What to Expect After Hypnosis

It's quarter to five and Susan is at war with her own mind. She can't decide whether to call, to google, or to go back to bed.

Her session ended at eleven thirty. She drove home meaning to get some work done, and instead she lay down on top of the covers and was gone.

The light through the blinds has gone the color of weak tea. Her head is thick, her mouth is dry, and she feels hungover, which is a strange thing to feel on a Tuesday afternoon when you haven't had a drink in years.

She's picked up her phone twice.

The message would be easy enough to write. Three words: "Is this normal?"

But her kids will be home soon, and she's not sure the office is still open. Besides, she doesn't want anyone thinking she got frightened by a long nap and a few tears.

She puts the phone face down.

Then she picks it up again and types the question into Google instead.

If that's roughly why you're here, the short version is this. What you are experiencing is probably normal. It probably passes. And it rarely means something went wrong.

And no, it isn't ridiculous to ask.

Most people find this page the way Susan did — on a phone, a few hours after a session, wondering whether to be worried.

If the office is closed, this page is what I can give you until it opens. These are the patterns I've seen over the years, and when we talk you can tell me whether you fit one of them.

Because when we talk, I listen first.

I've been doing hypnotherapy since 2008. Thousands of clients. More than twenty thousand one-on-one sessions. I listen to people during sessions, and when the need arises, between them. Most of what's on this page comes from that experience.

I also spend a fair amount of time reading science. Where research exists, I'll point at it. Where it doesn't, I'll say so, and on this subject it mostly doesn't.

Why am I so tired after hypnosis, and how long does it last?

Tiredness is the most common thing people feel after a session. For most, it's gone before they exit the office and make it to their car.

If we were sitting in my office, I would ask you: how long have you been feeling tired?

When it comes up, most people are a little tired for ten or fifteen minutes and then they're back to normal.

If you're still dragging after fifteen minutes, you may be tired for four to six hours.

Once in a while somebody stays sleepy all day and into the next. That's rare. Out of the thousand-plus sessions I do in a year, I only see it a few times.

I went looking for research on how long it lasts and came up nearly empty. Nobody has studied how long tiredness after hypnosis lasts, or why. The closest thing is a 2023 survey of 691 practitioners across 31 countries. Drowsiness was the third most commonly reported after-effect. And when those practitioners were asked how long after-effects lasted, about two-thirds said a few minutes, one in seven said an hour or longer, and one in fifteen said a day or more.¹ Three tiers, in the same shape as mine, from 691 people I have never met.

Marcus came in on a Thursday for stress. He'd been wound tight for about a year and he wanted some relief.

The session went fine. He opened his eyes, said he felt good, and stood up. I asked him to sit for a minute. He said he was fine. He had work to get back to.

By two he was tired. Not sleepy — bone tired, the kind that makes you feel like your body weighs twice as much as it should. The bed was calling to him.

He pushed through the afternoon anyway. When he got home he didn't even brush his teeth. He went into the bedroom, barely got his shoes off, and lay down. Somehow he made it under his cotton sheets. Just to close his eyes.

He woke up twelve hours later in his work clothes, one argyle sock half off.

He had slept. He still felt weary.

He called the next morning to ask whether something was wrong.

There isn't one reason people get tired afterward. There are three common scenarios people report.

Pattern 1: The most common one is coming up too fast after a session. Hypnosis relies on focused attention, not sleep. And as the mind focuses inward, many people experience their body settling down, and coming out of that in one motion is a lot to ask. You spent forty minutes turning your attention inward. You gave yourself three seconds to about-face, and expected to feel fine.

The fix is boring and it generally works. Come up slowly, over a few minutes. Stay in the chair a few minutes more before you stand. Eyes open is not the same as ready. Budget the time — in the session, and after it.

And if you're wiped out, don't drive yet. Sit until you feel like yourself. If that doesn't happen, ask someone to come get you or call a car. I'd rather have somebody in my waiting room for twenty minutes than out on the road before they know they're safe to drive.

