What’s the Difference Between Hypnosis and Meditation?
Hypnosis and meditation share plenty of characteristics on theoretical, neurophysiological, and experiential levels. They also differ on each of these planes. There is overlap in how they look from the outside, as well as what’s going on in the brain when engaging in each method. But there are also key distinctions in what they look like and what’s going on “under the hood.”
Before diving into all the similarities and differences, we’d be wise to start with why we care. What benefit would it bring you to know the differences between hypnosis and meditation? Understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of each technique may very well enable you to optimize your use of each, depending on your traits and needs.
If you’re someone who aims to optimize your wellbeing with psychological techniques, read on to learn how hypnosis and mindfulness compare and contrast.
The quick summary…
If you’re just here for the TL;DR, here it is: Hypnosis and mindfulness originated long ago independently of one another, both outside the reach of science. Each has been heavily researched over the last century, and thus “empirical” data have now been collected about the two. The major differences between the two techniques can be boiled down to your objective, and certain brain activities taking place during the exercise.
Your objective: In meditation, mindfulness is itself the goal. Meditation is meant to help you enter and maintain a meditative state, with open, nonjudgemental presence and a state of non-intention - being rather than doing. By contrast, hypnosis involves focused attention on one thing — usually the change in perception or behavior the practitioner wants to accomplish - doing rather than being. It is typically experienced much more rapidly than meditation, oftentimes with an immediately noticeable improvement. The benefits of mindfulness tend to be realized more profoundly after cultivating a longterm practice. Changes in hypnosis can be felt within minutes.
Brain activity: Hypnosis and meditation have related but different effects in the brain. Hypnosis separates the activity of the Executive Control Network from that in the Default Mode Network (DMN), which involves self-reflection, while mindfulness turns down activity in the DMN. Over time meditators also turn down activity in their DMN, a sign that the practice is helping them to ‘get over themselves,’ to privilege pure experience, being over being yourself. In hypnosis this change is more task-related. Hypnosis also reduces the activation of the salience network, thereby reducing distraction, and enhances coordination of the Executive Control Network with the Insula, which is a two-way mind-body control region. There are other distinctions in brain activity between these two, some of which we’ll cover in the long version.
The longer version of the story
To thoroughly explain the difference between hypnosis and meditation requires discussing a great deal of nuance, and forgiving certain gaps in the research. We will discuss the most defendable and relevant trends and observations in the rest of this article.
Both hypnosis and meditation have been studied scientifically, and evidence has shown that both involve unique states of consciousness. There has been some evidence to suggest that mindfulness is its own state of consciousness (different from sleep, alertness, and hypnosis). “In the minimal degree to which head-to-head comparisons have been conducted, meditation has in turn been distinguished from hypnosis, for instance in terms of EEG signature.”
Hypnosis has been accepted as an integrative medicine intervention ever since researchers found evidence that brain structure and activity differentiates people who are highly hypnotizable from those who are less hypnotizable. That is to say that hypnotizability is a trait, and yours is unique to you. Your hypnotizability predicts the likelihood that you will realize the change you intend to create in your life using hypnosis.
Besides these similarities and differences, the available scientific research on the subject has highlighted five experiential dimensions as prevalent: effort, attention, continuity of awareness, imagery, and agency.
Effort
Let’s start by understanding that people might use hypnosis and meditation for the same ultimate goal, like greater emotion regulation, equanimity, or patience. Hypnosis has additional clinical uses such as helping people quit smoking or drinking, eat healthier and lose excess weight, and managing one’s perception of pain on demand.
While hypnosis and mindfulness have both come to be understood as traits states of consciousness as well as practices, these factors affect an individual practitioner’s chances of achieving their desired results in different ways. Everyone who engages in hypnosis and/or mindfulness will be affected by their own traits (such as their hypnotizability level), and their experience with the given technique.
A key distinction: A person’s traits are likely to have a stronger impact on their results from hypnosis, and less so on the same person’s results from mindfulness. Experience level and time spent practicing will have a more salient effect on one’s results from meditation, while this will make less of a difference on their outcomes from hypnosis.
Example
Heidi from the Reveri community has been a daily meditator for 20 years, but she is new to hypnosis. She is moderately hypnotizable, which means she can get some immediate benefits from hypnosis off the bat, and practice will help her achieve more of her desired results. She says she was a little ball of rage for a lot of her life, and Reveri is another puzzle piece for achieving calmness, alongside meditation. She suggests people think about the concept of having a toolbox, and if they already meditate and wonder about hypnosis, Reveri is another tool that helps calm you down and center you. She actually found her recent hypnosis experience liberating, in that her ability to focus on solving a problem allowed her to accept rather than avoid her ‘intentionality.’
Attention
In both meditation and hypnosis, a person’s attention will change from their standard, waking state, to an intensified and absorbed focus on the present moment. This feature is one of the deeply nuanced topics under the umbrella of distinctions between hypnosis and mindfulness. The fact that there are many different types of meditation techniques accounts for a large part of the nuance. For example, a comparison between transcendental meditation (TM) and hypnosis found that the techniques were similar in terms of their impact on attention, but it was easier for subjects to manage distractions in hypnosis compared to TM.
Some distinctions in the brain
Highly hypnotizable people show to have greater connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the salience network (SN) than low hypnotizable people. Executive control and the default mode network (DMN) demonstrate changes in activity due to changes in the practitioner’s attention in both hypnosis and mindfulness. Interestingly, novice meditators may show greater enhancement of their executive control than even more experienced meditators, due to regulating their emotions in a “top-down” fashion at their early stages of development.
