Hypnosis for Letting Go
Eleven at night. The body is in bed, the day is over, and the head carries on by itself. You replay this afternoon's meeting, you look for what you should have said, you go through a mental list that never ends.
Tomorrow you will be tired, you know that already, and the thought joins the others.
If you could do it on command, it would be done. What holds you is not a failure of wisdom: it is a mechanism that had its reasons, and that keeps running long after they have gone.
What it feels like when you cannot let go
During the day it is the same movement in another form. The email read four times before sending. The task it would be simpler to delegate and that you take back anyway. The weekend planned like a working week.
And the sentence people keep saying to you, with the best intentions in the world: you really should learn to let go. We will come back to it below, because it deserves examining: said to someone who cannot, it usually adds a difficulty rather than removing one.
What is letting go?
Letting go means no longer fighting what does not depend on us, so as to put our attention on what does. Nothing more, and above all nothing else.
Four common confusions blur the idea, and each gives good reason to distrust it.
- It is not giving up. You do not let go of your goals, you let go of the illusion of controlling the outcome.
- It is not indifference. Someone who lets go does not stop caring; they stop believing that worrying more improves the outcome.
- It is not carelessness. Organisation, rigour and anticipation remain useful. What causes trouble is their compulsive version, the one that keeps running when there is nothing left to organise.
- It is not a permanent state. Nobody "lets go" once and for all. It is a capacity you work on, which comes and goes, and which is readily lost in difficult periods.
Rumination, anticipatory anxiety, need for control
Neighbouring terms are worth separating. Rumination is a thought going round in circles about the past. Anticipatory anxiety does the same work turned towards the future. The need for control is the strategy that tries to solve both, and keeps them going.
The wider subject of anxiety is covered on our page Hypnosis for Stress and Anxiety Management.
When to see a doctor first.
Some forms of control call for medical assessment rather than personal development work: intrusive thoughts that impose themselves on you and come with checks or rituals you cannot not do, anxiety present almost every day for months, panic attacks, established burnout, or unexplained physical symptoms.
These deserve to be assessed by a doctor. Any decision about your treatment belongs to the doctor who prescribed it.
Video available in French
What the need for control costs day to day
The need for control has this peculiarity: it is often rewarded. It makes you reliable, precise, prepared. Nobody around you complains about it, and that is precisely why it settles in unquestioned. What it costs is paid elsewhere. There is sleep, usually first in line: falling asleep that drags on, or the four-in-the-morning waking with the list intact. There is the body, which takes it in tension in the neck, the jaw and the back. There is rest that does not rest, because the mind keeps working through the holidays.
There are relationships, when control turns into checking up on other people, and is received as a lack of trust. And there is the background tiredness, the kind that comes not from what you did but from what you kept an eye on. When sleep is affected, it deserves attention in its own right: that is the subject of our page Hypnosis for Sleep and Insomnia.
One point matters more than the others: this pattern does not yield to argument. You already know that half your anticipating serves no purpose. Knowing it does not stop it.
Recognised approaches other than hypnosis
The starting point is your doctor, especially if sleep difficulties persist, if anxiety is present almost every day, or if exhaustion is setting in. They can rule out what is treated differently and point you in the right direction.
- Psychotherapy, cognitive and behavioural therapies first of all. Acceptance and commitment therapy, which came out of them, works precisely on accepting what does not depend on us, and is the subject of a large body of work.
- Mindfulness-based stress reduction programmes, whose effect on anxiety and rumination has been studied.
- Regular physical activity, whose role in anxiety is among the best documented, and the most often overlooked.
- Breathing and relaxation techniques, useful mostly because you can practise them alone and at the moment you need them.
- Occupational health or human resources, when the real workload is the problem. No inner work makes up lastingly for a situation that is objectively unmanageable.
Hypnosis sits alongside these approaches, on the side of automatic habits and emotions.
What a hypnosis session can aim at
Let us start with what hypnosis does not do.
It will not make you detached. It does not remove the need for control, which has often been useful and still is. It does not fix an excessive workload, an unpredictable partner or an unstable situation: those problems are real, and treating them as a failure to let go would make you responsible for what does not come from you. It replaces neither medical follow-up nor psychotherapy. And it does not produce a permanent state of serenity.
What the work does aim at:
- Reducing the intensity of the loop. Not suppressing the thoughts, which never works, but reducing the force with which they impose themselves and the time they spend going round.
