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The Hypnosis Network publishes the best recorded hypnosis sessions in the world, all from state-licensed mental health and medical professionals.

Unlike many companies selling hypnosis sessions, we select individual therapists for each topic. Each program we produce is developed by the most qualified therapist for the subject area in the English-speaking world.

Every therapist holds a Ph.D. or other terminal degree in a psychology-related field, and is an expert in the use of hypnosis as well as the topic area in which they record for The Hypnosis Network. We review the journals, research therapist backgrounds, and then ensure that each program is safe, backed by research, and effective. To read more about our impressive group of therapists, click here.

Our hypnosis programs have been acclaimed by psychologists, doctors, and clinical hypnosis organizations, as well as individual customers. To read what others have said about our programs, click here.

We back all our programs with a one-year money-back satisfaction guarantee.

Your conscious mind is only able to process approximately 50 bits of information a second, while your unconscious mind processes approximately 11 million bits per second.*

* Source: Zimmerman, M. (1989). "The nervous system in the context of information theory." In R. F. Schmidt & G. Thews (eds.), Human Physiology, pp. 166-173. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.

That means your unconscious mind is about 220 THOUSAND TIMES FASTER than your conscious mind.

Making changes that can lead to your success requires changes to your beliefs about yourself, the world, and others. It also requires making real changes in your habits, preferences and behaviors.

It is more efficient to make these changes with as little interference from your conscious mind as possible. This way you can access the incredible processing power of your unconscious mind without conscious interference.

Much of the time, your conscious mind is actually the bottleneck towards effecting true change, as its main role is getting you through the day in the here and now.

According to a fascinating experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, just one act of self-control depletes your ability to have self-control in another unrelated area.

For example, when subjects were told not to eat chocolates sitting right in front of them, their persistence in puzzle solving deteriorated. When they were told to suppress an emotional reaction to a movie, they had problems solving a solvable anagram. The list goes on and on.

Source: RE Baumeister, E Bratslavsky, M Muraven, and DM Tice."Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 74, 1998.

We all have a limited capacity for conscious self-control. (No wonder it is so hard to stay away from the chocolate chip cookies!) If you fight your unconscious desires on too many fronts, you are bound to take a beating.

Hypnosis is simply a relaxed state of focused attention. By temporarily bypassing your conscious mind, it gives you the power to make behavioral changes at a deeper level than when you attempt to make changes at the conscious level.

One way to think about it is that hypnosis increases the communication between your conscious desires (like losing weight), and the unconscious mind (where your true power to change exists).

Meditation is a discipline that takes steady practice over a long period of time. The practice involves clearing one's mind over long periods of time by allowing thoughts to pass by while focusing on a point, a mantra, or some other focus. Often breathing exercises accompany this practice.

A goal of meditation is to detach from your thoughts, and to experience a deep awareness that your thoughts are not you.

One important thing to know about meditation is that it is "content-less." There is no goal aside from the meditation itself. It can lead to many health benefits, including stress relief and peace of mind, but it is not goal-driven.

Hypnosis, on the other hand, is a state of focused attention where the conscious mind is distracted so that work can be done with the unconscious mind directly.

Although one can learn hypnosis and use it on oneself, the most powerful use of hypnosis is having an expert clinician guide you through the change process. Using hypnosis in this way allows a person to make changes in a fraction of the time it would take working consciously.

In short, the difference between hypnosis and meditation is that they both bridge the unconscious / conscious interface, with meditation being without content and not goal-driven, while hypnosis has content and is goal-driven.

In fact, a lot of people use the aid of hypnosis to help them develop the discipline to create a meditation practice. Hypnosis helps a person create the behaviors that lead to the goals they set for themselves.

Programs like Silva focus primarily on visualization. Hypnosis, on the other hand, is open to all of the senses.

Visualization techniques might be incorporated into a hypnosis session, but would not constitute a complete session. Visualization is just one of many tools that may be used by a psychologist who is highly skilled in the use of hypnosis. So you might say that visualization is contained by hypnosis.