Moving back to experiential comparisons, people have reported that hypnosis tends to overlap in sensation with concentrative meditative techniques, which encourage the meditator to narrow their attention on things like breath or a scan of their body. Meditative methods that are more open and generalized feel quite distinct from hypnosis, by contrast.
Because of a directed use of attention, hypnosis and mindfulness can both be effective forms of analgesia, or a “natural painkiller.” An experienced meditator is likely to report a greater reduction of pain perception through meditation than a novice meditator, while a person may experience a dramatic or complete reduction in pain perception when using hypnosis for the first time. Again, the traits of that individual are more relevant when it comes to hypnosis, versus their experience level when meditating, in this case.
Meru, another Reveri community member, is experienced in both hypnosis and meditation. She says that when she has a specific goal in mind, she always chooses Reveri. When looking for general relaxation methods, she tends to elect meditation.
Continuity of awareness
While hypnosis and meditation appear quite similar neurologically — due to an increased level of corticolimbic inhibition — the techniques diverge overall when it comes to continuity of awareness.
To understand how, one must grasp the concept of dissociation. Since it was first defined in 1920, the term has come to be understood as comprising a range of “disruptions and fragmentations of the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, body awareness, and perception of the self and environment.” To experience dissociation, you could close your eyes and imagine standing on top of a mountain. You might envision the view you see when standing there, looking through your own eyes in this imagined vision. Now, let yourself become aware of where you are really standing or sitting. You will realize that you had disconnected from your actual physical experience while you focused on the ‘view from the top’ in your mind’s eye. Now, you see that what you saw from the imagined top of the mountain involved dissociation from your actual physical experience.
While dissociation can happen naturally, such as when day-dreaming, it is also a core component of hypnosis, where it is put into a structured format. Hypnosis essentially requires the use of dissociation techniques, interrupting the standard state of consciousness with the use of imagination (more on this in the next section). By contrast, mindfulness requires an integration of consciousness.
Imagery
Harnessing the power of imagery is a prominent aspect of hypnosis. Oftentimes this imagery includes positive visuals, like a therapist inviting a depressed patient to picture a “door of forgiveness.” In some of Reveri’s exercises, Dr Spiegel invites you to imagine a screen where you envision a problem on one half, and a possible solution on the other side (Spiegel, D. (1992). The use of hypnosis in the treatment of PTSD. Psychiatr Med, 10(4), 21-30. This technique leverages a combination of almost all the aspects we are discussing today.
Such use of imagination is not common in mindfulness practices. Usually, many forms of meditation direct the meditator to let go of all their conceptions — even their sense of “self,” which will be expanded on in the Agency section.
Still, both approaches can have a positive effect on a person’s emotion regulation, but most likely in different ways. For example, Heidi uses the Eat Well exercise to eat healthier foods. She finds the imagery of treating her body like a baby she needs to care for very powerful and effective in actually changing her eating habits.
Agency
Hypnosis is distinct from most meditative states when it comes to agency, which refers to the ability to do, change, or affect something else. Most individuals would say they have some degree of agency, generally speaking. They are a force in and of themselves, with the ability to affect many other things and entities through their actions.
In most meditative states, the subjective, first-person perspective is greatly diminished; in some cases, it evaporates completely. This means sometimes, a person who is meditating can feel as though they are one and the same as their surroundings, melding with the world around them. In such cases, their sense of agency dissipates. It can have a therapeutic effect, although in extreme cases, it can have a negative psychological effect.
Hypnosis can be considered a form of “self-referential thinking.” By its nature, this method of thought requires the individual to be aware of themselves as an individual, who can both affect change and be affected by the external world. Engaging in this type of thought, and thus, in hypnosis, means the person acknowledges their sense of agency, which can also have therapeutic effects. It can help them understand their negative feelings and what causes them, as well as imagine what they can do differently to overcome their challenges. This is one of the reasons why hypnosis can create such an immediate benefit. But in hypnosis one frees oneself from the usual ways of thinking and evaluating oneself, making it easier and more effective to try new approaches.
Heidi mentioned this is a noticeable distinction between meditation and hypnosis for her. In insight meditation, you are directed to not have goals, because being attached to anything is considered a form of suffering. Hypnosis does require focused attention on a certain outcome, like reducing pain sensation, leaving behind cigarettes, eating healthier, or overcoming an acute sense of anxiety. She says she overcomes this dichotomy because Reveri helps her set a “worthy” goal that feels true to herself. “It’s challenging to achieve meaningful goals skillfully, and Reveri helps you do that,” she says.
Recap and Next Steps
There are numerous similarities and differences between hypnosis and meditation, in regard to traits, brain activity, experience level, and more. Both hypnosis and meditation have valid therapeutic uses, and are regularly used to achieve similar goals. Hypnosis is more likely to create a specific, immediate benefit, whereas the benefits of mindfulness tend to get stronger with regular practice.
This is a deeply nuanced conversation. Perhaps the best way to learn how hypnosis differs from meditation is to find out for yourself. Give them both a try with an open mind. Notice how differently you feel directly after each session, as well as over time as you practice each.
Additionally, you can learn more about yourself and how you can make the most out of hypnosis by testing your hypnotizability with the Reveri app.
Hypnosis with Reveri is extremely safe, and regarded by many as a pleasant, effective approach to the optimization of your health and overall wellbeing.
Contact us: support@reveri.com
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Many Reveri members experience the benefits of self-hypnosis after a single 10-minute session.