Pattern 2: You may still be working through something from the session in the back of your mind. When this happens, many people spend four to six hours processing in the background and feeling tired or a little slow. A few times since 2008, I've seen this background processing run into a second or third day.

What people describe is wanting to sleep. After sleeping, waking up feeling a little better than when they went down. Then wanting to sleep again. The body needs rest and people often feel much better within one to three days.

Pattern 3: The hypnotist gave positive suggestions and something inside you started pushing back. Part of you felt something was wrong during the session. Part of you was still pushing back after you left. That's an internal conflict.

It gets its own section below, because it overlaps with another pattern and needs some space to explain.

If you're still flattened four hours later, tell whoever did the session. Not because something is wrong — most of the time it isn't. Because there are things that can shorten the tiredness or discomfort, and nobody can help you if they don't know what's happening.

Still dragging hours later? Book a 15-minute consultation.

Why do I feel worse after hypnosis?

Usually because the thing you came in to change is doing a job you didn't know about.

You go in to stop worrying. The hypnotist says something reasonable — "you're letting go of the worry now." And some part of you hears that and answers: absolutely not. I need that. Without it, here's what happens…

So it pushes back. Hard, for hours.

That isn't failure. It's information. Something just told you what it's protecting, and until that gets dealt with, no amount of good suggestion is going to move it.

A woman came to me to quit smoking. She smoked two cigarettes a day, at the end of the day, out on the porch. Half of each one, stretched over twenty or thirty minutes.

That isn't a smoker. That's somebody buying half an hour.

Her husband got home from work and she'd ask him to take the kids. He'd worked all day and he was done, and he'd say no. She was home with little ones from morning to night, and she needed twenty minutes of adult quiet more than she needed most things.

Then she worked out that he hated the smoking. If she went out to the porch with a cigarette, he took the kids.

Before we did any hypnosis I asked her what would happen if she gave up the cigarettes.

She went white.

She'd never said the connection out loud, not even to herself. The cigarette wasn't a habit. It was the only lever she had, and I had just offered to take it away.

So we didn't work on smoking. We worked on how she was going to get twenty minutes. What she would say. How she would ask. We built the conversation and she went and had it.

He apologized. He hadn't known any of it. He started taking the kids in the evenings.

She quit not long after. By then the cigarettes weren't needed.

If I had pushed the smoking in that first session, the part of her holding onto it would have fought me, and she'd have gone home feeling worse and not known why.

So if that's where you are — you left a session and something inside you seems to be pushing back — that push is a communication. It needs to be heard.

If this is striking a chord, get a blank piece of paper and a pen.

Find where you notice the pushback. Is it in your head? Your chest? Is it a voice? Whatever it is, give it words on the paper. Make space, gently, for whatever comes.

If you aren't ready to do that on your own, you need somebody who can guide you through it.

Here is what you can do tonight. Acknowledge it. Put your hand where it is and tell it:

Thank you for communicating. I want to hear you. I promise to listen tomorrow when I am not so tired. I know you have something important to tell me. I am willing to listen.

That often starts to take the edge off right away. It's the acknowledging that does it — welcoming the communication instead of shoving it down.

It also helps to promise that you'll get some help with this once you've slept. That you aren't going to ignore it.

And then reach out to someone who knows how to help with this.

I'll say the uncomfortable part. Not everybody handles that conversation well. So while you're deciding whether to go back, three questions about the person you're working with.

Do they listen?

Do they hear what you're actually telling them?

And do they believe you?

The third one matters most. If you tell somebody what happened and they explain to you why it didn't, you've learned something about them.

A good practitioner wants to hear it. There are ways to make the work gentler, and ways to work with the pushback instead of against it. None of them can be used by somebody who doesn't know.

On the research. Some people find things get worse before they get better. In non-hypnotic sessions that happens to somewhere between one person in seven and one in four — that figure comes from 192 women across two clinical trials of talk therapy for the effects of past trauma.²

In those trials, people didn't quit when things got worse. They stayed, and they got better. It did mean slower going.