A lot of visualization programs, like Silva, are usually coupled with new-age beliefs in which thoughts create tangible reality. The hypnosis programs created here are not mystical.

Visualization can be a good practice to help focus the unconscious on goals, and it can help with concentration. Hypnosis just has a much greater capacity to overcome limitations, because it contains more tools and its practitioners have a broader skill set.

Compared to other forms of therapy, hypnosis is the obvious choice for many issues.

Alfred A. Barrios, Ph.D. reviewed the overall lasting success of various psychological approaches. This study revealed the following success rates:

• Hypnotherapy — 93% success rate after 6 sessions


• Behavior Therapy — 72% success rate after 22 sessions


• Psychotherapy — 38% success rate after 600 sessions

Source: Psychotherapy: Theory Research and Practice (Volume 7, Number 1, Spring, 1970).

This is a common question. First of all, none of our hypnosis products address anything at the spiritual level. There is nothing "new age" about them. They are simply designed to help you adopt healthy behaviors.

Almost all Christian denominations accept hypnosis for clinical purposes, as do Judaism and Islam. On the other hand, Seventh-day Adventists and Christian Scientists do not approve of using hypnosis.

No. The induction of hypnosis is never dangerous to the subject, although personal disappointments may arise because of unrealistic expectations or preconceived information.

The American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have approved hypnotherapy for use by professionally responsible individuals. The British Medical Association also adopted hypnosis as a viable therapeutic tool in 1958.

Because of the movies and stage show acts, there is a perception that you will lose control when using hypnosis or somehow be under the "power" of the therapist. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The power lies in your mind, because while under hypnosis you have greater awareness than when you are fully awake and you retain all the power to select what you want to say or do. You won't do anything in a hypnotic state that you would not find acceptable in your normal awake state.

In clinical hypnosis, you will be aware of what is going on and you will find you actually feel you have more control over yourself. The hypnosis is simply increasing your ability to communicate with yourself.

"Hypnosis is not mind control. It's a naturally occurring state of concentration; it's actually a means of enhancing your control over both your mind and your body."
— Dr. David Spiegel, Assoc. Chair of Psychiatry
Stanford University School of Medicine

Michael Lovitch, co-founder of The Hypnosis Network, says:

"I understand your concern; that comes from the movies.

You go into hypnotic trances every day naturally and come out naturally. For example, when you drive long distances and time just goes by - or right when you wake up in the morning and hit the snooze button.

The trance in these programs is very light (much like becoming engrossed in reading a good book). If the phone rings, you would hear it, and then decide whether to get up to answer, or if you would prefer to stay in the focused state of hypnosis.

Hypnosis is just a focused state of attention, which for some reason increases the probability dramatically that a person actually does what they want to do. The "trance state" actually gives you more control, as opposed to less control, over yourself.

I hope this helps. The short answer is that you can get out of the trance whenever you want to do so, because you are always in control."

Definitely: Hypnosis has been used by people such as Matt Damon, Kevin Costner, Jackie Onassis, Tiger Woods, Ellen DeGeneres, and countless other celebrities to address habits, behaviors, and athletic performance.

Hypnosis has been reported on in many mainstream publications:

• "Hypnosis can help adult patients control other forms of pain, relieve gastrointestinal problems, stimulate weight loss, clear up skin problems, and accelerate the healing of bone fractures and surgical wounds."
  — Consumer Reports, January 2005
• "Hypnosis has gained credibility in the past five years because of research using the latest brain-imaging technology. Studies show hypnosis can help treat a multitude of disorders."
  — Business Week, February 2004
• "Hypnosis can help. A growing body of research supports the ancient practice as an effective tool in the treatment of a variety of problems, from anxiety to chronic pain."
  — Newsweek, September 2004

Research at Stanford demonstrates that about 95% of people are hypnotizable. People of average intelligence (unless there is some form of organic brain damage) can be hypnotized in most cases if they are willing and do not resist.

