Does A Hypnotherapy Recording Do Anything?
You downloaded it on a Sunday night, when you felt organised. It's still on your phone. You've played it once.
You got about four minutes in. Then the dog wanted to go out, and you never went back to it.
Since then it's sat there, next to the exercise app and the language app. And you've started to wonder whether a recording can do anything at all. Surely the real thing needs a person in the room.
I make recordings and I see people in person, so I've got a foot in both camps. Here's how I think about it.
What a recording is for
A session with me does two jobs.
First, we work out what's going on and what you'd like to be different. That needs a person.
Second, you practise. You close your eyes, you follow my voice, and you rehearse the thing you've been avoiding. Walking into the room. Saying your price out loud when somebody asks.
Practice only works when you repeat it. A recording is how you repeat it without me. Nobody can afford to book me five times a week, and you'd get sick of me if you did.
How much is enough?
More than you'd think. A Swedish research team gives us a clue.
In 2025 a team in Stockholm tested hypnotherapy recordings at home. They worked with children and teenagers who had gut problems such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). They asked the families to listen at least five times a week, for twelve weeks.
Five times a week. That adds up to sixty sessions.
I need to be straight about what that study can tell you. It was small, with no comparison group. And it studied children's tummies, a long way from a grown woman's confidence. So it can't tell you what a recording will do for you.
What it does show is how the people who design these recordings expect them to be used. They expect a lot of repeats. They don't expect you to play it once on a Sunday night.
If you'd like the detail, I wrote about the study on my Mind Your Guts blog.
No exceptions
One rule has no exceptions. Never play a hypnotherapy recording while you're driving. That includes the relaxing bit at the start.
Give it a time slot
You'll be tempted to save the recording for bad days. You wait until the morning of the event, when you're already wound up, and you play it in a panic.
That turns practice into an emergency measure. It's like only ever rehearsing your speech in the wings, with the audience already sitting down.
Pick a time when you're already in a chair, on most days of the week. After the first cup of tea works for a lot of people. Decide which days the night before.
Then play it when nothing in particular is wrong. Those days count the most.
What a recording can't do
It can't ask you a question. It can't notice that you've gone quiet. It can't tell when you are avoiding things.
If the same thing keeps tripping you up after a few weeks of practice, that's the point where a person helps. That's what my sessions are for.
Where to start
I've called my free recording Twelve Minutes Before You Walk In. It runs for twelve minutes, and it comes with Confidence Connection, my Sunday essay. It's a general confidence and relaxation recording. It isn't a treatment for anything.
Pick your slot first. Then press play.
