The Loominal Take - Hypnosis & EFT

The word hypnosis quickly brings to mind images of swinging watches, spirals on a screen, or stage shows where someone clucks like a chicken while the audience laughs. But hypnosis is nothing more exotic than deep focus and relaxation, a state so common we often miss it. We slip into light trance when absorbed in a movie, when driving a familiar route and suddenly realizing we’ve arrived, or when a book pulls us so deeply in that the room around us disappears. Hypnotherapy simply harnesses that natural capacity and uses it on purpose.

Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, works in a similar way. It blends gentle tapping on acupressure points with spoken phrases to interrupt the body’s stress response and reroute old emotional loops. Both practices are deceptively simple, and yet their simplicity is their power.

Humans have been experimenting with trance states as a natural part of culture and healing long before the clinical term “hypnotherapy” existed. Shamans used drumming, chanting, or rhythm to help communities slip beneath ordinary awareness. Yogic texts describe dhyana, a meditative absorption that looks remarkably similar to what modern clinicians call trance. All of these point to the same instinct: to dip below the surface of waking consciousness for healing, insight, or renewal.

In the West, the modern story of hypnosis often begins with the controversial occultist Franz Mesmer (“mesmerism”) in the 1700s. Later, James Braid reframed hypnosis as a psychological process, and Milton Erickson recognized the power of hypnosis and brought it from the stage into clinical psychology. Today, hypnotherapy is still sometimes misunderstood, but it’s recognized as a powerful way of working with the mind when practiced with clarity and respect. While more high-quality research is still needed on both hypnotherapy and EFT, which I genuinely hope continues, what has already been studied shows real potential.

Hypnosis can be a meaningful support for challenges almost everyone knows: weight struggles, habit change, addictions, anxiety, and pain. One study found adults who completed ten weeks of hypnotherapy significantly reduced their BMI (Erşan, 2023), and a large review confirmed that hypnosis enhances weight-loss outcomes overall (Milling et al., 2018). For smoking cessation, hypnotherapy has been found as effective as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) at keeping people smoke-free after a year (Batra et al., 2024), and another trial showed that hypnotherapy with counseling was over three times more effective than nicotine patches alone for maintaining abstinence after hospitalization (Hasan et al., 2014).

The evidence for pain relief is especially strong. Reviews of dozens of clinical trials show that hypnosis reliably reduces pain—often more effectively than standard care—with relief lasting beyond the session itself (Milling et al., 2021). Experimental studies also show that highly responsive participants can experience up to a 42% decrease in pain intensity, while those moderately responsive still see nearly a 30% reduction—both considered clinically significant (Thompson et al., 2019). When we step back and look at the full body of evidence, a pattern emerges: hypnosis is not fringe. A recent overview covering 49 meta-analyses and 261 clinical trials found that nearly all outcomes were positive, with more than half showing medium to large benefits. The strongest results were seen in pain, medical procedures, and with children and teens, but meaningful gains were also found in mental health and everyday challenges. Just as important, hypnosis was reported as a safe, low-dose intervention with almost no adverse events (Rosendahl et al., 2024).

EFT has a shorter history but followed a similar path from skepticism to wider use. In the 1980s, psychologist Roger Callahan created Thought Field Therapy, a complex tapping method tied to specific diagnoses. In the 1990s, Gary Craig simplified it into a universal sequence called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), combining gentle acupressure with spoken acknowledgment. His idea was radical in its simplicity: by tapping while naming what you feel, you can calm the nervous system, interrupt stress patterns, and open space for change. Critics dismissed it as “woo” or placebo. But over the past two decades, research has begun to catch up with what practitioners and clients already knew—that something real is happening.

A recent meta-analysis showed that people using EFT had significant improvements in PTSD symptoms, with results on par with other recognized treatments (Stapleton et al., 2023). A review of clinical trials found that EFT helps lower anxiety symptoms and in some cases worked as well as or better than techniques like breathing or muscle relaxation (Choi et al., 2025). And in a controlled study, a single EFT session led to a 43% drop in cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, compared to just under 20% from standard psychoeducation and almost no change with no treatment (Stapleton et al., 2020). These shifts aren’t just in how people feel—they show up in the body’s stress chemistry. EFT seems to bring together the body and language, bridging cognitive and somatic layers. It’s almost as if the body finally hears the mind say what it’s been holding, and in that recognition, things unwind.

