosis stats with Reveri

The short review is that, with Reveri, self-hypnosis is really quite good! For me, not quite life changing. Not quite transformative. I’m still the same person, with the same strengths and weaknesses. But is it awesome? Is it useful? Genuinely helpful? Worth paying for? Absolutely. It’s the sort of thing that’s worth getting that free trial and diving right in and seeing how it could help you be more productive, sleep better, feel less pain, relax more, or switch off automatic negative thoughts. Having said that, the caveat below is worth reading.

I found self-hypnosis helpful and will continue using it as a wellbeing and productivity tool. But! It’s important to know that individuals like you and individuals like me differ in how they respond to hypnosis. According to research carried out by Spiegel and others, some people are highly hypnotisable.
Such people find it easy to switch into hypnosis, and perhaps make up 15% of a given population. Another 15% are weakly hypnotisable, and probably won’t experiece much benefit from hypnosis. The remaining 70% are people in the average. These people are more malleable and can probably work to find hypnosis more useful for them.
If all this sounds confusing, it isn’t. With Reveri, you can test your own hypnotizability quickly. This helps to make hypnosis realistic for you, as an individual. If it turns out that you don’t respond well to hypnosis, then that’s useful data - perhaps meditation, or CBT, or Yoga exercises are more your thing. Find something that’s real and that works for you.
For me, self-hypnosis is right up there with cold showers, exercise, journaling, and the like.

In the app, there are a range of tailored exercises that self-hypnosis can help with, from pain and sleep to stress and productivity. Here I will talk about the exercises that I did most. My focus is on reducing stress and anxiety because this is what self-hypnosis was most helpful for me.

Want to try Reveri for yourself?

Go to: https://www.reveri.com/

Or search for “Reveri” on your App Store

Stress and Anxiety

Hypnosis, despite its reputation, has long been known in the scientific literature to be helpful for stress and anxiety. The app’s founder, Dr Spiegel, has done some of the best brain imaging work to make clear why this is so. In hypnosis, as the prefrontal cortex and the insula communicate better, so the brain-body connection strengthens. A stronger connections means two things: one, the ability to feel what’s happening in your body better (tuning in) and two, the ability to selectively ignore bodily signals (tuning out).

Stress, we’ve known for a long time, is a deeply physical thing. As you know, heart rate, breathing, and sweating are all physiological markers of stress, for example. And so, if only there was some way to calm your body and your brain! Self-hypnosis can do exactly this. Following Reveri’s guidance, I first relax my body and slow my breathing. Slowly, physical tension is replaced with physical relaxation. Then mental imagery arrives. I picture myself floating in a lake or out walking in nature. Just as a stressed body helps to create a stressed brain, so a relaxed brain helps to create a relaxed body. The two way street goes both ways, for everything, all the time.

Hypnosis helps stress and anxiety through another brain mechanism: absorption. In hypnosis, I am able to deeply focus and tune out of other things that I might be thinking about, like to-do lists, the future, workplace worries, and so on. My anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the brain sometimes called the secretary because it’s involved in prioritising incoming information, begins to slow down. Instead of overthinking and overanalysing like it normally does, in hypnosis the secretary takes a trip to the spa, and…

Much like this sentence… Just… Sort of….Slows down, and…. Relaxes….

Information like thoughts and sounds still comes in, but the ACC secretary just doesn’t care about them as much. Related to this is a drop in activity in my salience network.

Salience means important. The network is involved in noticing all things that matter, or at least all things that it thinks could matter to the human user. The salience network is involved, for example, when you hear a loud noise and instinctively turn your head to see what happened and where. Much of it is automatic. Which means it can be difficult to turn down. Fortunately, in hypnosis, that network turns right down. A noise goes off. I still care, but I care much less. A calmer secretary and a less active lookout system lead, therefore, to feeling absorbed - more focused on what’s in front of me, less distracted by everything else, whether internal thoughts or external events.

Relaxing my body and it’s signals of stress, combined with focusing on the exercises in Reveri, I mentally begin to unpack my problems, and more clearly think about solutions to them. Hypnosis, then, offers a way to tune out of the usual stressors and worries, and instead to precisely focus in on what needs to be done. Which, it goes without saying, is really quite helpful. One important cause of stress is this. Stress is often caused by things that hang over us. It is caused by the stuff we need to do, but haven’t yet done. Beginning to take action on the pile of washing, on the finances, and on the studying not only helps to reduce stress, but to increase positive emotion. Hypnosis gets this process going first mentally, and then in reality. Just as imaging the worst case scenario prevents me from taking action, so imaging the solutions to problems helps me to get up and to start doing them. Imaging solutions to problems is good. Doing that in hypnosis, though, is much better, because hypnosis brings with it a laser-like focus mixed with calm.