But every one of those trials was built so the practitioner couldn't change course partway. That's the part I'd push on. Getting worse is information, not progress. Nobody has studied what happens when the practitioner and the client stop and look at it together. What I can tell you from experience is that making room for the difficulty, and changing course when the session asks for it, helps most people most of the time.

If you'd rather get a second opinion from someone who isn't the person who did your session, that's a reasonable thing to want. Book a 15-minute consultation.

Why did I cry during hypnosis?

Tears in a session aren't always from sadness.

There are a few different things they might be, and the difference matters enough that I often ask when I see them in session.

Some tears come from something letting go. A weight lifts and the body does what it does. People describe relief, or gratitude, or a kind of peace — and sometimes forgiveness toward somebody they hadn't planned on forgiving.

Some come from distress. The person goes into something painful and gets stuck. Different thing. Handled differently.

Some aren't emotional at all. The eyes just relax and leak a little. I first heard that from an old Dave Elman training course. I've seen it enough since to know he was right.

Sometimes a person goes back into a painful memory, either on their own, or because that's how their practitioner works. That one has its own section below.

So I ask. "What kind of tears are those tears?"

Ruth is in her sixties. She has to give a toast at her son's wedding and the thought of standing in front of all those "scary faces" makes her hands go cold and clammy.

In hypnosis I ask her where the fear is. She automatically puts her hand on her chest to show me. She says, "It radiates down into my arms."

When the fear shows up, Ruth has always tried to push it away or pretend it is not there. The fear is still there.

I ask, "Would you be willing to try something different?"

She says yes.

I say, "Put your hand where the feeling is. Don't push it out. Welcome it. Hold it the way you'd have held one of your own children when they were small and frightened. All of that love."

Ruth uses both hands.

Peace settles into her eyes. The corners of her mouth come up, barely.

A single tear forms in the corner of her left eye.

Then both cheeks. No sound. Little water spots on her silk blouse.

I ask, "What kind of tears are those tears?"

She says, "I feel so much love right now. A huge weight has just left. I am holding a very scared little girl and telling her I love her, that she is safe now."

Ruth wasn't sad. She had been carrying something for most of her life and she set it down, and her eyes did what eyes do.

In twenty thousand sessions I've found exactly one reliable tool for telling one kind from another. Ask. Sometimes it's obvious. Other times, tears just look like tears.

There's research on why asking matters more than it seems like it should. When people see tears, their reflex is to comfort and calm — even when they can tell perfectly well that the tears are happy ones. Six separate experiments found the same thing.³ The instinct to soothe runs right over what's actually happening.

So if your practitioner didn't ask, they probably weren't being careless. They were being human. Asking is still better.

Not sure what kind of tears those were? Book a 15-minute consultation.

Why did I have weird dreams after hypnosis?

Weird dreams come up in my office most months.

Three different things get called weird dreams, and they aren't the same.

Sometimes the dream happens during the session. That's a genuine hypnotic phenomenon, and it's been a scored item on the standard hypnosis scales since 1962 — a suggestion to dream is one of the things those scales test for.⁴

Sometimes it's suggested on purpose, for later that night. Certain people are quite receptive to that. Others aren't at all. In the best study I could find, run on people specifically selected for being highly suggestible, half of them showed no effect whatsoever.⁵ So it works. It doesn't work on everybody. And there's no telling in advance whether you will respond.

And sometimes a person just dreams vividly the night after a session with nothing suggested at all. Nobody seems to have studied that one. But I've watched it happen enough to know it's real, and I notice it more after sessions carrying a lot of emotional weight.

Here's mine.

I was the one in the chair once. The hypnotist was using imagery. A river, flowing.

Somewhere in the middle I lost track of him.

What I got instead was a dream. Very vivid, and completely separate from anything he was saying. It helped me let go of something emotionally old and dense. Completely. Gone.

Afterward I asked him whether the imagery I'd experienced was something he had suggested.

