What Can Hypnosis Do for Your Health?

In the 1770s, a German physician named Franz Mesmer made a splash when he said he could cure physical and mental ailments by putting people in a trance to realign their magnetic fields. “Mesmerism” was popular for about a decade until it was publicly discredited in 1784, but some elements of the practice persisted.

In 1841, the Scottish surgeon James Braid started using a similar technique of fixed attention to cure headaches, alleviate pain and anesthetize patients. He called it “hypnosis,” after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep.

Today, hypnosis, also called hypnotherapy, has a lot more data to back up its use for mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. It can also be an effective treatment for sleep problems, pain, irritable bowel syndrome and quitting smoking, studies show. And it’s still occasionally used as a way to sedate patients for surgery with little (or no) medication.

Despite all of these varied applications, hypnosis can’t seem to shake its reputation as a stage gag — in which you might stare at a pocket watch and then cluck like a chicken — or a way to retrieve lost memories and probe “past lives.” (The former can be misleading and the latter is pseudoscience.)

Experts say it is a technique that requires diligence and focus, akin to mindfulness and meditation. Here’s what to know.

What is hypnosis?

The simplest way to describe hypnosis is as a state of both deep relaxation and focused attention, where your mind is more receptive to making subtle changes in feelings and behaviors.