Hypnosis and hypnotherapy are not meant to diagnose or treat any disease.
Understanding Hypnosis
How is hypnotherapy different from talk therapy?
A psychologist or licensed mental health professional is trained to diagnose and treat mental health conditions — things like clinical depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, and other conditions that significantly affect a person’s ability to function. That’s specialized, important work, and it serves the roughly 15–20 percent of the population dealing with those kinds of challenges.
I work with a different population. Most of my clients are in that other 80 percent — high-functioning, largely healthy people who are facing a specific problem or have a goal they want to reach. They want to quit smoking, sleep better, stop a pattern that’s been running on autopilot, or perform at a higher level. They don’t need a diagnosis. They need change.
Most of my clients consciously understand they have a problem — they just can’t control it. The woman eats the chocolate cake at night while watching The Biggest Loser, feeling guilty because she knows she shouldn’t be doing it — but on another level, the cake soothes her emotions. The smoker smokes in spite of everything his doctor and the media tell him. They already know. Knowing isn’t the problem.
The main goal of hypnotherapy as I practice it is to get your conscious mind and your subconscious mind to work together. Right now, many people are conflicted between their logical mind and their emotional mind. Hypnotherapy has powerful tools to resolve that kind of conflict.
The two approaches aren’t in competition. When a client is also working with a licensed provider, I’m happy to coordinate — as long as what I’m doing fits squarely within my scope of practice. And if what someone is dealing with needs a level of care beyond what I offer, I’ll tell them directly.
What does hypnosis feel like?
Most people are surprised by how normal it feels. There’s no swinging pocket watch, no “going under.” You’re aware the whole time, you can hear everything I’m saying, and you remember the session afterward.
The closest comparison is that feeling when you’re completely absorbed in a good book or a movie — the world around you fades a little, but you could snap out of it any time you wanted to. You just don’t want to, because you’re engaged.
Some people feel physically relaxed. Some don’t. Relaxation is a common side effect, but it’s not the point — the point is focused attention. Your mind becomes more open to new perspectives and patterns in that state, and that’s where the work happens.
After a session, most clients say something like “that was different than I expected” — usually meaning it felt more natural and less dramatic than they’d imagined.
How does hypnosis actually work?
Hypnosis is related to our natural ability to focus attention. You’ve experienced it without knowing it — athletes call it being “in the zone,” and you’ve felt it every time you’ve been so absorbed in something that you lost track of time.
In that state of focused attention, the mind becomes more open to suggestion. Especially the part of your mind that runs your habits, stores your emotional responses, and drives the automatic patterns you don’t consciously choose.
Hypnotherapy is a structured way of using that natural state to make changes at that level — changes that are hard to make through logic and willpower alone.
My teacher, Dan Cleary, once said, “Hypnosis is a method by which we can alter our state of awareness, allowing us to focus on issues of our choosing.”
And yes — if you’ve ever watched a movie and felt your heart race during a scene you knew was fiction, you’ve already experienced how powerfully focused attention shapes your responses. Hypnotherapy points that same ability at something you deeply value.
Why is Hypnosis Effective?
As noted above, hypnosis is simply a state of mind where the attention is focused and the subconscious mind can be accessed. So hypnosis in and of itself is not necessarily effective. To produce real change, hypnosis must be paired with effective strategies for change.
Hypnotism is the study of the use of hypnosis paired with effective change strategies. For example, I could teach the majority of you to produce a hypnotic state in another person in under ten hours. Some of you would learn much more quickly. I routinely teach my clients to do self hypnosis in under thirty minutes.
However, even after learning the basics of hypnotic induction, most of you would not be able to help someone conquer a fear or overcome a bad habit because you would not yet know how to effectively utilize the trance state to produce change.
The commitment to help people overcome their problems and to improve their lives in an effective manner is a lifelong study. There are many different schools of thought, and much research is being done on what kind of change techniques are effective for different types of problems.