He said he'd been talking about the river the whole time.

I was somewhere else, doing something I needed more. I've seen clients do the same kind of thing.

That's most of what I think is going on with all of this. Something in you knows what it needs. When the conditions are right and your attention goes inside, your mind does the rest.

Had a dream you can't shake? Book a 15-minute consultation.

I didn't feel hypnotized. How do I know if it worked?

Most of the time, that feeling is a gap between what you expected and what happened. Hypnosis feels different from the inside than almost everyone pictures.

The most common version happened to me the first time I was hypnotized, as a client. I thought I was supposed to go unconscious, my mind completely blank. But it didn't. I wondered if it had worked.

I felt awake the whole time. I heard a car outside. I remembered everything. At some point I caught myself thinking about dinner. Somewhere along the way I'd picked up the idea that I was supposed to "go under" — and I didn't, so it must have failed.

I was hypnotized. I just didn't know it, because I was never supposed to "go under." Hypnosis is focused attention. Alert and aware is what it feels like from the inside.

There's research on this exact gap. People were asked what they expected to experience at the deepest point of hypnosis, then asked afterward what actually happened. They consistently expected something different from what they got.⁶ It's one of the steadier findings in the field, and it accounts for a lot of disappointed people.

That's why I ask people to set aside everything they think hypnosis will be, and give it a few sessions before deciding whether they're responding.

The second version is harder. You did the work, you didn't get the result, and now you're wondering whether the whole thing is nonsense.

Sometimes people do not respond to hypnosis.

Sometimes you were promised something nobody can deliver.

I was at a hypnosis convention some years ago. A man gave a talk on one-session smoking cessation and said he had a hundred percent success rate.

I went up afterward and asked how he tracked and measured his success.

He said nobody ever came back to complain, so he assumed it had worked.

I was not impressed.

He wasn't following up with anyone. He wasn't tracking anything. People went home, didn't call, and he counted it.

Change takes the time it takes, and the time varies by the person and by the problem. Somebody who has done this for years can give you a range. Nobody can promise you a finish line before they've met you.

The third version is that one particular suggestion or approach didn't land. That happens, and it isn't dramatic. Not everybody responds to the same kind of approach, and a good part of the early work is finding out what you actually respond to.

That takes more than one session to learn.

Dana came in because of her father.

Not because of any one thing he did. She couldn't be around him without getting triggered. Every phone call left her agitated for hours — jaw tight, replaying it while she loaded the dishwasher, still upset at eleven at night.

The first session felt like nothing to her. She heard everything. The air conditioner cycling on. A dog barking somewhere down the street. At one point she heard her phone vibrate in her purse and thought, well, this is a bust. She was polite about it. She said thank you and drove home and felt a little stupid for having tried.

Saturday was the barbecue.

Everyone brings their own meat. That's how it works at her house. Dana had the carne asada going on one side and a row of hot dogs for the kids on the other. Her sister Janice was standing there holding a plate of chicken, waiting on grill space.

Then her dad came through the gate. He picked up her grill fork, moved her carne asada out of the flame, and set four burgers down in the best spot without asking.

Dana slid her carne asada back over the flame and kept turning it.

Her dad left around four. Janice watched him go, then looked at her.

How did you stay so calm?

Dana opened her mouth and nothing came out. She hadn't decided to stay calm. She'd been so calm she hadn't noticed being calm — not until Janice said it out loud. Something had changed. She didn't quite know why.

Her second session was Tuesday.

Dana's experience is more common than not. Change isn't a light switch. It's a dimmer, turned up so slowly you can't see it moving. A bit here. A bit there. And sometimes you don't notice at all until somebody else says something.

If you're deciding tonight whether to go back for a second session, that's exactly the kind of thing worth talking through before you decide. Book a 15-minute consultation.

When hypnosis brings up a painful memory

Sometimes a session goes somewhere nobody planned. A suggestion lands near something old, and the old thing wakes up.

