The Best Hypnotic Trance Deepener

Last updated September 27, 2026

There is no single best hypnotic trance deepener, but there is a best one for each job. The simplest is the preframe, which we call Mike's Universal Deepener: three sentences, then you stop talking and let their unconscious do the work. The most powerful is a breathing shift, because it gets the subject involved instead of listening. The most dependable is fractionation, which works on almost everyone almost every time.

That ranking is not arbitrary. It follows one principle, and once you see it you can judge any deepener you ever meet: the more the subject does, the better it works.

"Why deepen hypnosis? You can get all kinds of results with a light trance!"

We hear this all the time.

But we usually hear it from hypnotists who are great at getting people into light trances. It can actually sound like a bit of an excuse.

We believe that a deep, robust trance is the working state of hypnosis, and there are many advantages to making it routine. Here is the whole toolbox, ranked, with the exact words to say.

Somnambulism and the Deep Hypnotic Trance

First of all, what exactly is a hypnotic trance?

We see a trance as what NLP people call downtime. This is what happens when our attention turns inward, causing us to be less reactive to what's happening around us.

Once we're in a trance, our unconscious resources become available to us, and we're able to improve or transform almost any experience.

Note that this occurs naturally, when we get absorbed in a good book, watch a captivating film, or drive the highway at night.

The deeper the hypnotic trance, the more powerful the effects that can be produced.

It's true that in a light trance, pain can be pushed into the background, or simply ignored. But in a deep trance, we can go beyond this, producing powerful analgesia or even complete anaesthesia. Learn all about pain management with hypnosis here.

Although we may not get experts to agree on what hypnosis or trance is, we treat it as a useful model, and the various depths we talk about serve to make the model more useful.

So let's call the deep trance by its name: Somnambulism.

Someone experiencing this level of trance will typically have a face devoid of expression, and will only interact with the hypnotist, unless instructed otherwise.

Somnambulism is the working state of hypnosis, and it is worth being blunt about why. A light trance is fragile. It fragments easily, and the change work you do in it tends not to hold. If your change work has been failing, it is worth considering that nothing was wrong with your technique. You may simply have gone to work on a trance that was barely past the surface.

Dave Elman did not believe there was any such thing as a medium trance. In his view there was a light trance and there was somnambulism, and nothing in between worth naming.

Here's Why Hypnotic Depth Scales are Silly

Over the last hundred years or so, psychologists and hypnotists have created numerous "hypnotic depth scales". The Davis-Husband scale, the Friedlander-Sarbin scale, and the Lecron-Bordeaux scale, are three notable examples.

All of these scales are an attempt to digitize trances, enabling the hypnotist to tell that the subject is at "level 16" or "level 3". We think this is silly though, because we're dealing with complex human beings, and in many cases, the so-called depth scales are wildly inaccurate or even self-contradictory. We explain the exact reason why here.

We believe that attending to scales is less important than carefully observing our subjects. Their subtle behaviour will give us all the depth information we require.

Those subtle behaviours have a name: External Trance Indicators, or ETIs. They are what you watch instead of a scale. A shift in breathing. The shoulders and jaw letting go. The head tilting. A sigh. Facial muscle tone smoothing out. A change in skin colour. Responses arriving slower than they did a minute ago. The blink reflex slowing or stopping altogether. Eyelid flutter. Lacrimation. Small muscle twitches as tension releases.

None of that requires a number. It requires you to look at the person in front of you. We call it ABC: Always Be Calibrating. It's about the person, it's not about your piece of paper. We go deeper on calibration and reading trance here.

But having said that, we still believe that a deep trance is almost always a good idea. That's because the subject in a deep trance will have a more profound experience than a subject in a light trance, and will be able to fix a longer list of problems and issues.

The One Thing That Makes a Deepener Work

Before the methods, the principle that sorts them.

The more the subject does, the more powerful the deepener.

This is why a breathing shift outperforms a beautifully worded script. When you tell someone to take a deep breath and let it go, they have to do something. They participate. Compare that to lying there while a hypnotist reads at them about a staircase.

There is a mechanism underneath it, and it has a name: hetero-action. Every time a person fulfills something hypnotically, it increases their predisposition to fulfill the next thing. So a deepener the subject actively completes does not just deepen the trance, it makes the following suggestion more likely to land as well. Stack two or three and that effect compounds.