- Separating the useful from the automatic. Preparing for an important meeting is useful. Replaying it twelve times is not. The work restores that distinction, which the autopilot has erased.
- Getting access to release again. Many people in overcontrol have no recent experience of relaxing, and the hypnotic state provides one, which can then be reproduced alone through self-hypnosis.
- Working on what feeds the control: fear of making a mistake, the idea that vigilance protects, or a past period when everything really did have to be held. This overlaps with our page Hypnosis for Self-Confidence.
- Installing an exit signal. A gesture, a breath, an image, that interrupts the loop as it starts rather than an hour later.
The paradox of the instruction
"Let it go" has become a universal piece of advice, offered most often kindly, and it regularly produces the opposite of what it aims at. It turns a difficulty into a personal failing, it adds the shame of not managing to what was already heavy, and it implies the solution was available all along, which is false.
There is something more awkward. Trying to let go is still a way of controlling. Setting yourself the objective of no longer ruminating, monitoring whether it is working, getting annoyed that it is not: the mechanism is intact, it has simply changed target. Research on thought suppression points the same way: a meta-analysis of thirty-one studies consistently finds a rebound effect, that is, the thought coming back more insistently after the effort made to push it away. It is also what makes hypnosis relevant here. In hypnosis, control is not asked to stop. Attention is allowed to move elsewhere, and the release happens without having been demanded.
What the research says
No study measures "letting go", which is not a scientific object. What is measured is anxiety, and that is where to look.
A meta-analysis published in 2019 in the *International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis* brought together 15 studies, that is 17 trials, comparing a hypnosis intervention with a control condition in people with symptoms of anxiety: general anxiety, but also performance anxiety and anxiety before medical or dental care. At the end of the intervention, the gap with control groups corresponded to an effect size of 0.79. In the 7 trials that included follow-up, the gap was at least as marked at the furthest measurement point.
Two points matter as much as the result. First, the number of trials remains modest, the situations brought together are very different from one another, and follow-up covers only 7 trials out of 17: that calls for caution. Second, and this is the most useful point for you: results were better in the trials where hypnosis was combined with other psychological interventions rather than used on its own. That is exactly the place we claim, and it is why we work readily alongside the professional who is following you.
An example: Vincent
Vincent held everything together: his job, a family, a role in a charity, and the quiet conviction that he could not afford to stop. He came for two things. In the evening, it took him more than an hour to fall asleep, the day replaying itself in full as soon as the light was out. And at the office, he found himself answering sharply to colleagues he liked, over details that would not have touched him six months earlier.
The work covered three points: what the permanent vigilance was trying to avoid, the distinction between preparing and chewing over, and a short exercise for bedtime.
> "I thought the problem was my diary. The problem was that I kept working after closing it." > Vincent, name changed
He now describes nights that are still irregular, but evenings that no longer feel like being on duty. The irritation at the office has come back twice since, and he says he can see it coming.
*Every situation is different. Vincent's path is his own and says nothing about what you will experience.*
How a session on this subject unfolds
The conversation. What goes round, at what moment, and since when. What the control protects, when you think about it. Your sleep, your medical context, your medication. And the questions that tell us whether we are the right resource, or whether another door should open first.
The objective. Worked out together, and modest by design. Not "letting go", which is a word and not an objective, but for instance: no longer replaying the day at bedtime, or being able to send an email without reading it four times.
The induction. A natural state of focused attention, which you already know without naming it. You stay conscious, you hear everything, you can speak and you can stop whenever you want. It is often the part people in overcontrol dread most, and the one that reassures them fastest.
The work. On this subject, it is mostly about the distinction between useful anticipation and the automatic loop, about what the vigilance is trying to avoid, and about the concrete experience of release, which is worth more than explaining it.
The debrief and the exercise. A conversation about what you experienced, and a self-hypnosis exercise to take away, often aimed at bedtime or at the twenty minutes after work ends.
The number of sessions is worked out at the first conversation. Sessions work in person and by video alike.
Book an appointment
The first conversation is there precisely to work out whether hypnosis is the right resource for your situation, and a clear answer, including "this isn't for you", is part of the work. Ask us a question or book an appointment. Our practitioners who work in English see people in Montreal, Sherbrooke, Gatineau, Paris and Lille, and by video wherever you are in the world. The number of sessions is worked out at the first conversation.
