There is a tendency to gloss over this and let you draw your own conclusions. This is because there is no clear-cut agreement. Lately, self-hypnosis has included listening to records made by someone else.

To me, self-hypnosis is either telling yourself what to do or making a recording telling yourself what to do.

I responded very poorly to hetero-hypnosis in any form, more likely to do the opposite. And it is a big ask to tell yourself what to do and carry out the instructions at the same time, so making a recording and listening to it seems the way to go. That is how I gave up smoking – listening for quality control to a recording I had made for a UTS (University of Technology Sydney) Student, which led me to my research.

Two of my UTS Students were coming second and fourth in the Australian pentathlon of the time and came to see me for hypnosis. I think the issue no. 4 had was in the swim, because I remember watching him compete, but no 2 suffered a slight tremor in his pistol shoot. “from now on…” blurble, blurble off I went. My boss at UTS and I went to the rifle range and watched him shoot a perfect score. They came first and second in the pentathlon that year and I felt I had contributed substantially.

Years later I read a full page article about no. 1. In it he said that self-hypnosis had played a large part in his success. He had undergone hypnosis years ago and from it distilled the following: relax, steady, aim, shoot.

Now that’s what I call self-hypnosis.

Sigmund freud said “all hypnosis is self-hypnosis” implying, I think, that while the hypnotist was blurbling away the client was taking what they wanted from the interaction.

I still think making your own recording and playing it back is so much easier than the alternative. And for many people and for many issues hetero-hypnosis can be effective.

It is just that for major problems like overeating, alcohol dependence, gambling, procrastination, drug abuse and others, self-hypnosis is more likely to work.

Most of us just don’t like being told what to do.