This is also why the Dave Elman induction works as well as it does. The subject is not sitting there being read to. They are busy making their own trance, and an active subject is a good subject.

One more thing belongs here, because it costs nothing and it changes everything. Tad James put it best: your subject will not actualize what you do not believe to be true. If you do not believe they are about to go deeper, your voice will give you away. Congruence is not a nice extra. It is part of the technique.

Different Methods to Deepen Hypnosis

There are literally dozens if not hundreds of ways to deepen a hypnotic trance. Some are better than others though, because they're both effective and easy to use.

Here they are in the order we would reach for them, judged by how much the subject has to do.

1. The Breathing Shift: The Most Powerful Deepener

If you only ever learn one, learn this one. It is the most powerful deepener we know, and the reason is the principle above. The subject does the work.

You simply have them change their breathing, and you tie that change to going deeper.

"That's right... and now take a deep breath in... and as you let it go... allow yourself to drift twice as deep..."

It is even more powerful if you breathe along with them. You are pacing their physiology, and there is a chain running through it that we teach as the Chain of Excellence: change the breathing and you change the physiology. Change the physiology and you change the state. Change the state and you change the performance.

The best part is that a breathing shift stacks onto anything else. Add it to the meter stick below, add it to the arm drop, add it to a countdown. It costs you five seconds and it makes whatever else you are doing stronger.

2. Fractionation: The Most Dependable Deepener

One of the most powerful hypnotic deepeners you can possibly do is called fractionation, and was discovered by Dave Elman. As a boy in Fargo, North Dakota, Elman read about the work of the French neurologist Hippolyte Bernheim, the author of Suggestive Therapeutics.

In this book, Bernheim stated that each time his subject returned for another appointment, he'd go into an even deeper trance, even if the previous appointment was a week earlier.

Young Dave Elman wondered if waiting for a week was necessary. What if the same patient was hypnotized only a day after the first session? What if it was only an hour later? What if it was immediate?

This led to one of many profound contributions that Dave Elman made to hypnosis. Elman discovered fractionation. By rapidly and repeatedly putting a subject in and out of hypnosis, the trance quickly deepened, and became more useful for therapeutic work. This is especially true if the hypnotist tells the subject that this is what will happen.

Why does it work so well? Because trance is a learning state. Each round teaches the subject what going into trance feels like, and they get better at it. Bernheim noticed the effect and missed the explanation. Elman saw that you did not need to wait a week for the lesson to take.

Two practical points that most people get wrong.

Always double. Tell them they will go twice as deep. Do not say fifty times deeper, and certainly not fifty trillion times deeper. Nobody can imagine fifty trillion, but anybody can imagine twice.

Keep the eyes-open beats short. One second is plenty. And mean it every time. You are not going through motions, you are giving an instruction.

This simple method is the most important aspect of one of the best and most famous hypnotic inductions of all time, the Dave Elman induction, named after the man himself. The Elman contains six rounds of fractionation in a row, which is a large part of why the late Jerry Kein put the figure at roughly 90% of people reaching somnambulism on the very first attempt, even with no previous experience.

3. Mike's Universal Deepener: The Simplest Deepener

Although there are lots of deepeners available, there is one that stands out for sheer economy of effort. We have called it the preframe deepener for years, and inside the Academy it goes by Mike's Universal Deepener. Same technique, and it is about as simple as hypnosis gets.

We came up with this a number of years ago, and it's finally becoming mainstream. With all the hypnosis books in our library, we were astounded to never find it anywhere, it's such an obvious method.

Here's how you use the method to deepen trance. (Note that the wording is very important).

You induce trance, and then say something like this:

And your unconscious mind knows...that there's a level of trance...even deeper... than the one you're currently in...and I'm asking...your unconscious mind...to take you there...NOW...

Then stop talking and watch what happens.

Basically, it works because their unconscious does all the work for you.

Here are the steps:

• Preframe that the subject's unconscious mind knows there's a deeper level
• Ask the subject's unconscious mind to take them to that deeper level NOW
• Observe what happens as the subject sinks deeper

There is a quiet second mechanism in the wording, which is why we said the wording matters. Listen to the phrasing again: "your unconscious... mind knows there's another level even deeper than this one." Delivered with the pause in that spot, there is an embedded suggestion sitting inside it. You are unconscious. It does double duty, and the subject never notices.

