To make self-hypnosis work, you must use suggestion. "Suggestion" is how you spell out your goals and instruct your subconscious mind to achieve those goals. Once your subconscious is in alignment with your conscious goals, their achievement is practically guaranteed. You can get that alignment, but it does take a little effort. And you need to know how to formulate suggestions, and how to apply them.

How Suggestion Works

Over the eons the minds of homo sapien sapiens(that's you and me) have evolved in two parts. One is the conscious mind. That's the part you think you think with.

The other part of the mind is the subconscious mind. This is the part that you are usually not aware of, yet it determines much, sometimes most, of what you do.

The subconscious mind works in surprising ways. For one thing, it does not know the difference between reality and fantasy. Or the products of our imagination which are often the same thing. This is partly because the subconscious mind is limited to deductive logic (more about this in a minute; don't let it scare you if you are not familiar with the difference between deductive and inductive logic).

The subconscious also works differently from the conscious mind because one of the really important jobs of the subconscious is to keep subconscious processes sub-orunconscious. That is, secret from the conscious mind.

But first let's tackle this business of logic. Deductive logic is the process of reasoning from the general to the specific. There isn't anything difficult about this process if you remember that deductive logic means applying what you know about a lot of things to one or just a few things that are similar.

For instance, just about every human being you've ever known or heard about was born with eyes. So when you hear that someone gave birth to a new baby, it is through deductive logic that you assume that that new baby also has eyes.

(Put aside for a moment the sad case of birth defects. We are talking in general or statistical terms here.)

To make another example, consider the case of redheads. An unsubstantiated stereotype has it that redheads are hot tempered. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that you have known 10 or 15 redheads in your life and every one of them have had volatile tempers. If you were then introduced to one or two or three people with red hair, it would not be illogical of you to conclude that these new friends might also have quick tempers. This is deductive logic, or deduction.

Inductive logic goes in the reverse direction. With induction you form generalities from specifics. This is the logic of science, in which you go from the specific to the general. You make a limited number of observations, then generalize what you learn to the rest of the population.

(It is possible to make the argument that all logic is inductive and that deduction is simply a special case of inductive logic, but this is not the place to embroil you in all that stuff.)

Much of the uniqueness and contradiction that inhere in the subconscious mind are possible because it is limited to deductive reasoning.

Why is this important in a discussion about suggestion? Because it means that a good suggestion repeated often enough and long enough will be accepted by the subconscious mind as true. It is this characteristic that allows us to make statements that, in the beginning, are not really true, but that eventually become true. That is basically what we do with suggestion.

Please notice that I said "good" suggestions. That means that if the suggestion is formulated correctly, and if it is not of a nature to trigger much resistance, it will work. That is, it will become true. Or more correctly, the subconscious mind will sooner or later come to believe the condition stated in the suggestion. And when the subconscious believes it is true, it is true (for anything that depends on your own efforts).

Here is a simple example. Umberto has trouble sleeping at night. He goes to bed exhausted, falls asleep almost immediately, then wakes up at, say, around two in the morning and can't get back to sleep until five or six. He is not getting enough sleep and he is exhausted when he has to get up and go to work every morning. He knows (consciously) he needs his sleep, he is desperate to get enough sleep, yet this has been going on for some time and nothing seems to work.

Now, if it were just up to his conscious mind, Umberto would go to sleep and stay asleep until he had to get up. But something beyond his conscious mind is waking him up, and that something is his subconscious. We don't know what it is (Umberto could probably find out with some ideomotor questioning). But unless someone else is playing dirty tricks on Umberto, it is his subconscious mind that wants him awake every night at that time.

So he formulate a suggestion to use during self-hypnosis that goes something like this: "Every night I will go promptly to sleep and stay restfully asleep until it is time to get up in the morning." (Stating a specific time to awaken in the morning would be even better.)

It may take only one iteration, one repeating, of this suggestion for it to work. But it is more likely to take a week or two of daily repetitions for the subconscious to begin to believe it. Once it does, the subconscious need to awaken in the middle of the night will have been supplanted with the belief that it is better to sleep through the night.

It is important to keep in mind that many things can get in the way of the effectiveness of suggestions and keep them from being good ones. Your job is to minimize the risk of triggering one of those things, and to formulate and apply suggestions that get you where you want to go.

To help you in that direction, here are some of the more serious ways in which suggestions can go wrong.

How Suggestions Can Make Things Worse

The Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians includes the statement that they will "do no harm." That would be a good addition to anyone's thinking who is working with suggestions. Suggestions that are flawed or that go against subconscious needs can make things worse. When this happens it is usually the result of errors that belong to one of the following categories.

There IS such a thing as "can't"! It always seems a little strange to have to say this but it needs saying: avoid impossibilities. You are not going to grow another limb or even change yourself from left- to right-handed. You are not going to change your eye color, reverse the aging process, or get rid of 20 pounds of fat overnight. I am using silly examples to make my point here because although hypnosis sometimes seems like magic, it is not.

Trying to achieve the impossible will not physically harm you, but it does do serious damage to your subconscious acceptance of self-hypnosis and any suggestions you may be working with. After all, if you are not consciously taking this seriously, why should your subconscious?

But wait a minute! Self-hypnosis can be used to achieve things that have not been possible without it, so how's a person supposed to know what is and what is not possible? How are you supposed to determine where the line is between possible and impossible? How do we define what is do-able and what isn't?

These are tough questions to answer. For example, common sense says that a woman cannot enlarge her bust size. Yet many women claim to have done just that with self-hypnosis. (This has not been clinically proved, but try telling that to the women tried it and had to go out and buy larger brassieres!)

Equally intriguing, perhaps even more so, are the innumerable findings in formal research of a placebo effect. Placebo effects can make things worse under negative conditions, but they can also be used to make things better. The problem is, the use of a placebo generally requires an unwitting or naïve participant, and that clearly is not going to happen with self-hypnosis. (Unless you are reallyschizophrenic, or suffering (enjoying?) multiple personalities. Just kidding!)

To conclude on the business of what is possible and what is not, you'll have to use your own judgment. As a rule of thumb, approach everything gradually and just keep ratcheting upward until you have reached the limits of possibility.