lasik surgery and hypnosis

I'm curious, is there a difference between actual hypnosis and just a kind of relaxed, focused, positive mindset? I know hypnosis isn't like in the movies where you can trance people into squawking like a chicken, then snap your fingers and they wake up and forget everything. I've read that it's sort of a directed focused state where other things fall away and the person is more susceptible to suggestion.

I guess what I'm asking... are the people who are saying "hypnosis helped me"... were really getting hypnotized in any medical sense? IS there formal medical criteria for being considered hypnotized? What if they're just getting effectively relaxed and focused through some exercise or a tape?

If that's not the same thing but the results are good either way, I guess I can't knock it. I'm a little cynical though. I wonder if people selling "hypnosis" aren't just giving the patient a reason to use focus and positive thinking... something they could have just activated on their own if they bothered.

PS to edd, that is not meant to offend you. I know the value of therapy in general and I'm not so closeminded as to suggest you're selling snake oil or whatever. What I'm getting at is... how can you tell when someone is improving because of hypnosis vs. improving because they think they're going to, and therefore put a little extra into it? AKA the placebo effect?
 
CreeDo said:
I'm curious, is there a difference between actual hypnosis and just a kind of relaxed, focused, positive mindset? I know hypnosis isn't like in the movies where you can trance people into squawking like a chicken, then snap your fingers and they wake up and forget everything. I've read that it's sort of a directed focused state where other things fall away and the person is more susceptible to suggestion.

I guess what I'm asking... are the people who are saying "hypnosis helped me"... were really getting hypnotized in any medical sense? IS there formal medical criteria for being considered hypnotized? What if they're just getting effectively relaxed and focused through some exercise or a tape?

If that's not the same thing but the results are good either way, I guess I can't knock it. I'm a little cynical though. I wonder if people selling "hypnosis" aren't just giving the patient a reason to use focus and positive thinking... something they could have just activated on their own if they bothered.

PS to edd, that is not meant to offend you. I know the value of therapy in general and I'm not so closeminded as to suggest you're selling snake oil or whatever. What I'm getting at is... how can you tell when someone is improving because of hypnosis vs. improving because they think they're going to, and therefore put a little extra into it? AKA the placebo effect?
Click to expand...

Hey Creedo,
All very sound questions. Please know there is nothing magical about hypnosis. The first principle is that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. Someone such as myself helps merely to facilitate a trance state - which is a highly focused states that allows us to quiet our 'busy", conscious mind in order to access our innate wisdom. Hypnosis is a naturally occuring phenomenon. Think of a time that you've been absorbed in a movie and didn't realize that someone was speaking to you. Since pool is such a mental game and focus and concentration are so key, anything that can help us with that is worth pursuing. Hypnosis, in some way, is very similar to meditation. A key component to meditation is deep, diaphrammatic breathing, similar to yoga practitioners. So just practicing deep breathing can be helpful with focus and anxiety control, as it almost immediately begins to relax the muscles, lower the heart rate, counteracts stress hormones that get flooded into our blood stream such as cortisol and increases the flow of blood to your brain particularly the right hemisphere which is that part of the brain that oversees visualization, intuition and muscle memory.
 
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