Improving performance: how hypnosis helps you both physically and mentally

Sometimes you just want to perform something, but if your performance is stuck at a certain level it can be very frustrating. So what can you do to improve your performance? Improving your performance can mean anything. For example, do you want to improve your physical performance while cycling or CrossFit? Or do you want to work smarter and improve your mental performance?

In this blog, I address both of these issues and how hypnosis can play a role in them.

Improve performance in sports

In spring, you often see them suddenly reappearing everywhere, the cyclists. Some people think they are terrible and others understand the sense of freedom that cycling gives. In the Strava app, you can even enter entire competitions with fellow cyclists.

So what can you do to win that battle after all?

Improving cycling performance is something cyclists are always striving for. In the past, many cyclists even used substances like EPO for this purpose, and recently, neurodoping has even been studied[1], but what exactly is it, and is it just as illegal as using EPO to improve cycling performance? Researchers have already indicated that neurodoping poses no threat to the integrity of the sport, and in this study, hypnosis was also discussed as a neurodoping agent.

Research in other sports, such as basketball, shows, for example, that hypnosis can do a lot to improve physical athletic performance. The same applies to soccer, track and field, and golf.

In addition, in 1993, a Danish cyclist named Bjarne Riis performed exceptionally well during the Tour de France. According to him, this was due to his healer, who combined acupuncture with the hypnotic suggestion of“three extra kilometers.” He received acupuncture in his knees, and the healer told him this would give him three extra kilometers or miles to ride—just a little bit more energy. The needles, combined with what was said about the effect, can be seen as a kind of hypnotic suggestion that improved the Danish cyclist’s performance (source 1).

Suggestions can also affect CrossFit performance. For example, changing the idea of how much time is available to do certain exercises improves performance and a greater sense of ability among athletes doing CrossFit[2].

Since hypnosis can help in all kinds of sports, it could make a lot of difference in CrossFit as well.

Hypnosis can also help soccer players improve their sense of ability, mood while playing soccer and improve soccer performance. Hypnosis is then used to strengthen the ego. So you can then get suggestions about how good you are as a soccer player[3].

In addition, you can also practice by visualizing how to perform a particular sport. For example, you often see Dutch speed skaters sitting on a bench in deep concentration before their competition. Sometimes their shoulders move as if they are already skating in their minds. They are then actually mentally practicing how they are going to put down that top performance[4].

If you find it difficult to visualize something in a successful way, a hypnotherapist can help you learn to do so so that you can then apply self-hypnosis for this type of exercise.

Improve Cognitive Performance

Cognitive performance refers to your thinking abilities, such as performance in work that requires a lot of thinking or during tests. For students, engineers, and managers, it can therefore sometimes be helpful to improve cognitive performance.

For example, a test can cause a lot of stress and anxiety, just like having to complete an important assignment for work. That stress and anxiety can, in turn, negatively affect your cognitive performance, so it can be helpful to take steps to address this.

In a study of medical professionals who had to pass certain tests, they were given two 50-minute hypnotherapy sessions to ensure that they would suffer less anxiety and stress. Until now, the medical professionals had not passed those tests, but after the hypnotherapy, ten of the eleven professionals still passed the test. This just by being mentally different in the test and thus not suffering from forgetfulness[5].

Another area where physical and mental performance can be improved is in making music. This is often quite a mentally taxing task, and when performing in front of an audience, anxiety—such as stage fright—can cause you to momentarily forget where to place your fingers, the timing of the piece, or the lyrics. In that case as well, hypnosis can help you overcome that anxiety so you can still deliver a fantastic musical performance.

A study in which musicians received hypnotherapy or EMDR showed that both methods are effective in overcoming anxiety and improving musical performance. The participants were approximately 18 to 26 years old (three were over thirty).

In both cases, life story played a role in making therapy successful. This story gives people a sense of control and it gives the therapist insight into why certain situations produce certain fears and cognitive problems.

Negative thoughts were made less important with hypnosis. It also used positive visualizations, changing awkward behavior patterns and bringing about positive change. All in order to achieve certain goals you set for yourself.

With EMDR, on the contrary, the main focus was to process the fear differently. You give the fear a kind of number. For example, a ten for severe anxiety, and as the treatment gets better and better the feeling of the anxiety should go away, until you can give the anxiety the number one, no anxiety. Then a positive cognition thought is installed.

EMDR is also sometimes combined with hypnosis, but it was not in this study[6].

Your life story can also be used in multiple ways with hypnosis. Anxiety and stress, for example, are often caused by beliefs. These can be beliefs about what happens when you lose or, conversely, when things go well. By reflecting on your life, you can identify moments when these kinds of limiting beliefs first arose. With hypnosis, you can then go into regression to find such a moment. You can then use hypnosis to reinterpret this moment, giving the memory a different emotional tone. You’ll now have a better understanding of what happened back then, since these are often moments from your early childhood.

This alone can help you release a lot of anxiety and stress.

Performance improvement plan

Hypnosis can therefore do a great deal to improve performance simply by reducing stress and anxiety and by increasing motivation.

Sometimes, however, you need more than emotional stability and lots of motivation. Running a marathon, for example, is not something you can do on motivation alone. It also requires good preparation. Especially if you want to improve your time compared to a previous marathon.

There are techniques that can help you think out a performance improvement plan. Thus, with progression, you can envision your ideal future. This could be that record time from the marathon, for example, or it could be successfully completing a project at work.

It just depends on what performance you want to improve.

A hypnotherapist helps you set this vision of the future as ideal and complete as possible. Your feelings, your emotions, what you have, what you see and so on.

Next, step back in time from that moment. What did you do before that moment? And then another step back and another. Until the moment you are in the hypnotist's chair. This gives you a plan by which you can improve your performance.

So hypnosis can do a lot for you in terms of physical and mental performance. For mental performance, it is particularly important to eliminate sources of stress and anxiety, and regression can be used for this purpose.

For physical performance, the ego in particular is strengthened and something is done to improve motivation.

In both cases, visualizations can play an important role. On the one hand, to have an image of the goal you want to achieve, which can inspire you to a certain roadmap. On the other hand, this can trigger your muscle memory, making it easier to make certain movements.

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