Seeing it in Person

I recently got the opportunity to finally watch someone listening to my mp3 induction files in person.

As a hypnotist, body language is one of the most important indicators as to how you are doing, and that’s not something you normally get to see when the person listening to your file is 100 miles away, webcam or no.

It was a great relief that not only did my subject enjoy the experience, and give me high marks for the quality of the file; her body language showed that she was achieving a moderate trance depth, despite the strangeness of the situation and having just completed a six mile run.

When you’re there in person, you can see the rhythm of the subject’s breathing, the tension of his or her muscles, and the motion of his or her eyes beneath the eyelids. On top of this, you can notice facial flushing, especially redness in the eyes, resulting from relaxed blood vessels. These are some of the most important clues as to how well someone is responding to hypnosis.

All of my files use the same induction, and so this review gave me the confidence to release my two for-sale downloads, knowing that they use similar techniques and are of even higher audio quality.

I often have a difficult time writing a script in more than an outline form before starting a session, as it’s hard to work on the pacing and wording without some feedback in the form of someone listening. With some additional help from this subject, I hope to be releasing some new recordings within the next few months.

Finally, Files for Sale

I bit the bullet and finally posted the two files I've been working on.

The first helps you get to sleep, and the second helps you wake up on time. A nice pairing, I think.

After lots and lots of tweaking, I decided it was better to have a product that wasn't perfect than to not have a product at all.

Trial and Error

Hypnosis doesn’t always work out the way you plan. Sometimes someone just isn’t going under, even when you’re use standard methods that you’ve used dozens or hundreds of times before.

Some people blame this on the potential subject who ‘just isn’t hypnotizable.’ That’s a weak excuse.

When you hear the oft-quoted fact that “x% of the population can’t be hypnotized” what it’s really saying is, if you use the exact same induction methods with however many people, a certain number just won’t go under. Well Duh.

Hypnosis is something that often has to be tailored to the individual to be successful. I say often because in most cases, there is a standard response you’ll see from most people for a given suggestion; it’s just a matter of how big the response is and how long it takes. The people that claim that each session must be individually tailored sometimes seem sanctimonious, but if you want the best results in the shortest time, they’re right.

That leads to the biggest challenge I have with iHypnoU.com: trying to come up with a set of suggestions that works well enough with everyone to achieve the session’s goals. How do I do it? I use the fact that there are standard responses to the suggestions I’m giving, and structure my entire recording around encouraging them, using their appearance to build expectations.

Hypnosis for Swine Flu?

I don't know whether to be angry or just sad about the marketing of it - Victoria Gallagher, the hypnotist at hyptalk.com, has released a hypnosis recording to boost the immune system with hypnosis to help the listener not get swine flu.

Google has a lovely tool which I use called Google Alerts. It provides me with an email listing recently indexed sites and blogs relating to terms I specify. Linked in that email last week was a press release that made me quite angry.

You can read it yourself here, but I'll tell you the wording that made me contemplate the laws regarding these types of claims. I'll preface this by saying that the file probably just makes you relax and not worry so much about sickness, which could help your immune system; but some of these claims are just ridiculous.

The first line: "Spend 30 minutes a day in Hypnosis, and you will greatly improve your chances of staying healthy this year (and every year)." Iffy, but okay. It's a bit of marketing exaggeration for most, but true in the cases of some people who always think they're sick.

Later: "For those who might be scared of the risks involved with the Swine Flu Vaccine, Hypnosis provides a risk-free alternative." Wow. Claiming that hypnosis is risk free compared to the vaccine...what the risk of really getting swine flu? And what about the risk of then passing it on to someone you love? I mean, swine flu isn't that bad, but I wouldn't want to give my family a bad present for Christmas; why would I want to risk giving them an illness?

"So, you could find yourself staying healthy from all colds and viruses." The word could is a good qualifier, but 'all colds and viruses' includes meningitis, HPV, HIV, and all sorts of other things that aren't so much affected by stress levels. And being sick is about more than just experiencing symptoms.

The release starts to redeem itself in the second half, encouraging people to wash their hands, rest, and drink fluids, as well as hinting at the fact that what the file is doing is getting you to not think about getting sick, but by that point it's made some pretty fantastical claims.

She is/They are giving a way a file for free right now, but most of her files apparently sell for $39, which makes it no surprise that she's pushing this, even buying a special domain name, beastswineflunow.com. I assume the hope is that when someone listens and doesn't get swine flu, they'll line right up to buy the $99 packages for good luck so they can win the lotto.