How to Practice Self-Hypnosis: A Beginner’s Step-by-Step Lesson

This lesson walks you through a complete beginner’s self-hypnosis session from start to finish. It takes about fifteen minutes, needs nothing but a quiet place to sit and works best if you read it through once before trying it. If you’re new to the idea, start with What Is Self-Hypnosis? A Plain-Language First Lesson.

Lesson 2 of the beginner path · about 9 minutes to read, 15 minutes to practise

What you’ll learn

• How to prepare your time, space and aim
• How to write a suggestion that is easy to use
• A seven-step routine you can repeat on your own
• How often to practise, and what to expect
• What to do when it doesn’t go to plan

Before you begin

• Time: set aside 10 to 15 minutes when you’re unlikely to be interrupted. Silence your phone. If you have somewhere to be afterwards, set a gentle alarm.
• Place: a comfortable upright chair is ideal. Lying down is fine if you’re practising for sleep, but sitting up makes it easier to stay awake for everything else.
• Safety: never practise while driving, cooking or doing anything that needs your full attention.

Step 1: Choose one simple aim

Pick a single, modest goal for this session. Good first aims are small and specific: feeling calmer when you get home from work, settling into study more easily, or staying steady during a weekly meeting. Leave bigger or more personal goals until you’re familiar with the process.

Exercise: write your aim in one sentence. If it contains the word “and,” pick one half.

Step 2: Write your suggestion

A suggestion is a short phrase you’ll repeat and imagine during the session. Helpful suggestions tend to be:

• Positive: describe what you want, not what you want to avoid (“my shoulders stay loose,” not “I won’t tense up”)
• Believable: something that feels possible to you this month
• Personal: in your own words, in the first person
• Present tense: as if it’s already beginning to happen
• Tied to a moment: linked to a specific situation in your week

That last point matters most. Try writing your suggestion as an if-then plan: “When [situation], I [response].” For example: “When I sit down at my desk, my attention settles on the first task,” or “When I notice my jaw tightening, I breathe out and let it soften.”

This format comes from research on implementation intentions, the psychological term for if-then plans. A meta-analysis of 29 experiments in people with mental health difficulties found that forming if-then plans had a large effect on reaching their goals (d = 0.99) [1]. That research was about planning, not hypnosis, but it suggests a practical rule: link your suggestion to a cue you will actually meet.

Write your suggestion on a card so you can read it just before you begin.

Step 3: Settle and focus

Sit with your feet flat on the floor. Pick a spot slightly above eye level, such as a mark on the wall, and rest your gaze on it. Take three slow breaths, letting each out-breath be a little longer than the in-breath. When your eyes start to feel tired or heavy, let them close.

Step 4: Relax your body

With your eyes closed, move your attention slowly from your feet up to your head. At each area, notice how it feels and invite it to loosen. You can say the words silently: “Feet relaxing… legs relaxing…” There’s no need to force anything. Noticing is enough.

Step 5: Deepen your focus

Count down slowly from ten to one, one number per out-breath. With each number, imagine settling a little further into the chair, or walking one step down a quiet staircase. If you lose count, start again from wherever you remember. Losing count often means your attention has turned inward, which is exactly what you want.

Step 6: Rehearse your suggestion

Bring your suggestion to mind and repeat it slowly three to five times. Then imagine it happening. Picture the cue (sitting down at your desk), then the response (your attention settling on the first task), and notice how it looks, sounds and feels from the inside. Run the scene two or three times. This rehearsal is usually the most engaging part of the session, so give it the most time.

If you don’t see images easily, that’s fine. Rehearse in words, sounds or body feelings instead: hear yourself say the first line of the presentation, feel your feet on the floor.

Step 7: Return to alertness

Tell yourself you’re going to count from one to five, and that at five you’ll open your eyes feeling alert and clear. Count up slowly, wiggling your fingers and toes as you go. At five, open your eyes, take a breath and sit for a moment before you stand up.

If your goal is sleep, skip this step and let yourself drift off.

A sample session, start to finish

An illustrative example, not a real person. Sam wants to feel steadier before a weekly team meeting. Sam’s suggestion card reads: “When I open the meeting link, my breathing slows and my voice is steady.” On Monday evening Sam sits upright, fixes their gaze on a picture frame, takes three slow breaths and closes their eyes. Two minutes on the body, a slow count from ten, then four minutes rehearsing: clicking the link, the faces appearing on screen, a slow breath out, speaking the first sentence clearly. Count up to five, eyes open, two lines in a notebook. Total: twelve minutes.

After your session

Jot down a few notes: how long you practised, what helped, what distracted you and anything you’d change. After a week or two, these notes show you which approaches suit you best.

How often to practise

Most days, for a few weeks, before you judge it. Regular practice makes the routine quicker and easier to slip into.

Research gives some useful reassurance about dose. In a trial of 100 veterans with chronic low back pain, two sessions of self-hypnosis training plus recordings and brief weekly reminder calls worked about as well as eight sessions. Taken together, the hypnosis groups reduced pain intensity more than a biofeedback comparison, and over half of those who received hypnosis reported a meaningful drop in pain intensity of at least 30% that lasted six months or more. The amount of home practice was not linked to how much people improved [2]. That was a clinical population with professional training, but it suggests you don’t need marathon sessions; a short, steady routine is enough.

Expect the routine itself to take time to feel automatic. In a 2024 review of habit-formation research, the four studies that measured it reported median times of 59 to 66 days to reach automaticity, with very wide individual variation, from 4 to 335 days [3]. Keep the same suggestion for at least a week or two before changing it.

Troubleshooting

• My mind kept wandering. Completely normal. Each time you notice, return to your breath or your count without starting over. Noticing and returning is the skill you’re building.
• I fell asleep. Sit more upright, practise earlier in the day, or keep your eyes open and softly focused on one spot.
• I’m not sure anything happened. Early sessions often feel ordinary. Look for small changes, such as heavier limbs, slower breathing or time passing differently, and judge results by your aim over weeks.
• I can’t picture anything. Use sounds, words or physical sensations in Step 6 instead of images.
• I felt uncomfortable. Open your eyes and stop. Try again another day with a different focus, such as the breath instead of the body.

Stop and get advice if… sessions regularly bring up distressing memories or feelings, relaxing makes you feel more anxious rather than less, or you notice low mood, panic or thoughts of self-harm. Talk to a doctor or qualified therapist, and don’t use self-hypnosis to put off seeing a professional about new, severe or worsening symptoms.

Key takeaways

• Prepare one modest aim and a short if-then suggestion tied to a real moment.
• The sequence is settle, relax, deepen, rehearse and return.
• Wandering attention is normal; returning to focus is the practice.
• Short sessions on most days beat occasional long ones; give it several weeks.
• Self-hypnosis supports wellbeing but does not replace medical or psychological care.

Next: curious how this compares with mindfulness? Read Self-Hypnosis vs Meditation: How They Differ and When to Use Each.