My approach to change has been heavily influenced by behavioral change techniques, brief interventions, and by hypnotic insight approaches. I have studied with most of the major hypnotic schools of thought and have a wide range of strategies at my disposal to help the individuals that come in to my office.
My son just went into the doctor for a terrible pain in his right knee that turned out to be septic bursitis (he is doing much better now). The doctor considered using a needle and syringe to aspirate fluid from the bursa. Several days earlier, that same son was at the dentist and had a Novocain injection before a tooth was repaired.
Needles and syringes can be used in many ways in medicine and dentistry. Perhaps sometimes a needle is used to aspirate fluid. Other times, it is used to inject a numbing agent. Yet other times, it may deliver an antibiotic. No one would confuse the needle and the syringe with the medicine inside.
In a similar fashion, hypnosis is simply a vehicle to deliver and amplify the techniques to help a person change their life and reach their personal goals!
Can everyone be hypnotized?
Most people can be hypnotized. The groups that have a more difficult time are:
- Small children who aren’t yet able to focus their attention. I’ve successfully worked with children as young as 4 — ideally, a child needs to be able to pay attention for more than about 3 minutes.
- Those who have suffered severe brain damage and cannot concentrate.
- Extremely low IQ individuals, some of whom can still be hypnotized.
- Someone who is chemically impaired to the point where they cannot concentrate or hold a conversation. This can happen with legal and illegal substances.
- Someone who DOES NOT WANT to be hypnotized.
I believe that ALL hypnosis is self hypnosis. While I’ve had people experience difficulty learning self hypnosis on a first session (less than one in twenty), I’ve only had a handful of people over my entire practice since 2008 — under two dozen — who were not able to learn to go into a trance. It is very rare.
I also specialize in change techniques that do not require the hypnotic state. I’m an expert in Neuro Linguistic Programming and Meridian Tapping, neither of which rely on hypnosis to work.
What to Expect
What happens in the first session?
Before we shoot an arrow, we need to define what your bullseye looks like and where your target is placed. That means we spend the first part of the session talking — defining what you want and what success looks like. We are working together.
I am an expert on hypnosis, and you are an expert on your life — what has happened, and what you want. Think of it as sitting side by side on the front porch, looking down the road of change while you describe your journey — where you have been up until now and where you hope to go.
Once we are looking at the same map, we can start planning to travel.
A young woman came to me wanting to quit smoking. She had been smoking two packs a day for ten years. She knew what she wanted, but wasn’t quite sure why she was sabotaging herself every time she tried to quit.
The first step wasn’t to pick a quit day — it was to invite her attention inward to look at the pattern of self-sabotage. Once she went inside and focused her attention on the part of her creating the sabotage, she realized that the cigarettes symbolized a time in her life that she valued — one where she had made deep friend connections and lived life freely and openly, something she longed for. Now the cigarette was her only reminder of that time of her life.
We weren’t helping her give up the smokes. We were helping her learn to honor her deep values in a way that was more congruent for her current self. We were tearing down a shack to lay the foundation for a palace.
She learned she could keep her friends, her memories, and keep her free and open life while letting go of what was holding her back from true freedom — the cigarette.
Now we need to program the flight computer. This is where hypnosis comes in. We transition to help you focus your attention in a way that your deep mind gets the map of where we are heading. Usually we spend a few minutes getting a direction and the bulk of the session doing hypnosis.
A 35-year-old man came in having a hard time falling asleep. He had already been to his doctor — nothing was medically wrong with him. But he couldn’t shut his mind off.
What his mind was doing was listing all of his failures in life, all of the wrongs he had done, comparing him against everyone who was stronger, smarter, and better, and then playing out all the what-ifs with his wife and kids that could go wrong. His mind was like a professional movie editor with 30 screens open, all showing him terrible movies he really didn’t want to watch — all with the volume wide open. It was a cacophonous, out-of-tune orchestra, where each instrument played its own song, at its own tempo, without a conductor.
We didn’t have a problem of not sleeping. We had to teach his mind new skills so that he could slow things down inside and reshape his relationship with his thoughts. He learned he didn’t have a sleep problem — he had to change his relationship with the movies and sounds in his head, and then his body simply remembered how to sleep.
