I dare you to hypnotize me!

It’s one of the most common misunderstandings we come across, and we hear it all the time.

Just the other day, we received a message that echoed hundreds we've seen before. It read:

“Three times! Three times I’ve wanted to be hypnotized. I even paid a professional hypnotherapist a good amount of money. Nothing happened. The Elks Lodge had a magician who brought me on stage to hypnotize me. Still nothing. Then a third time—I was really relaxed, genuinely excited, and completely open to the experience. I let go, listened closely... and once again, absolutely nothing. Why?”

That question hits at the very heart of the issue. So we ask the one that really matters: What exactly did you think was supposed to happen?

Thanks to movies, pop culture, and good old-fashioned misinformation, most people believe that hypnosis is a mysterious and rare condition, something halfway between being knocked out and being drugged. It’s the realm of spinning spirals, dangling watches, and eerie music.

But hypnosis doesn’t work that way. It never did.

Back in 1894, George Du Maurier wrote the novel Trilby, introducing the world to Svengali, the fictional, manipulative hypnotist who controls a young woman with his dark powers. It was complete fiction, yet public fear and confusion about hypnosis persisted for years afterward.

This is the strange power of myth. It doesn’t need to be factual. It only needs to be compelling.

Today’s version of the myth is subtler, but just as wrong: People think hypnosis must feel special. They expect to float, vanish, or lose all awareness of their surroundings. When that doesn’t happen, they assume it didn’t work.

In truth, the problem is almost never that someone can’t be hypnotized. The real issue is that their expectations about what hypnosis actually is are completely off base.

Let’s put it simply. If we agree that trance and hypnosis refer to the same general phenomenon, then all healthy human beings experience hypnotic states every single day.

Think about it: Have you ever driven a familiar route, reached your destination, and realized you remember nothing between points A and B? That’s highway hypnosis. Your unconscious mind took the wheel while your conscious mind drifted elsewhere.

Or perhaps you’ve sat in a warm bath or hot tub and found yourself lost in thought, your awareness floating. That too is a form of trance.

Watch a movie and feel yourself tear up during a sad scene, or feel your heart race during a suspenseful moment? You’ve entered the movie trance. Music in films plays a massive role here. It wraps around our emotions and guides them—joy, sorrow, anticipation. Try watching the same scene with the volume turned off and see how different it feels.

These are all hypnotic states.

But if you expect hypnosis to be a dramatic blackout or a mystical out-of-body experience, then yes, you’ll be disappointed. Real hypnotic trance is not about drama. It’s about how your mind processes information differently.

It’s often just a narrowing and shifting of attention. Many times, it feels like nothing more than quiet focus or gentle internal absorption. Close your eyes, breathe deeply and slowly, and allow yourself to drift inward. That’s it. That’s the feeling.

It might sound too ordinary—but that’s exactly what real hypnosis feels like.

Every time I teach a hypnosis training, someone in the group is convinced they’re the one person who cannot be hypnotized. By the end of the course, they’ve experienced trance twenty or thirty times, and it feels... surprisingly normal.

But that’s exactly where the magic lives.

When someone who has suffered a lifelong phobia suddenly walks free of it...

When a shellfish allergy that once triggered anaphylaxis just vanishes completely...

When someone who could never find motivation suddenly starts working out every morning with energy and joy...

Or when a person who always dreaded public speaking now feels confident and even excited to step up and talk...

You don’t need flashing lights to tell you that something profound has shifted.

That is hypnosis.

It may not have felt special. But something changed. And that change happened beneath conscious awareness, deep within the structures of the mind.

So when people tell us they can’t be hypnotized, we smile. We’ve heard it all before. And after working with hundreds of these “unhypnotizable” people, we can tell you one thing with complete certainty:

The ability to go into trance has never been the issue.

The only thing missing was an accurate understanding of what hypnosis really is—and what it absolutely isn’t.

- Mike Mandel