The Truth About Hypnosis “You are getting sleepy, very sleepy, so sleepy that your eyelids feel so heavy that you cannot hold them up”. Everyone who knows of hypnosis has probably heard a line like this and can imagine a hypnotist swinging a gold pocket watch in front of the subject he is attempting to hypnotize. Although many people have heard of hypnosis, not a lot are educated on the topic. Before I witnessed the phenomenon for myself at my high school senior class party, I was a skeptic. However, once I saw our all-state linebacker prance around and shriek like a girl for no apparent reason and multiple other classmates act like animals without regard for their own dignity, I began to believe in the power of hypnosis. Utilizing the power of hypnosis for entertainment was certainly amusing, but I began to …show more content…
Hypnotherapy has been approved by the medical and scientific establishment as far back as the nineteenth century (Smith 50). In 1961, the American Psychiatric Association endorsed hypnosis as a therapeutic procedure (Smith 51). In the United States, hypnosis is used to treat anxiety disorders, sleep and eating disorders, depression, substance addiction such as alcoholism and smoking. (Horowitz 87). In addition, hypnotherapy can be used to treat suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress disorder, and diabetes (King 172). Numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of hypnosis in reducing the sensation of pain. One study aimed to change the pain threshold of its subjects via hypnosis by monitoring the subject’s brains and having them rate their pain after receiving painful electric shocks (King 172). The brain-scanning results revealed that although subcortical brain areas of both the hypnotized subjects and control subjects recognized the painful stimulation, the hypnotized subject’s sensory cortexes were not activated (King