After the hypnosis, I walk you through how to keep the change process going between sessions — what to practice, what to notice, and how to build on what we started. Sessions run about 50 minutes.
As we sit down, I am curious what it is that you already know and what it is you can learn as you learn to focus your attention and go inside to look.
The reason my clients are often my clients is because they have fallen out of rapport with their own deep values and mind. They are not broken. They just need a little help aligning the head, the heart, and the deep mind — and then their journey becomes much easier.
How quickly does change happen?
Change takes as long as it takes — and most of the time it happens over several months. It can happen faster. Every year I see a few miracle sessions, where people change much more quickly than usual — anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. This has been true as long as I have been in practice.
And it is still far more normal to see change happen steadily in degrees. Other problems are more complex and require more time to solve.
When many goals exist, we focus on one change at a time. If you contact me, I would be happy to give you an average range of sessions based on the nature of your issue. However, every individual is different and each problem is different, so you may not be average! Your change might be much quicker or may take more time.
My promise is to help you get the results you want as quickly as we can!
Is online hypnosis as effective as in-person?
I started my remote sessions on the phone somewhere around 2009 when a client requested them. Around 2011, I started adding Skype video sessions. Then FaceTime. Eventually, I started using Zoom before anyone knew what Zoom was.
Prior to COVID, approximately 30 percent of my client base was remote — living all over earth. There was a time during COVID when we went 100 percent virtual for a while to keep people safe.
Now, depending on the month, as many as 70 percent of my clients might do virtual sessions, using a combination of Zoom, Google Meet, FaceTime, and the phone (yes, some people still prefer the phone).
There are a handful of techniques that are much harder to do on the phone than live in the office, but if I have the ability to see you, we can use nearly everything in the hypnotic toolkit.
I can easily do 95 percent of what I do live in the office, while you work right from the comfort of your home or office.
And here’s what surprises most people: for the majority of what we do together, you don’t need more than a two out of ten in terms of subjective hypnotic depth — which almost everyone can accomplish on a first session, even remotely.
I remember working with a client during the COVID timeframe when I was doing all virtual sessions. She thought she would HATE working over the internet. She lived close enough to come in, but didn’t feel safe, and the state was asking us to limit our in-person work to critical cases, only when necessary. So she reluctantly started doing sessions from her living room, about 15 minutes from my office.
She was shocked at how easily she continued to access hypnosis, all while saving herself a drive. She said, “I think my living room is a safe place for me, so it actually helped the process more than I would have imagined.” Even after COVID restrictions lifted, she continued to meet with me virtually to work on her goals.
What remote sessions do require is a good connection — phone or internet — and a private, quiet place to talk and close your eyes for a while as you bring your focus to your inner world.
Wherever your mind is, hypnosis can happen.
What are the side effects from hypnosis?
Usually the side effects from hypnosis are powerful personal change and a sense of well-being. Hypnosis is a naturally occurring state of mind, so side effects are rare.
The side effects that do happen tend to be related to your body’s natural relaxation response. For example, someone might experience their heart rate slowing down, or might perceive time speeding up or slowing down.
Because of these changes, I generally recommend that people do not stand up too quickly immediately after a session, as standing too quickly could cause dizziness in rare cases. As long as you spend several seconds to several minutes allowing yourself to transition from the hypnotic state, this is incredibly rare.
Sometimes, when profound change work takes place, there can be an after-effect that lasts up to several hours. While the brain is integrating change at the deepest level, a client may notice foggy thinking, or perhaps a powerful sense of well-being or euphoria.
Most cases resolve within one to four hours. Out of 20,000+ sessions, perhaps 10 to 20 times I have had a client report this effect lasting approximately one to two days. However, when a client communicates what they are experiencing, there are techniques that can quickly shift them out of that state.
What is key is communication — so I know what is happening and can help.
Most clients feel great upon emerging and are feeling normal within two to ten minutes.
Is it possible to get stuck in hypnosis?