In my practice that's rare — somewhere around one person in a couple of hundred. Common enough that I've seen it. Uncommon enough that a practitioner could go years without ever running into it, particularly if they don't follow up with people. And it happens even when everyone is careful.

Some practitioners work this way on purpose. Going back into a painful memory and moving through it is a technique with a long history behind it. Some believe it is very powerful. I believe there are usually gentler ways to get things done.

That's a difference in approach, not a criticism — and it does mean that if it happened to you, it may have been deliberate. If it was, your practitioner should have talked it through with you before guiding you back into something difficult. You deserve a voice in that.

And sometimes people end up guiding themselves back to something difficult anyway. When that happens, the hypnotist's job is to follow the client and help them through whatever shows up.

Jean came in to lose weight. She said the problem was eating too much in the evening. She agreed to explore the pattern in hypnosis.

She sat back in the recliner, closed her eyes, and took a breath. We spent a few minutes inviting her into hypnosis.

"Are you ready to explore the pattern of evening eating?"

"Yes." Calm, eyes still closed.

"When's the last time you remember eating too much in the evening?"

"Last night."

"Think about last night. Right before you started eating too much. Tell me what you notice."

"I notice a pressure in my belly." Her hand went to it and stayed there.

"Your hand is already there. Welcome that feeling. Thank it for being here."

We waited a moment.

"Give the feeling a voice. What does it want to say?"

Her shoulders tensed and pulled in. The corners of her mouth turned down. She held her breath, and then her voice caught.

"My brother died!"

"Tell me about him."

"Jimmy. Two years ago. An accident. I miss him so much."

Neither of us had planned to be there.

"Is there anything else this feeling needs to say?"

And we went on from there, with Jean steering while I made room for what she needed to say. We worked with the feeling in her belly until she took her first steps toward peace.

She came in to talk about eating in the evening. Her mind took us somewhere important. We spent half that session in a place her logical mind would not have found — a place her belly said might be connected to the eating.

If yours didn't go like that, three questions.

Were you okay with it?

Would you be okay doing it again?

And after a few days of letting it settle — did it help?

You can't answer that last one the same day. You're still inside it.

That's the ordinary version. If what came up has left you in real distress — if you don't feel safe, or you're having thoughts of harming yourself — don't wait a few days. I don't provide crisis care. Call a crisis line or emergency services. In the US, you can call or text 988, any hour of the day.

Back to the ordinary version. If the answer to any of those three questions is a no, say so to whoever did the session, and ask for a different approach moving forward. Someone who can only work one way will make that clear soon enough, and then you know what you're dealing with.

There are practitioners trained to work several different ways. I'm one of them.

The research here is worth knowing. There's a long-held idea that the way to clear a painful memory is to get the feeling out, and the harder the better. The research doesn't support that. Feeling it again is not what does the work. What does the work is the memory getting put back together in a way the person can live with. Without that, people can go back to the same memory over and over and get more stuck, not less.⁷

An uncomfortable session isn't wasted. What matters is what gets made of it afterward, and that's what the next conversation with your hypnotist is for.

Looking for a gentler approach? Book a 15-minute consultation.

Can you get stuck in hypnosis?

Nobody stays hypnotized. There is no case in the medical literature of a person who couldn't be brought out. Not one.⁸

What does happen — and it's only happened to me a few times in twenty thousand sessions — is that somebody takes longer to come back than either of us expected.

Clients always come back. In those few cases most were up within ten or fifteen minutes. One took almost seventy, with gentle and proper instructions the whole way. And every one of them said the same thing afterward — it felt so good they didn't want it to end.

Nearly every difficult case in the literature comes from a stage show, where nobody was paying much attention to bringing people back properly.

It hasn't happened with a client of mine in almost a decade. That's the real argument for taking the last five minutes of a session seriously. Not because you might get stuck. Because coming back deserves as much care as going in.

Reading about side effects can give you side effects

Including this page.

