Hypnotize Yourself Using the Best Me Technique

The "Best Me Technique" is a form of hyperempiria, or suggestion-enhanced experience, which involves your whole person in the content of a suggested event. Every letter in "Best Me" corresponds with an element of suggestion, and these elements can be applied in a variety of ways: to place yourself into self-hypnosis, to pre-experience the accomplishment of a goal, and to end your self-hypnosis session. It's the versatility and the thoroughness of these elements that makes the "Best Me Technique" of self-hypnosis distinct from meditation and visualization exercises. Instead of merely picturing something in the mind’s eye, the Best Me Technique enables us to paint upon the canvas of experience almost any masterpiece we may desire. This article will show you how to use "Best Me" suggestions to pre-experience the rewards of future goals now, at full strength in the present when they are most needed for motivation, reducing or eliminating the need for will power. (It's also a great way to relax and fall asleep or take a power nap!)

Steps

1. Unless you actually intend to do so, choose a time when you are not too sleepy or tired, so that you are not likely to doze off.
2. Find a quiet place with subdued lighting, where you are not likely to be disturbed for at least half an hour.
3. Turn off your cell phone or pager, if you have one, and take the telephone off the hook or put it on answer mode with the ringer turned off.
4. Sit down or lie down in a position which will enable you to relax deeply. If you should find yourself becoming uncomfortable during the session, it should not disturb you to gently adjust your position in order to keep yourself as comfortable as possible.
5. Guide yourself through the elements of the Best Me Technique. After reading over the following script a couple of times to get the idea, go through the steps of the Best Me Technique yourself, using words and images with which you feel most comfortable, and at a pace which allows you to get the most out of the experience. Just as we combine words and pictures on wikiHow pages in order to communicate more effectively, we often pair words and images together in hypnosis in order to strengthen the effect of our suggestions. The present example uses imagery of a boat rocking you gently back and forth to help you relax as you go through the elements of the Best Me Technique in your mind, but not everyone responds equally well to the same images. Regardless of the words and images you actually use (see suggestions in the Tips section below) Your purpose is not to achieve a trance (which only a few people actually do), but to put yourself into a relaxed and pleasant frame of mind where your imagination can operate more effectively.
   
   
   • Belief systems: Imagine that it’s a warm summer afternoon, and that you’re lying on the deck of a small boat which is safely tethered at the edge of a shallow bay, about a hundred feet from shore. If you accept, believe each detail of the scene as you describe it to yourself, without trying to think critically, your imagination will allow you to experience the situation just as if you were really there.
   • Emotions: Let your body absorb the peacefulness which is all around you, as the boat rocks you gently back and forth and the sun shines warmly down, driving out all of your worry, all of your tension, and all of your care, and leaving you filled with perfect, infinite, boundless peace, calm, and tranquility.
   • Sensations and physical perceptions: Feel the cool breeze upon your skin, and savor the freshness of the pure, salt air. Listen to the cries of the birds in the distance, and the sound of the water quietly splashing against the side of your boat as it rocks you gently back and forth, and that warm, golden glow of the sunlight relaxes you completely from head to toe.
   • Thoughts and images: It’s so calm, and so peaceful there on the deck of the boat, that all you want to do is keep drifting, and dreaming, and floating on, and on. Then, you can just drift on into, peaceful, state of self-hypnosis by silently counting from one to ten, repeating the following thoughts in time with your breathing after each count: "Sinking down, and shutting down, sinking down, and shutting down, sinking down, and shutting down, shutting down completely. And the deeper you go, the deeper you are able to go. And the deeper you go, the deeper you want to go, and the more enjoyable the experience becomes." And so on, up to the count of ten.
   • Motives: At this point, you can either keep repeating these suggestions to yourself until you drift off to sleep, or you can use the building blocks of the Best Me Technique to pre-experience the rewards of a future goal. If you are a student enrolled in a degree program, for example, you might proceed somewhat as illustrated in the breakdown which follows this section, using words of your own choosing to provide the greatest meaning. As you proceed through each step, take a moment to clarify and intensify it in your mind, so that you feel each portion of the experience as strongly as possible.
   • Expectations: As you go through each step, believe it will happen, expect it to happen, and feel it happening, just as strongly as if you were willing it into being at that very moment. The exact number of repetitions is not as important as the clarity and conviction with which you feel like you are willing your convictions into existence.
6. If you are inclined to doubt whether or not you have achieved self-hypnosis after a few minutes, you probably have.
   
   
   • Decades of research have shown that people vary considerably in their responses to hypnosis. For many people, there is no such thing as a "hypnotized" feeling.
   • An induction procedure is like the theme music to a motion picture or a television drama. It allows us to shift our thinking from a strictly logical mode of thought to a more flexible, more imaginative way of looking at the world. And we can all do that!