No. It is not possible to get stuck in hypnosis, contrary to what Hollywood might portray. Hypnosis is a normal, natural state. Many people believe that hypnosis is related to the states that immediately precede and follow sleep. Just as people don’t get stuck in sleep, people don’t get stuck in hypnosis.
People who go very deep into a hypnotic state might feel so good that they don’t want the trance to end — they feel a sense of euphoria characteristic of very deep trance and simply don’t want the experience to stop. Eventually, that person will either fall asleep or emerge from trance once the euphoria passes, in most cases within a couple of minutes, if a skilled hypnotist helps them emerge.
What if I tried hypnosis before and it didn’t work?
It depends on what you mean by “didn’t work.” What is curious is that you are asking again, which may mean that you wonder if it might be an option for you, or that you hope that it will work.
When some people say it didn’t work, it means that they did not feel hypnotized, or maybe that a stage hypnotist was not able to hypnotize them. Many people who don’t feel hypnotized have incredible gains from hypnosis.
Almost everyone who isn’t hypnotized at a stage show can be hypnotized when they are in a safe environment with a trained hypnotist who shares a common goal with them.
Other people might mean that they got a partial result. For example, I had a smoking client that reduced her smoking from 48 cigarettes per day to 1 in four sessions. Some clients would say the hypnosis “didn’t work.” Another client might recognize that significant progress was made, and she simply needed more than four sessions to get past whatever was making her hold on to that last cigarette she smoked in the evening.
If hypnosis helped you get some of the way to your goal, there is a high probability that additional hypnosis will help you get farther along — especially if a wider set of advanced hypnotic techniques is used. Sometimes, you just need to give yourself permission to take the time your mind actually needs to change.
When some people say it didn’t work, they mean the approach the hypnotist used was not a good fit for them. If this is the case, let’s talk honestly about what you did and didn’t like, and what did and didn’t work, and we can modify things from there.
Are there people who cannot change with hypnosis? Rarely. Yes. I end up seeing 1–2 a year. In those cases, we shift our approach to use tools and techniques that do work for you. Once in a while, the best course of action is to refer you out for another type of help.
There are certain people who should not seek hypnosis. These are rare, but they do exist. If you have questions about whether or not hypnosis can help, the best next step is to schedule a 15-minute consultation and tell me a little more about your situation.
Most of the time I can help. When I can’t, I will do my best to point you in the right direction.
What we should probably talk about is what you mean exactly. What I can do is give you an honest answer about what I can and can’t do.
About Will
What is your training and experience?
I am a hypnotist by training. I have done thousands of hours of formal training in hypnosis, Neuro Linguistic Programming, Mindfulness, and Meridian Tapping — and since 2008 I have easily doubled or tripled that in solo study and continuing education. I have a reputation of being something of a walking encyclopedia when it comes to change.
Training is something I have never stopped doing, and I don’t plan to. I regularly read inside my field and adjoining fields, including scientific papers from major journals on topics that help shape my work with clients.
I have trained with The American Hypnosis Association, the National Guild of Hypnotists, and the International Medical and Dental Hypnotherapy Association, The American Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming.
I have done significant training with Michael Watson, an Ericksonian hypnotist. And I have done extensive training with Tim Hallbom MS at The NLP Institute of California, where I have also trained with Robert Dilts, and Suzi Smith, among others.
I have performed more than 20,000 one-on-one sessions and worked with more than 3,000 individuals since 2008. I am a contributing author to “Unlimited Human,” where I have written approximately 40 articles on hypnosis and change over the past 10+ years.
I am not a psychologist or licensed mental health provider. I work with everyday concerns — habits, stress, confidence, sleep, performance, and the patterns that keep people stuck. For anything that involves a diagnosis or medication, I refer to the appropriate professional. When a licensed provider does refer a client to me, I work alongside them within my scope of practice.
If you are currently working with a doctor or mental health provider, we should connect with them before we begin — and I can help you do that.
What modalities do you use?
I practice a number of different modalities, depending on the client’s needs.