Where would you like to consult?
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Annie Mayrand
Gatineau - Cumberland (ON)
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Christian Rocher
Beloeil
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David Veilleux
Montréal - Anjou
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Florence Aton
Sutton
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Julie Rocque
Montréal - Jean-Talon
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Nuria Pérez de León
Montréal - Rosemont - Saint-Lambert
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Réjeanne LeBlanc
La Prairie
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Frequently asked questions about Hypnosis for Letting Go
No. It means no longer fighting what does not depend on you, not giving up on what does. An unfair situation or an unmanageable workload do not call for letting go: they call for something to be done about them. Confusing the two is the surest way to make yourself responsible for everything.
No, and it is the most common question on this subject. The hypnotic state is a state of focused attention, not sleep and not being under anyone's influence: the available research shows no loss of control over your own actions, and people told they can resist a suggestion do resist it. You stay conscious, you hear everything, and you keep at all times the ability to refuse a suggestion, to speak or to stop the session.
Yes, and the idea that you have to be "suggestible" in the everyday sense is wrong: personality traits predict almost nothing about how someone responds to hypnosis, on the order of 6% of the differences between people in the available work. What weighs more is your expectations, your attitude to the process and your motivation. Nor do you need exceptional concentration: staying aware of what is around you does not stop you responding to suggestions. The first session is also there for you to experience it: nothing escapes you, and you keep at all times the option of not following a suggestion.
Yes. Hypnosis is a non-medicinal approach that adds to your follow-up without interfering with it. Simply tell us what you are taking at the first conversation. Any decision about your treatment belongs to the doctor who prescribed it: we will never ask you to stop it or change it.
Psychotherapy is a regulated framework, practised by professionals whose title is protected, and it can address psychological functioning as a whole and diagnosed disorders. Hypnosis as we practise it is a narrower form of support, centred on a specific objective and on the automatic habits attached to it. The available work suggests the two combine better than they replace each other.
Both touch on your relationship with your thoughts, by different routes. Mindfulness is a regular practice you carry out alone, over time. Hypnosis is work done with a practitioner, aimed at an objective you have set out, with a short exercise to take home. Many people do both.
Perhaps, but not only. Thoughts that impose themselves on you despite yourself, along with checks or rituals you cannot not do, deserve to be assessed by a doctor, because they sometimes call for specific care. This is not a diagnosis on our part: it is the right person to see first.
The number of sessions is worked out at the first conversation, based on your situation. Nobody can tell you beforehand without having met you.
Sources and references
If the load becomes too heavy
- Quebec: Info-Social: 811, option 2; in distress or having suicidal thoughts, 1 866 APPELLE (1 866 277-3553), 24 hours a day.
- France: 3114, the national suicide prevention line, free and confidential, 24 hours a day.
Sources
- Gouvernement du Québec, *Anxiety disorders* (in French): the forms anxiety takes, and who to turn to.
- INRS, *Preventing psychosocial risks at work* (in French): when the workload itself is the problem.
- National Health Service, *Anxiety, fear and panic*.
- Valentine K. E., Milling L. S., Clark L. J., Moriarty C. L., *The Efficacy of Hypnosis as a Treatment for Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis*, International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 2019, 67(3), 336-363 (doi 10.1080/00207144.2019.1613863). Full text behind a paywall.
- Wang D. A., Hagger M. S., Chatzisarantis N. L. D., *Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression: A Meta-Analysis*, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2020, 15(3), 778-793: the rebound effect of thought suppression.
Hypnosis as practised by the members of Solutions Hypnose is a complementary support approach. It is neither a medical act, nor a diagnosis, nor psychotherapy in the regulatory sense, and it in no way replaces a consultation, follow-up or treatment prescribed by a health professional.
Our practitioners do not assess and do not treat mental disorders or illnesses. They never ask for an ongoing treatment to be stopped or changed: that decision rests exclusively with your doctor.
No result can be guaranteed. The testimonials and examples presented on this page describe individual experiences and do not predict what you will experience.
In case of significant distress, unexplained physical symptoms or suicidal thoughts, contact a doctor, emergency services or a helpline without delay.
Page written by Florence Aton
hypnotherapist and NLP coach
partner at Solutions Hypnose.
English version reviewed by David Veilleux