If you are able to get "involved" in a good book, it is likely that hypnosis can work for you. If you choose to be hypnotized, it is usually easy to achieve, especially with psychologists as skilled as ours.

The depth of hypnosis varies with a person's ability to respond. If you are not a naturally responsive subject, you can improve your receptivity to hypnosis with practice.

Remember that this isn't stage hypnosis. You are not going to be asked to surrender your will. It is up to you as to how you interact with the sessions.

Question from a potential customer:

I was told six years ago that I can't be hypnotized. Is that true? Will these CDs still help?

Response from Michael Lovitch, co-founder of The Hypnosis Network:

The idea of "hypnotizability" is highly debatable. There are credible groups in the mental health world that believe that some people cannot be hypnotized, and others that don't. Personally, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Beyond that, the tests for hypnotizability are quite extensive. Unless you were given these tests by a licensed psychologist, I would not give the label much credence. It is a nice "face-saver" for a hypnotist to use when their hypnosis does not work!!!

Whether you can use hypnosis to your benefit is mostly influenced by your attitude towards it and the person helping you with hypnosis. We publish multiple therapists, all A-list professionals. Some people will love one therapist but do not get any benefit from another, so it also can be a matter of style.

I can't tell you whether a program will work for you or not, based on what you have said. All I can say is to give our programs a try. If the particular program you select does not work for you, just send it back within a year's time. So far, only about 5 out of 100 people choose to return a purchased program.

Question from a potential customer:

I am considering purchasing Core Inner Strength. My husband has repeatedly pointed out my negativity and I must say that I am my own worst enemy. Can such a program REALLY change my poor attitude when I am a "resistant" subject?

Response from Michael Lovitch, co-founder of The Hypnosis Network:

It is good to be skeptical. I am a born skeptic, which is why it is fun to run this company. This is not really about eliminating negativity and is not a positive thinking program. Personally, I think some negative thinking is healthy as long as it is balanced with some perspective and optimism!

The program you are talking about will help you feel more comfortable with yourself, and will help provide you with access to some very strong parts of yourself that can make life much more pleasant and freeing.

If you are totally resistant, then don't bother. You can't use hypnosis if you don't want to, because no one can hypnotize you against your will. If you are open to the experience and listen to one session a day (about 20 minutes) for a month or so, you will notice that a lot of blocks you may have to feeling and expressing yourself fully are far easier to overcome!

So in short, for self-sabotage Core Inner Strength can help you, but it will not make you into a rosy thinker if this is not your nature.

Question from a potential customer:

I understand that hypnosis programs the subconscious mind. What I am concerned about is that just by looking in a mirror, weighing, or measuring I can see how big I am and therefore my eyes will tell my subconscious mind that I am obese. Doesn't this counteract the suggestions made with hypnosis? I believe that for hypnosis to work, you have to subconsciously really want the suggestions to be real. When your eyes are telling you the opposite of the suggestions, which is going to be the strongest factor? For myself, I know that what I see, is what I believe. I know that to be thin, I have to think thin, and I can't think thin when I see fat.

Response from Michael Lovitch, co-founder of The Hypnosis Network:

Good question. I think you are confusing hypnosis with visualization, in which you would visualize yourself as a thin person. This can help, but it is not nearly as effective as medical hypnosis done by someone of the caliber of Dr. Temes.

The hypnosis program will not ask your subconscious mind to deny brute reality. (You are right: if you are being told something that you know to be false, then your mind will not take it seriously, and the program will not work.)

The hypnotic suggestions will be for behavior. Only by following a healthy plan for as long as it takes will you ever end up being at your ideal weight. Suggestions will be made to you that you are enjoying the process of steadily becoming healthier and of losing body fat. Again, the suggestions reinforce behaviors and thoughts of people who have successfully lost a significant amount of weight, and more importantly, have kept it off.