Mike first used this on stage the day he developed it, and people went deeper all over the room. You could see them sink.

4. Catalepsy, Which Doubles as a Depth Gauge

This is usually the first deepener our students learn, and it has a feature none of the others do. It shows you the answer while it works.

Once you have a cataleptic arm suspended in the air, you suggest that as the hand sinks down, the subject goes deeper. Then you watch.

If the hand descends, you know the trance is deepening. If it stays exactly where it is, you know it is not, and you know to do something else. You are not guessing and you are not counting levels on a scale. The subject is telling you, with their arm.

5. The Arm Drop

Simple, physical, and it takes about fifteen seconds.

"I'm going to lift your right hand by the thumb, and as I do, be totally relaxed... and when your hand drops down... go twice as deep."

One detail matters and it is the one people get backwards. You lift the hand. The subject never lifts their own arm. If they are lifting, they are working, and the limpness you want to feel is exactly the thing you are testing for. The drop is a deepener and a test of physical relaxation at the same time.

6. The Shoulder Press

This one comes from the book Forensic Hypnosis by Hibbard and Worrell, and the whole thing takes twenty or thirty seconds.

The order matters more than the words:

• Warn them you are about to touch their shoulders. Always warn a subject before you touch them.
• Have them breathe in first.
• Then place your hands on their shoulders.
• Press gently down as they exhale, and tie the press to going deeper.

You are stretching the trapezius while they breathe out, so relaxation and breathing arrive together. On its own, relaxation only gets you a light trance. Used as a deepener, once the trance already exists, it is very powerful.

7. The Meter Stick

Credit where it is due, we believe this one originates with Tad James, and we have built on it since.

Have the subject imagine a vertical scale with a slide on it, marked 100 at the top and 0 at the bottom. 100 is somebody who has just drunk five cups of coffee. 0 is somebody under a general anaesthetic. Ask them where they are right now, then have them push the slide down.

Two things make this better than it looks. First, they are doing all of it, which is the principle again. Second, pushing an imaginary slide downward tends to produce a small head tilt, and head tilt is concomitant with trance. The gesture helps create the state it is describing.

It doubles as a fractionation tool, because you can bring them back up and take them down again. And it works as a self hypnosis method, which makes it a useful thing to teach a client to take home.

8. Counting Down to Deepen Trance

Counting down is a classic deepener that's been around for at least a hundred years. Basically, you instruct the subject that as you count down out loud from 10 or 50 or whatever, your subject will go deeper with each number. Then you simply count, both slowly and deliberately, and generally your subject will go deeper into trance.

Then there are automated methods, which demand very little of the hypnotist. All that's needed is to connect anything that's going on with the subject going deeper into hypnosis.

You might tell the subject that she will "Go deeper...with every gentle breath you take..."

It can be every tick of a metronome or clock, every raindrop you hear hitting the window, etc.

9. Visual Methods

There are as many methods of deepening trance as there are people, and one person's favourite method will not be someone else's favourite.

Some hypnotists specialize in fairly long-winded visualizations. We've observed some of them taking their subjects through imagining that they're lying on different coloured couches, walking down infinitely long stair-cases, and writing numbers on beaches that erase as the waves come in.

Other hypnotists use the visual sense by having the subject sitting in a "control panel of the imagination" and turning a dial that sends him deeper and deeper into trance.

This can be very effective with a highly visual person, but a more auditory person would probably prefer being told to relax more and more, while listening to soft, soothing music.

If you use a staircase, keep it short. A staircase deepener should run a minute or two. Do not make it five hundred steps with a different coloured couch on every landing.

One small preference worth knowing: if you are choosing between an escalator and an elevator, take the escalator. Some people are claustrophobic and do not want to be shut inside a box.

10. Make Up Your Own

Once you have the principle, you can invent deepeners on the spot, and the best ones are usually invented for the person in front of you.

The rule is simply: this becomes this. Doing this causes that.

Years ago Mike was working with a young woman named Andrea who was wearing an interesting ring. He had her take it off before the induction, and once her eyes were closed he pressed it back into her hand and told her that as she slid it onto her finger, she would go twice as deep. It was made up in the moment and it worked perfectly, because she was the one doing it.

Dave Elman used to shake the subject's hand, and each handshake took them deeper.