This is the throughline with both hypnosis and EFT: they are not about magic, manipulation, or shortcuts. EFT works on the front lines of stress, giving the body a way to release tension and reset its chemistry in real time. By tapping first, the nervous system is soothed and old emotional loops lose some of their grip. From there, hypnosis can go deeper, guiding the mind into focused trance where new patterns and possibilities take hold more easily. Together, they create a progression: EFT clears the path, and hypnosis builds the new signal. Both practices engage the parasympathetic nervous system—the mode where the body repairs, integrates, and re-patterns.

We are constantly moving through different states of consciousness, programming and reprogramming, whether we realize it or not. Our minds drift, our nervous systems shift, our attention expands and contracts, and all of this quietly shapes our behavior. Most of the time, we are at the mercy of these shifts. We react, we repeat, we replay the same old loops. But hypnosis and EFT remind us that we don’t have to stay unconscious in that process. We can meet the machinery as it runs and participate in how it operates. These techniques don’t add something foreign; they clear space for what’s already there to reorganize. They let us work with the same internal forces that shape our lives whether or not we acknowledge them.

And this is where the real shift happens. Not in pretending hypnosis or EFT are silver bullets or mystical secrets. They remind us that we are not just passengers being driven by habit and history. We are participants in our own programming. When we create conditions for the conscious mind to quiet, the subconscious becomes available—pliable, responsive, alive to new possibilities. Tapping does not erase grief or fear or trauma, but it creates room for those things to move instead of calcify. Hypnosis does not overwrite us with someone else’s will, but it opens the door to reshaping our own.

Neither practice is about escape. They are about presence. They ask us to sit with what is real—anxiety in the chest, memory in the gut, thought loops in the head—and to approach it differently. Change is not about fighting ourselves into submission but about shifting the terrain on which the struggle happens. The nervous system is not an enemy to conquer but a language to learn. Once we stop yelling at it in words it cannot understand and start speaking in rhythm, repetition, image, and sensation, it responds with remarkable willingness.

These practices are not miraculous, but they are ordinary miracles—simple, repeatable ways to interrupt the unconscious shaping that is always happening. We live every day inside patterns. Most of those patterns run without our consent. Hypnosis and EFT don’t give us total control, but they give us a way to enter the weave. To touch the threads, to shift the rhythm, to move with more intention. That is their real power. Not spectacle. Not performance. Not promise of perfection. Just the quiet, profound ability to meet ourselves where we are and move in the direction we want.

References

Batra, A., Eck, S., Riegel, B., Friedrich, S., Fuhr, K., Torchalla, I., & Tönnies, S. (2024). Hypnotherapy compared to cognitive-behavioral therapy for smoking cessation in a randomized controlled trial. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1363451.

Choi, S. H., Sung, S., & Lee, G. (2025). Emotional freedom techniques for anxiety disorders: A systematic review. Healthcare (Basel), 13(17), 2180.

Erşan, E. E., MD. (2023). The Effect of Hypnotherapy for Obesity. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 29(2), 258-263.

Hasan, F. M., Zagarins, S. E., Pischke, K. M., Saiyed, S., Bettencourt, A. M., Beal, L., Macys, D., Aurora, S., & McCleary, N. (2014). Hypnotherapy is more effective than nicotine replacement therapy for smoking cessation: Results of a randomized controlled trial. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 22(1), 1-8.

Milling, L. S., Gover, M. C., & Moriarty, C. L. (2018). The effectiveness of hypnosis as an intervention for obesity: A meta-analytic review. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 5(1), 29–45.

Milling, L. S., Valentine, K. E., LoStimolo, L. M., Nett, A. M., & McCarley, H. S. (2021). Hypnosis and the Alleviation of Clinical Pain: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 69(3), 297–322.

Rosendahl, J., Alldredge, C. T., & Haddenhorst, A. (2024). Meta-analytic evidence on the efficacy of hypnosis for mental and somatic health issues: A 20-year perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1212345.

Stapleton, P., Crighton, G., Sabot, D., & O'Neill, H. M. (2020). Reexamining the effect of emotional freedom techniques on stress biochemistry: A randomized controlled trial. Psychological Trauma, 12(8), 869-877.

Stapleton, P., Kip, K., Church, D., Toussaint, L., Footman, J., Ballantyne, P., & O’Keefe, T. (2023). Emotional freedom techniques for treating post traumatic stress disorder: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1195286.

Thompson, T., Terhune, D. B., Oram, C., Sharangparni, J., Rouf, R., Solmi, M., Veronese, N., & Stubbs, B. (2019). The effectiveness of hypnosis for pain relief: A systematic review and meta-analysis of 85 controlled experimental trials. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 99, 298-310.