Concrete steps like eating smaller portions, eating more vegetables, drinking more water, eliminating empty calories, consistently exercising (even if just walking), and enjoying all of these are stressed in the program. The program is not built on useless suggestions like "I am already a thin person." As you said, that would not work.

Thousands of people now have used this hypnosis program to change their lifestyle to one that promotes a healthy weight.

Our programs are designed to work into your schedule. Most sessions will last less than 30 minutes and you will only listen to one session a day. Usually listening to one session 3-4 times is sufficient to move towards your solution, although some people prefer to do them more often.

Some of our programs only have four sessions, while some have up to 10, so it depends on the particular program as to how long you will be listening. The goal is not to addict you to hypnosis, but to get the benefit of the breakthrough, and move on.

There are pros and cons when comparing listening to a hypnosis program on CD to sessions with a personal hypnotherapist. Here's how Mike Adams of Truth Publishing described the difference when reviewing our programs:

"The main drawback to audio hypnosis is that the audio program cannot respond to you. It can't observe your physiology like an in-person hypnotist would do, nor can it alter the program according to what the hypnotist sees working (or not working) with you at that particular moment."

"The advantage, though, is that audio hypnosis programs are remarkably inexpensive compared to a live hypnotist, and you can listen to them as many times as you want without paying an additional fee. There's also the convenience that you don't have to go anywhere, or make any appointments, to experience the benefits of these hypnosis programs."

So with a CD program you don't have a personal, live response, but you gain the benefit of decreased cost, increased repetition and convenience. Whenever you need to slow down, re-center and refocus on your issue, the help is always as close as your CD or MP3 player.

The other difference is qualifications. At The Hypnosis Network, we choose the most qualified hypnotherapist for your issue.

It might not be hard to find a local hypnotherapist to help you stop smoking, for example, but you would need to know, "Who is this therapist? What are his/her qualifications? Is he/she a licensed medical professional? Is she/he a specialist in dealing with smoking?" Always look for a state-licensed mental health professional with clinical certification in hypnosis in addition to his or her professional training.

Every program we produce includes audio CDs (from one to seven, depending on the program), brief instructions for use, and a product catalog.

The first track of the program is usually an introduction to the therapist, and his or her own brief explanation of hypnosis and how it's used for this particular issue. Then the therapist will explain how to use the program. The remaining tracks are typically hypnosis sessions, ranging in length from 10 to 40 minutes. Most sessions are around 20 minutes long. You'll listen to one session per day.

The best thing to do is to trust your gut feeling, or write us with your particular question.

However, pick the issue where you are weakest. If you are severely overweight, it is probably really hurting your energy levels and might be a good place to start.

Question from a potential customer:

Do I have to be on a weight loss program (South Beach, Weight Watchers, The Zone Diet) to have Enjoying Weight Loss work? I really just want to control my portion sizes.

Response from Michael Lovitch, co-founder of The Hypnosis Network:

You do not have to be on any one program. Session two will help you develop a plan for yourself that you will want to follow. If your plan is to control portion sizes, and you know what you can and can't eat, then that will be your plan. There is a lot in the program about controlling portion sizes (a huge part of its success), so it should be good for you.

Many individuals advertising hypnosis therapy give their credentials as "CHT," or "Certified Hypnotherapist." A Certified Hypnotherapist is really a misnomer. Most states do not have licensing in hypnotherapy - this is why the therapist being licensed in another regulated therapy is paramount.

A "CHT" may be certified and claim to have received 200 or more hours of training from an institution. Unfortunately, this is only about 5 weeks of full-time training.

State-licensed health care professionals, on the other hand, typically have seven to nine years of university coursework, plus additional supervised training in internship and residency programs. When licensed health care professionals train in hypnosis, their hypnosis training is an addition to their medical, psychological, dental, or social-work training.

All therapists published by The Hypnosis Network are licensed health care professionals with extensive hypnosis training and experience. We seek out the most qualified therapist for each topic area in which we publish.