I practice a collaborative style of hypnosis. I work alongside you toward a goal you describe. You stay awake and in control, working with me to reach the automatic reactions willpower alone can’t budge — so change happens at the source.
I also use modern NLP — a practical toolkit: getting clear on what you actually want, working with the values and beliefs underneath it, resolving the inner conflict and self-sabotage that keep you stuck, shifting how a situation feels through reframing and imagery, and anchoring new responses so they hold. We don’t just talk about change — we build the internal structure that makes it real and makes it last.
I practice Mindfulness — present-moment focus, a genuine kindness toward yourself, and the ability to unhook from difficult thoughts and feelings instead of being pulled around by them. The work doesn’t end when the session does. You carry a way of meeting the hard moment — the craving, the dread, the spiral — right when it shows up.
I practice Meridian Tapping — gentle tapping on pressure points while you focus on what’s bothering you. It works by helping you face the feeling in a calmer state and settling your body’s stress response. When something is held in the body and not just the mind, this gives us a physical way to loosen it.
The modality I use depends on what you need. Sometimes we use one, sometimes several in the same session. The goal is always the same — help you change what you came in to change.
Are sessions confidential?
My goal is to keep your information private so that you can focus on what you came for — reaching your goals and dreams.
I do not share your information with others unless one of the following applies:
- A court demands that I do so. Fortunately, this has never happened in my practice, but it is theoretically possible.
- You give me permission to share with someone specific.
- You disclose harm to self, harm to others, or child abuse.
Outside of that territory, what happens in our sessions stays in our sessions.
Specific Concerns
Can hypnotherapy help with sadness and self-esteem?
People mean very different things when they say they’re feeling down. Some people mean they’re going through a rough patch — a normal amount of sadness or “stuckness” that comes with life. Other people are dealing with something much more serious that needs a level of care beyond what I offer.
If you’re feeling stuck, unmotivated, weighed down, or struggling with how you see yourself — those are exactly the kinds of concerns hypnotherapy is well-suited for. I have a variety of tools that can help, and I’ve seen people make remarkable shifts in how they experience themselves and their lives.
If you are in crisis or experiencing thoughts of harming yourself, I do not offer emergency or crisis services. I will refer you to a licensed professional, crisis center, or emergency services that can evaluate your situation and keep you safe.
If you are currently working with a mental health professional, you should probably reach out to them first and see if they think it is appropriate to add hypnosis to your toolbox.
My goal is to keep you safe, to preserve the relationship you’ve already established with your provider, and to work within the goals and framework they’ve set — under their guidance.
Hypnotherapy is not a replacement for the work of a psychologist or doctor. It is a powerful complement to it.
If someone is looking to improve their self-image, I can do quite a bit to help. That is squarely in my wheelhouse.
What kinds of concerns do you work with?
Beyond the concerns I’ve already described on this page, here are some of the many areas where hypnotherapy can help:
Habits: Break a bad habit, stop smoking, eliminate cravings, lose weight, overcome pornography, repetitive hair pulling
Felt Experiences and Emotions: Relieve stress, reduce worries and anxiousness, control anger, moments of overwhelming fear, letting go of emotional weight from the past, working through old grief or loss, reducing the impact of past traumatic experiences, trouble sleeping, eliminate nightmares
Performance: Increase confidence, increase motivation, enhance sports performance, increase concentration, overcome test anxiety, improve academic performance through strategy change, goal setting
Life Transitions: Prepare for childbirth (with referral), conquer fears (public speaking, flying, medical procedures, etc.)
If you don’t see your situation on this list, that doesn’t mean I can’t help. The best next step is a 15-minute consultation where you tell me what’s going on and I give you an honest answer.
Does hypnotherapy work for quitting smoking?
Many of my clients have had great success with smoking cessation. My stop smoking program uses much more than just hypnosis.
Not that long ago, I had a young woman come in to see me. She told me that she was LDS and that the only thing keeping her from being able to marry her husband in the LDS temple was her cigarette habit. She had started the habit at a very young age — around 10 years of age — and had tried everything to quit.
