The movie Office Space has a very funny premise, even if it offends My perspective as a professional Hypnotist. In one of the opening scenes, the hero is being hypnotized, and the hypnotist dies right after telling the subject that all his inhibitions are gone. Though planting that suggestion alone was never the hypnotist’s intention, it works miracles. The newly liberated hero quits his miserable job, dumps his abusive girlfriend, and summons the courage to woo the girl of his dreams.

The scene is of course ridiculously exaggerated. One interrupted hypnosis session cannot cure all of your personal woes. But beneath it lies a kernel of truth. Hypnosis can improve your life, sometimes in very dramatic ways. Regular hypnosis sessions convey all the effects of meditative relaxation: easing tension, lowering blood pressure, reducing pain, decreasing stress. But just as in Office Space, the biggest potential benefit of hypnosis is to decrease inhibitions.

“Inhibition” is a fancy term for all the mental states that constrain our happiness. Fear. Anxiety. Insecurity. Guilt. They are the thieves of passion, the destroyers of joy and ambition. When we break inhibition, we build ourselves.

How can hypnosis help? People have the wrong idea about inhibition- they mistake it for self control. But true self control only begins where inhibition ends. Hypnosis, like meditation, focuses the mind and puts you in touch with the inner workings of consciousness.  Trance empowers you to relinquish inhibitions and cultivate awareness.

Come, pet. Give it a try. What do you have to lose? Except, perhaps, your inhibitions…..