Other easy ones: notice the colour blue in the room and go deeper. Count backwards silently from any number you like. Raise both arms and let their own weight pull you down as they fall.

Get the Deepener Toolbox

We put the core of this into a two page reference you can keep beside you while you practise. Six deepeners, the exact words to say for each one, and the short list of rules that make any of them work.

Open The Deepener Toolbox here. No opt-in, no hoops. Print it and use it.

How Long Should a Deepener Take?

Shorter than you think, and this is the mistake we see most often.

A shoulder press is twenty or thirty seconds. A staircase is a minute or two. Your whole induction should not run more than a few minutes.

Please do not do thirty minute inductions and long involved deepeners that bore people into trance. You will get superficial states most of the time, which is the exact opposite of what you were going for. Long and droning feels thorough to the hypnotist and feels like a lecture to the subject.

If you want more depth, do not make one deepener longer. Do another short one. Then another. Cascading three quick deepeners will beat one twenty minute visualization every time, and it gives you hetero-action working in your favour on top.

In our practice rooms we have students cascade through three, four or five deepeners in a row, purely for the practice, even though you would never use that many with a client. One tip if you try it: debrief at the end of the whole series, never between deepeners. Stopping to chat in the middle wrecks the experience you just built.

Do Children Need Deepeners?

Generally, no. Children do not need deepeners, and the sweet spot is roughly between the ages of seven and twelve. They have vivid imaginations and very little of the critical interference adults bring, so they tend to arrive where you want them without any extra work.

Adults are a different story. With an adult, deepen.

Which Deepener Will You Use?

Naturally, you can use any deepener you like. Just make sure that it's working, and let the person in front of you tell you whether it is.

It's also quite appropriate to mix and match, doing different deepeners in the same session. You might begin with visual images and end with fractionation, or whatever. If you're in rapport with your subject, the sky's the limit. Rapport is the foundation underneath all of it.

One piece of judgement to develop early: deepen until you have a strong, clearly responding subject, then stop deepening and start working. The goal was never maximum depth for its own sake. The goal was a trance robust enough to carry the change work. Once you have that, going further buys you nothing and you are spending session time you could be using.

Over time, you'll develop experience and be able to know when to continue deepening trance, or when enough is enough.

In any case, we believe that knowing a few good deepeners that you can rely upon, is crucial to becoming a first-rate hypnotist. If you would like to see how deepeners fit into a complete session, our ultimate guide to hypnotic inductions lays out the whole sequence, and these three easy inductions are a good place to start if you are still building your toolkit. If you are curious how suggestion itself does its work, we cover that here, and the classic and new code NLP distinction is here.

Frequently Asked Questions About Hypnotic Deepeners

How do I make my deepener stronger?

Get the subject doing more of it. A deepener the subject actively completes beats a beautifully worded one they merely listen to. Add a breathing shift to whatever else you are doing, then stack a second deepener on top of the first, because every suggestion a person fulfills makes the next one more likely to land.

How long should a hypnotic deepener take?

Twenty seconds to two minutes. A shoulder press runs twenty or thirty seconds, a staircase a minute or two. Long droning deepeners produce superficial trances, so if you want more depth, do another short deepener rather than a longer one.

How do I know if the trance is deep enough?

Watch External Trance Indicators rather than counting levels on a depth scale. Breathing changes, the shoulders and jaw releasing, head tilt, slowed or stopped blinking, slower responses, eyelid flutter. Catalepsy is especially useful because it gauges depth while it deepens: if you suggest the hand sinks as they go deeper and the hand sinks, you have your answer.

What is the best hypnotic trance deepener?

It depends what you mean by best. The simplest is the preframe, or Mike's Universal Deepener, which is three sentences followed by silence. The most powerful is a breathing shift, because it involves the subject. The most dependable is fractionation, which works on nearly everyone nearly every time.

Do children need hypnotic deepeners?

Usually not, and particularly not between the ages of about seven and twelve. Children tend to reach a useful depth without extra work. Adults almost always benefit from a deepener.

Is fractionation the same thing as a deepener?

Fractionation is a deepener, and one of the most dependable. It means taking the subject in and out of trance repeatedly, each pass going deeper, because trance is a learning state. The Dave Elman induction contains six rounds of it, which is much of why it works so reliably.