She said that she was tormented by her inability to quit and felt like she was failing herself and her husband. Nothing had worked in the past. She was desperate and was “even willing to try hypnosis.”
We worked together during four sessions and she told me, after we finished, “This is easier than it has ever been to quit. I don’t believe how effective hypnosis is. I would have done this a long time ago if I knew how well this worked.” She has now been smoke-free for months and has a temple date scheduled with her husband.
My standard stop smoking program is 4 to 10 sessions. Most people start with 4, and some people need all 10. I require pre-payment for the program and will reschedule, but do not offer refunds because I only want to work with people who are committed to the process of quitting.
If someone is unsure that they want to quit, I am happy to sit down with them for a consultation to get to know the person and to answer any questions. I also do my best to evaluate whether my program is a good fit.
During the first session I teach the person how to do self-hypnosis. I also make the person a customized hypnosis recording that can be used during the first two weeks to a month to help reduce or eliminate cravings on the days that the client doesn’t see me in my office.
How does hypnosis help with weight?
I had someone tell me once, “Weight loss is nothing more than pure physics! You need to burn more energy than you consume.” I thought it was interesting that this person was almost 75 lbs overweight. Evidently, he didn’t have a good grasp of physics — or there is more to weight loss than simple math.
Hypnosis addresses weight loss directly at its root and is effective because it rapidly and powerfully addresses the subconscious causes behind the weight gain: lack of motivation, limiting or conflicting beliefs, habits, emotional eating patterns, cravings, etc.
What if I’m too embarrassed to talk about my issue?
I am an expert in “content free” interventions. This means that sometimes we have lived through things that are so hurtful or embarrassing that we don’t want to talk about them. In a content free intervention, I wouldn’t need to know the details of the problem, just the emotions involved.
For example, you might tell me that you are afraid of something, yet not tell me what the fear is about. You might tell me that you are embarrassed, but not tell me what the embarrassment is about. You might tell me that you feel shame, and without knowing the source of the shame, I can help you get rid of it. You might tell me that you feel compelled to do something, yet not tell me the nature of the compulsion.
As long as we work together to define some common ground and boundaries, I can work with most negative memories in a “content free” way.
Is hypnosis compatible with my faith?
If your faith allows you to use your mind to change, the answer is likely yes.
My goal as a practitioner is to help you live according to your deepest held values. My training emphasized the ethical uses of hypnosis, which included honoring a client’s values and beliefs. My job is to add science-informed tools to help you align your actions to what matters most to you.
I routinely receive referrals from religious and non-religious sources and do my best to work within the framework you have. I have worked with LDS clients, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu clients, and atheist clients. All belief systems are welcomed and respected here.
Practical Details
Do you work with children?
I prefer to work with kids over the age of 12, but will work with younger children depending on the maturity of the individual child. I have worked with a number of children in the 8-year-old range successfully. My youngest successful client was three years old (we worked to eliminate his night terrors in one session).
After the age of 14 or so, most children can be worked with in a similar fashion as an adult.
Very young children, under the age of 8, generally need much shorter sessions and may not be capable of giving me the necessary background on the problem, which might necessitate taking a history from the parent.
Most children under the age of 8 do not need a formal hypnotic induction. The goal of hypnosis is to produce a state where the individual is more receptive to suggestion. Most children under 8 are already in that state. So with young children, I usually use a hypnotic storytelling approach, which works quite well.
Children between the ages of 8 to 14 may require shorter sessions and techniques especially geared toward their maturity and attention level.
Any younger than 8 and I am willing to do what I can, but the results will vary from child to child.
When working with a minor, I require the presence of an adult family member to be in the room or outside of an open door while we work together.
Does insurance cover hypnosis?
Most insurance will not pay for hypnosis. I do not bill insurance. If your insurance covers hypnotherapy, I would be happy to give you the information you need to get reimbursement.
If you have a flexible spending account or a health savings account, it might help pay for your sessions. You will have to contact your flexible spending plan coordinator for confirmation.