What's the difference between meditation and hypnosis?

The beautiful fells (+ rainbow!)

I’ve just come back from my annual holiday to the Lake District. September feels more like the start of a new year than January does (why do we want to make new years resolutions in the deepest depths of winter anyway? We should be hibernating until spring!).

Being totally immersed in nature for a few nights really does wonders for my brain. It allows me to reconnect with myself, assess what’s going well, and what I can shed going into the autumn months. And this year, my trip away has highlighted the importance of my meditation practice - a practice I always (try to) maintain.

A question I get asked a lot as a hypnotherapist is ‘what is the difference between hypnosis and meditation?’. And while there are both altered states of consciousness, there are key differences between these two states of being.

Let’s begin by exploring meditation. Meditation has existed as we know it for thousands of years and it is a vast topic. For the sake of this article though, I’ll keep it simple. A typical style of meditation is finding a comfortable seating position, closing the eyes or softening the gaze, to then focus on one’s breathing. This ‘anchor’ of the breath is the foundation of the practice. Our mind inevitably wanders, thoughts creep in, we start planning what to do with the day or we think about an embarrassing thing we did 12 years ago. The meditator witnesses this without judgement and draws the attention back to the breath. A common metaphor to describe this phenomenon is our awareness being the sky, the thoughts are passing clouds.

Meditation is like strength training for the mind. The ongoing process of continually drawing one’s attention to the breath feels uncomfortable at first and requires a lot of concentration and focus. Over time, it eventually becomes easier to simply witness, focusing becomes slicker and achieving levels of deep calm is quicker. Practice makes perfect.

So, what’s going on in the brain? Regular meditation increases the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and increases grey matter in the brain associated with emotional regulation, learning and memory. Solution focused hypnotherapists always bang on about the PFC – it is the logical, rational CEO of our brains and is involved with complex decision making. And because of the increase in grey matter, our brains can get bigger in size and volume!

Now, let’s take a look at hypnosis, or trance (I use these terms interchangeably). Like meditation, it is an altered state of consciousness. But it isn’t just what we see in stage hypnotism, which has people worrying whether all their life savings will be swindled. In fact, a trance-like state is often accessed in our day to day lives, without us even realising. We could be commuting a regular route and wondering how we got from A to B, or going for a run, working out at the gym, or just staring out the window and daydreaming.

So, hypnotherapists use this natural phenomenon our brains engage in naturally to access the states of consciousness that can bring about therapeutic change. How do we do this? Well, we use imagery, specific language structures and techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation, which induces hypnotic states by bypassing our critical conscious mind. This leads to increased susceptibility whilst also entering a state of deep, but focused, relaxation. In this state, your subconscious mind is easily accessible. A huge amount of our automatic thoughts, behaviours and habits are programmed here, so by being super relaxed and receptive, we can begin to rewire outdated programming that no longer serves us and start creating changes we want to see.

So, what’s happening in the brain during hypnosis? So many things! Parts of the brain that are involved in self-consciousness disengage, parts of the brain involved in attention, working memory and bodily awareness lock in, and our autonomic nervous system slides into a parasympathetic state - our rest and digest mode - which is really relaxing. Our imaginations are incredibly powerful, so when you’re imagining a very pleasant scene in which we are feeling completely relaxed, our bodies will inevitably follow suit.

When observed via an EEG (electroencephalography, measuring electrical activity in the brain), our brain waves in hypnosis predominantly shift into theta. Theta brain waves are associated with deep relaxation in which you are relaxed, but aware. These brain waves are linked to problem solving, creative thinking, emotional processing and memory consolidation.

So, there are plenty of overlaps between meditation and trance (they're like cousins, rather than siblings) and they are both powerful states of relaxed, focused attention. They work in slightly different ways, but both are complementary and entirely beneficial for our brains. The differences between meditation and trance can be described in a simple metaphor. Imagine you’re walking a dog. In meditation, you have your dog on a very tight leash. The dog is always at your heels, and if it strays, you quickly correct it. In meditation, this is the meditator observing the thoughts have crept in and redirecting focus to the breath once more. It is a passive state - by noticing our thoughts, we can redirect our attention back to the breath, but our responses for next time this happens doesn't change.

In trance, you still have the dog on a leash. But this time, it is on a very long leash and allowed to run and roam freely. You still have eyes on the dog, but it’s allowed to sniff and run around as it pleases. So, in trance, our minds are often wondering off – this is completely normal - but they are still in a deeply relaxed state. Our brains are working hard in the background solving problems without even having to consciously think about them! This is an active state - because we tap into the subconscious mind, our past programming can be altered for therapeutic benefit.

This is why solution focused hypnotherapy is so effective. Our sessions are structured in such a way that by the time you arrive at the trance, your brain is already working hard to figure out how best to achieve what you want to achieve. And all while you relax in the comfort of your own home in your comfies!