She had tried intermittent fasting, HIIT workouts, long walks, and a slew of supplements that claimed to boost metabolism. She ate a healthy diet. She had completed all of the necessary medical exams. But still, Jennifer Petruccelli couldn’t get her weight to drop. At 5’5” and 200 pounds, the 46-year-old resource manager from Rhode Island was no longer happy with her weight after gaining 40 pounds in four years. “I could exercise and eat ‘perfect’ and still not lose. I needed a reset—to tell my body we are going to start moving in the other direction,” she recalls. Maybe it was her anxiety and emotional eating, she had thought.

Then, a post advertising an online hypnosis tool for weight loss popped up in Petruccelli’s social media feed and piqued her curiosity. In early January, she tried her first hypnosis session. It began with what her hypnotherapist, Suzi Nance, calls the “pre-talk”: a deep-dive conversation designed to uncover the client’s goals, motivations, and hidden blocks, which will later form the foundation of the personalized script used during hypnosis.

For someone coming in for weight loss, like Petruccelli, Nance typically starts with questions like: Why are you here? Why do you want to get healthy or fit? What’s your relationship with food? What have you tried before? She also explores the client’s past, from family dynamics to adolescence and college, looking for subtle emotional cues or long-buried memories that may hint at deeper behavioral patterns. “Very often the questions give me—and often the client—an insight that they had not ever even thought about,” says Nance, who has 12 years of experience in hypnotherapy. “One session with me is like a typical two years of traditional therapy,” a psychotherapist once told her.

Nance says hypnosis works by aligning the conscious mind, where you make plans, analyze, and set goals, with the subconscious mind, where automatic habits and emotional associations live. This framework is common in modern hypnotherapy and endorsed by organizations like the National Guild of Hypnotists, with which Nance is certified as both a hypnotherapist and instructor. “When someone is in a hypnotic trance, they’re gently shifting into an altered state of consciousness—their brain shifts into a slower, calmer wave state, alpha or theta, which is like the dreamy place between sleep and wakefulness, and we move into a more relaxed, focused, and receptive state where real transformation happens,” says Nance.

A growing body of research has explored hypnosis as a tool for breaking habits. A 2022 peer-reviewed randomized controlled trial published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that hypnosis combined with nutritional education helped adults with obesity show better control over their eating impulses than those who received education alone. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology compared the efficacy of hypnotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in helping smokers quit. After one year, both groups showed similar abstinence rates, indicating that hypnotherapy can be just as effective as CBT for smoking cessation. What’s striking here is the contrast in psychic “organs” involved. CBT works primarily with the conscious mind, with patients identifying unhelpful thought patterns and actively reframing them through logic and repetition. Hypnotherapy, by contrast, aspires to penetrate the subconscious mind directly.

Dimitri Otis//Getty ImagesSigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, famously used an iceberg analogy to describe the three levels of the mind: consciousness, subconsciousness (also known as pre-consciousness), and unconsciousness. Your thoughts and perceptions are part of your conscious mind, represented by the top of the iceberg. Your memories and stored knowledge make up the subconscious mind, the portion of the iceberg just under the waterline. Your instincts, fears, and selfish motives comprise the unconscious mind, represented by the deepest and darkest part of the iceberg.

And that’s exactly what Nance sought to do in the next phase of her session with Petruccelli. After the pre-talk conversation, Petruccelli sat down comfortably in a recliner, wrapped in a blanket, with the lights dimmed. This is the stage where hypnotherapists use relaxation techniques to quiet the mind; the process felt like a guided meditation, Petruccelli says. Then, Nance told her to “imagine, think about, or just pretend” the imagery being described. If the mind wandered, that was okay. “There is no right or wrong,” Nance had explained. “If I say you see a house and you see a blue house and then I say it’s red—either keep it blue, make it red, or poof, it’s yellow.”

Unless a client had an aversion to beaches, the journey would often begin on “a deserted Caribbean beach, on a lounge chair looking out at the crystal-clear water, following the rhythm of the waves.” From there, Nance guided Petruccelli into full-body relaxation, “feeling the warmth at the top of the head and moving all the way down to the toes.” This was followed by what Nance calls a deepening technique, which involves a countdown—sometimes from 10, sometimes 20 to 1.

Then came the personalized script, written from everything revealed in Nance and Petruccelli’s pre-talk, woven with the hypnotee’s own words, goals, imagery, and metaphors. This, Nance explains, brings a level of personalization that helps bypass surface resistance and speak directly to that part of the mind where automatic behaviors stem from in a language it recognizes. “A big part of the script is I will have them see themselves in the future, having achieved whatever they had come to achieve,” Nance says. For someone like Petruccelli, the imagery might be a thriving garden. For a New York finance executive, perhaps a boardroom. “It all depends on the client,” Nance says, “and what the issue is.”

As for how it felt on the receiving end? “For most of the hypnosis, I was very aware. Toward the end, I could feel my body relax, and it was a similar feeling to those few minutes right before you fall asleep—where your eyes twitch, and you can hear what is going on, but your brain has started to go into sleep mode,” Petruccelli remembers.

While Petruccelli had a positive experience with hypnotherapy, some rigorous studies present a more skeptical view of hypnosis in creating meaningful behavioral change. Strong case in point: a Cochrane review, one of the most respected types of evidence reviews in medicine, which analyzed 14 studies on hypnotherapy for smoking cessation involving 1,926 participants. The authors concluded there was not enough evidence to determine if hypnotherapy was more effective than other methods or no treatment at all. If there’s any benefit, they noted, it’s likely small. Shari B. Kaplan, a licensed social worker and founder of Cannectd Wellness, an integrated mental health facility in Florida, is among those who are cautious.

More Altered States of Consciousness ⬇️

“Hypnosis might not be the best modality of treatment for somebody struggling with addiction for several reasons,” Kaplan says. Many people with addictive behaviors have untreated trauma: “If this individual is prone to dissociating, meaning disconnecting from their body, their identity, or their sense of self, doing hypnosis on a person with this type of history could activate a dissociation episode,” Kaplan says.

Those navigating addiction also tend to use behaviors to escape. “If the hypnosis is not done properly by a qualified clinician, there is a risk of using the hypnosis as another means for escape,” Kaplan says. (While there is no universal regulatory body for hypnotherapists, organizations like the National Guild of Hypnotists and the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis offer certification and training programs designed to uphold professional standards).

Without trauma-informed care and clean boundaries between patient and therapist, hypnosis could be perceived as re-traumatizing if the patient feels a sense of powerlessness similar to their past traumas, Kaplan continues. “Hypnosis should not be used as a quick fix. Sometimes people reach for an immediate fix as a way of avoiding the deeper repair work [therapy] that would get to the root cause,” Kaplan says.

Yet for Nance, the value of hypnosis isn’t in the trance itself, which she describes as fleeting. The transformation, Nance thinks, often shows up quietly when clients realize they’ve started responding to old triggers in completely new ways. “That’s the subconscious updating its programming,” she says. Still, Nance hints that beyond the mechanics of the subconscious, something else—intuitive, energetic, or even spiritual—may be at play. “We’d be kidding ourselves if we pretended to fully understand consciousness.”

In any case, since her first hypnosis session, Petruccelli has walked through the doorway to that dreamy tropical shoreline several times. She reports she has already lost 21 pounds.