What Is Hypnosis? Describe the Psychological and Physical Aspects of Hypnosis and Discuss the Role of Relaxation in Therapy.

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What is Hypnosis? Describe the psychological and physical aspects of hypnosis and discuss the role of relaxation in therapy. What is Hypnosis? Many people don’t really know what hypnosis is. Hypnosis has for years been associated with the mysterious sideshows you may have witnessed where members of the audience are invited to the stage to carry out strange acts following instructions from the ‘hypnotist’. People may have seen the magician David Copperfield performing supernatural activities on television. Hypnosis is a natural state of awareness, a natural ‘trance’ state or daydreaming. You are either asleep or awake and there are many different in between levels of awareness, which I will describe later. Humans have in fact been in a hypnotic state on many occasions without even being aware of it. For example when you are driving perfectly physically, but mentally you are somewhere else and miss your turning off the motorway, or maybe even thinking about a loved one. Everything we learn is stored in our subconscious and with reference to the example above, driving skills are stored in our subconscious. Once you reach the desired speed while driving your conscious mind switches off and may turn to other matters, perhaps causing you to end up at an unintended destination. Hypnosis can be defined as ‘an artificially induced trance state resembling sleep, characterised by heightened susceptibility to suggestion’. For the purpose of this essay, it may be beneficial to look back at some of the past events relating to hypnotherapy. Throughout the centuries there have been many concepts of hypnosis dating back to the 1700’s. The earliest came from Franz Anton Mesmer born in 1734 who eventually became known as the grandfather of hypnosis and came to develop the theory of animal magnetism. Mesmer believed that every human being had a cosmic fluid

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