After each session, which are between 4 and 10 minutes, Reveri asks me to rate if my stress has increased or decreased when compared to before. Every time I felt better. It’s like going to the gym. I’ve never left that place and felt worse. After a typical self-hypnosis session, I consistently feel less stressed. Consistently less anxious. Consistently more able to break my problems down into smaller chunks and solve them, rather than getting overwhelmed. And that consistency is what, to me, makes self-hypnosis so useful.

In the last couple of years I have been writing a book - which is turning into a monumental task as ideas sprawl and multiply, getting confused and twisted along the way. I have also been studying for an A-Level in Physics so that I can train as a secondary school teacher, alongside a privately practicing therapist. Learning how to think mathematically and how to manipulate equations alongside writing and working my day-job has not been particularly easy. Self-hypnosis has significantly made handling projects like these much more manageable, much more realistic, much less stressful than it could have been. The secretary and my other brain systems are being overloaded by my incessant desire to do more, to learn more. I think they deserve a break. With self-hypnosis, with Reveri, that’s exactly what they get.

After all, the hardest part in doing any task or project is often not the project itself, but our own negative self-talk, which so consistently gets in the way of our natural ability to learn and to get things done. I hope that it’s clear to see why having a tool like self-hypnosis is so immensely useful in breaking down the big and unfamiliar and turning them into something smaller and more achievable. I won’t write my book in a week or learn physics in a month. But too much negative self-talk really will prevent me from making the small gains that over days and weeks, over months and years, will help me to actually achieve those long-term goals.

Reveri and self-hypnosis cannot eliminate anxiety or beat stress. Thankfully, they are not self-help gurus. Complete (and probably unrealistic) transformation are not what they are trying to do. Instead, what they can do - what they actively seek to do - is to help people like me to get deeply focused and relaxed, to break problems down, and to find small solutions. The final mechanism of hypnosis, you see, is cognitive flexibility. As you get deeply absorbed and connected to your body, there is a useful dissociation that occurs. Your sense of self can become more flexible. This is made possible by a useful disconnect between two areas of our brain: the default mode network and the prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex governs our rationality, our planning and our logic. The default mode, on the other hand, is the seat of our reflecting self. It’s where we think about ourselves, our actions, our identity. It’s also where, unfortunately, we overthink. Writing my book, I may think to myself: how can I ever achieve this project? I’m not smart enough; I’m not capable enough, and so on. In hypnosis, then, a disconnect between these two brain systems allows a kind of freedom from overthinking and old ideas about ourselves. In self-hypnosis, I feel more free to explore, to experiment, and to learn. Crucially, I feel freer from the judgement of myself, or from others. That really helps to keep a long-term goal on track. Doubt is replaced by quiet self-belief.

In general, self-hypnosis helps to make my stressors more manageable as I mentally rehearse ideas to approach the problem in a way that is open and judgement free, rather than concerned. As we become adults, it is often said, who we are becomes more fixed. That, for the most part, is true. The good news is that hypnosis is a method to temporarily break the mould, to try out new selves and new solutions - with less overthinking and more of a willingness to try. In hypnosis, not only do you connect more deeply to your body and get absorbed in clearer ideas, but you become more cognitively flexible, which lets you try out new versions of yourself, new solutions to old problems. This is rather useful when pursuing new identities outward. I am not yet a writer. Or a science teacher. There is thus a lot of internal resistance when I try to push my identity into these new areas. Self-hypnosis helps to smooth those edges, to help me shape my identity in a way that is curious to learn rather than afraid to make mistakes.

A year of Reveri practice has, without question, helped me to relieve stress and helped to relieve anxiety. Depending on how hypnotizable you are (see top of article), it will probably be helpful for you, too.

Beyond Stress & Anxiety, there were three other exercises which I found useful.

Unwinding from Work

After a days work, this exercise helped me to switch off and mentally transition into relaxing time at home. It helps to create a focused and relaxed state after work that lends itself to unwinding and mentally rehearsing positive ideas about how to spend the upcoming evening. Really quite useful after a busy day.

Dealing with Procrastination

Likewise, this exercise was helpful. Often before doing a big and scary task, like learning physics, there is internal resistance. That feeling, the building of procrastination, can be helped by self-hypnosis. In the app, Dr Spiegel guided me through some mental imagery that helped me overcome procrastination. As expected, self-hypnosis was consistently helpful in getting me started, which is often the hardest part.

Improving Focus

Hypnosis is all about focus. It should come as no surprise that it can be used to mentally rehearse problems in your mind and get clear on what you’re doing, and why. I also practiced this in the stress and anxiety exercises. Again, really helpful for juggling ideas in your mind and getting that thinking nice and clear.

Want to try Reveri for yourself?

Go to: https://www.reveri.com/

Or search for “Reveri” on your App Store