In 1995 some researchers ran a study I think about a lot. They gave people who were about to be hypnotized one of three briefings. No mention of after-effects. A vague mention. Or a specific one — roughly half of subjects report mild short-term after-effects such as headache.

The group that got the specific warning reported the most after-effects.⁹

Telling people what might go wrong made more of it go wrong.

That finding is why this page is built the way it is. If I open with a list of frightening things that might happen to you, some of you will go and have them. So I've tried to tell you what these experiences mean instead of cataloguing them.

It's also worth knowing if you spent an hour reading other pages before you landed here. Some of what you're feeling right now may have arrived in the last forty minutes by way of a search result.

For the record: after-effects from hypnosis get reported at about the same rate as after-effects from ordinary psychology experiments where nobody was hypnotized at all.¹⁰ Sitting quietly with your eyes closed for an hour has a side effect profile. So does sitting in a waiting room.

Rather ask a person than a search engine? Book a 15-minute consultation.

What to do now

If you're my client and something is going on, tell me. That's the whole instruction. I can't work with what I don't know about.

If you're someone else's client, tell them. Same instruction. And if that conversation doesn't go well, that's information too.

If you haven't talked with anyone yet and you're reading because you're thinking about it — the next step is a conversation. Fifteen minutes, during business hours. You tell me what's going on and I'll give you an honest answer about whether I can help, including when the answer is no.

I turn people away when they need something I don't do. If what you need is a doctor, a psychologist, or a licensed therapist, I'll say so and point you the right way. I'm not any of those things. I'm a hypnotherapist, and I know my lane.

Fifteen minutes. A conversation, and an honest answer. Book a 15-minute consultation.

Related reading: Questions and answers · Is hypnosis real? · Side effects of hypnosis

Notes

1. Palsson OS, Kekecs Z, De Benedittis G, Moss D, Elkins GR, Terhune DB, Varga K, Shenefelt PD, Whorwell PJ. Current practices, experiences, and views in clinical hypnosis: findings of an international survey. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. 2023;71(2):92-114.
2. Larsen SE, Wiltsey Stirman S, Smith BN, Resick PA. Symptom exacerbations in trauma-focused treatments: associations with treatment outcome and non-completion. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2016;77:68-77.
3. Aragon OR, Clark MS. "Tears of joy" and "smiles of joy" prompt distinct patterns of interpersonal emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion. 2018;32(5):913-940.
4. Weitzenhoffer AM, Hilgard ER. Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C. Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press; 1962. The dream suggestion is a scored item on the scale.
5. Tart CT. Hypnotic suggestion as a technique for the control of dreaming. Activitas Nervosa Superior. 2009;51(2):77-82. Five of ten highly suggestible subjects showed no effect on dream content.
6. Cardena E, Terhune DB. The roles of response expectancies, baseline experiences, and hypnotizability in spontaneous hypnotic experiences. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. 2019;67(1):1-27.
7. Van der Hart O, Brown P. Abreaction re-evaluated. Dissociation. 1992;5(3):127-140. The paper concerns abreaction specifically — deliberately revisiting a painful memory to discharge the feeling. It argues that the discharge alone does not resolve anything; re-integration of the memory is the active ingredient.
8. Kluft RP. Approaches to difficulties in realerting subjects from hypnosis. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. 2012;55(2):140-159. The paper documents difficulty realerting and the techniques for it; it records no case of a person who could not be brought out.
9. Coe WC, Peterson P, Gwynn M. Expectations and sequelae to hypnosis: initial findings. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. 1995;38(1):3-12.
10. British Psychological Society. The Nature of Hypnosis. Leicester: BPS; 2001. Working party report.

Individual results vary. Hypnosis and hypnotherapy are not meant to diagnose or treat any disease; they are intended to provide information, education, and motivation to support you in making positive changes in your own life. Susan, Marcus, Dana, Ruth, Jean and the other clients described here are illustrations drawn from many sessions over many years. Identifying details have been changed. None of them represents a specific individual or guarantees a particular outcome.
Written by Will Wood · Northern Utah Hypnosis