Too Much Is Not Enough

For some people, merely thinking about the incentive or, perversely, trying not to think about it, increases the urge to use it. Moreover, arguing with yourself about whether or not to use the incentive keeps your attention on it, making you more vulnerable to falling into its trance. Any thought or image of the incentive is a clear warning signal that you are in a high-risk situation and now is the time to exercise will. One coping tactic is to pose Will’s Question: “What is the best use of my attention right now?” The answer to this question identifies the path of greatest advantage.

Whenever you ask Will’s Question, you force a decision: To continue to follow the path of least resistance or to exercise will by purposely shifting your attention in a way that changes your motivational state. The exercise of will refers to the effort required to change the focus of your attention for a sufficient period to elicit the intended state change.

Intentional Trance Formation
A change in the focus of attention evokes trance formation. The change may occur as a result of the appearance of a highly salient stimulus or because you intentionally changed it by asking Will’s Question.

The method of Intentional Trance Formation has two parts: The intentional part—that is, deciding what trance is intended—is determined by asking Will’s Question; the trance formation part requires continually re-directing your attention back to the answer and willfully helping the process through suggestion. 

Intentional Trance Formation is one approach to escaping traps that result from the Soul Illusion. The method is simple to describe: To escape motivational states that may promote relapse or to elicit motivational states that promote behaviors consistent with your core motivation, dissociate from what is going on in the here and now and ask, “What is the best use of my attention right now?” Then focus on the answer and use your imagination and cognitive resources to help the trance formation.

We want your core motivation—rather than the most salient feature of the local environment—to influence your motivation and appraisals during high-risk situations. Intentional Trance Formation is the method of willfully changing your motivational state by shifting your attention from the salient stimulus that has captured it to the answer to Will’s Question.  To experience hypnotic phenomena directly, please click here.

Suggestion, the use of imagination to manipulate subjective phenomena can be used to counter many addictive traps. This procedural skill requires a creative imagination and the ability to focus your attention for a long enough period to achieve the intended result. The payoff for investing effort to work with the experiential exercises described in this section is the enhancement of willpower

When you tell yourself to raise your hand it goes up, but when you tell yourself to calm down, become sexually aroused, or to salivate, you may not get the desired response. This is because consciousness is a property of the rational processing system, which can operate your skeletal muscles, but cannot directly control your passions.

There is, however, an indirect method by which you can exert conscious influence on your biological responses: Instead of willing the response, aim your attention to the stimulus that elicits the intended response. For example if you want to salivate, instead of telling yourself to salivate, imagine licking a juicy but sour lemon—the same approach works with sexual arousal, anger, and other emotional reactions.

Thought Experiment: Evoking a cringe – Take a few moments to relive a time when you embarrassed yourself, you will find that the more vivid the image and the more detail you can conjure up, the greater the cringe effect.

If you were able to experience the cringe, then you successfully initiated trance formation—that is, you willfully aimed your attention to a particular stimulus—in this case, an embarrassing moment—in order to produce the intended state change.

Because this is an early exercise and I wanted to make it easy, I used cringe imagery rather than efficacy-enhancing imagery, which would have been more useful for our purposes. Special exercises designed to strengthen your ability to use your imagination in an intended way are included in this kit precisely because most people actively resist efficacy enhancing imagery. Some people actually suppress images of themselves as competent or successful because they were specifically trained to be modest or self-deprecating. For some individuals, the bias against efficacy-enhancing imagery is a major obstacle. Below are two sources of it:

 Asymmetry of Positive and Negative Imagery: Because it is more threatening, negative imagery is more salient than positive imagery. Moreover, stimuli that promote incentive use are intrinsically more salient (hotter) than stimuli that promote self-determination—especially during high-risk situations.

 Bias Against Self-Suggestion: Paradoxically, it is easier to accept a suggestion from a hypnotist—who may know nothing about you or your situation—than it is to accept your own suggestion. A popular misconception is that there is an authentic you and pretending to be better than you are would simply be prideful self-delusion. People resist positive self-suggestions because they view efficacy-enhancing imagery as intentional lies about the authentic you. In fact, there is no authentic you. The one that shows up at any given time is the one that emerges from your current subjective reality. Barry performs better socially when he perceives himself as clever and attractive than when he feels socially inept and shame-worthy. Even though the former appraisal is more accurate and helpful than the latter, Barry acts as if the more salient suggestions were valid. By so doing, Barry transforms these negative suggestions into objective reality by performing poorly.

Please click here to download a free audio file that invites you to experience hypnotic and other trance formative phenomena. Even though you will perform these exercises in a relaxed environment and have the aid of an audio, maintaining your focus on the target stimuli—despite internal and external pulls on your attention—requires a kind of mental strength. Using this method to escape pathogenic trances in real time is considerably more difficult than evoking the intended phenomenon during practice. Exercising your faculty of aiming attention as described in the thought experiments in this section will strengthen your ability to resist the pull of salient distracting stimuli.

We are all condemned to the limitations of subjective reality and so our perceptions and appraisals are creations of the Psyche and not unbiased representations of objective reality. Our understanding of reality is always distorted in one way or another, as different stimuli capture attention, elicit emotional reactions, and thereby bias state-dependent phenomena. When you become angry your perceptions and response tendencies change. The anger that produced these changes does not exist in the objective world; it is a subjective experience that was created by and exists solely within you. The truth when you are angry is different than the truth when you are contrite.

One client, who was working on an anger problem, reported that during a chaotic situation at an airport ticket counter someone kicked him in the back of the leg. When he turned around to “confront the asshole” he confronted a handicapped girl in a wheelchair, which had rolled, out of control, down a ramp and hit him. He reports that she was terrified by the rage on his face when he turned around. His subjective reality changed instantaneously as a result of the new information, although objective reality now included an apologetic adult and a terrified little girl.

Your motivational state is, to a large extent, determined by the stimulus that captures your attention. Some stimuli are more attention grabbing than others. Stimuli that are particularly salient can elicit a state change without your conscious intention. Stimulus Salience refers to how bright or attention grabbing a stimulus is, not necessarily how meaningful it is. The picture of one child suffering as a result of an earth quake may be more salient and elicit a greater emotional reaction than statistics of thousands killed

If there were a rattlesnake by your feet, you would be in a different emotional state (fight-or-flight) than you are in now, and it would be hard to pay attention to this text. This adaptive response results from our descent from organisms that noticed threatening stimuli; those who did not react quickly and powerfully are not our ancestors. A rattlesnake in the room with you is both salient and meaningful. But for an individual with snake phobia, even the idea of a snake—which is not objectively dangerous—can elicit a state change that is not adaptive.

Reward refers to the pleasurable effects of using an incentive. Reinforcement refers to the effect using the incentive has on future behavior. Reinforcement not only strengthens the behavioral sequence that lead to the incentive, but also enhances the salience of stimuli associated with it. The Karma of repeatedly experiencing powerful reinforcement is not only the creation of autonomous paths to relapse, but that stimuli associated with getting or using the incentive become increasingly capable of capturing your attention and eliciting unintended state changes—or trance formations. As a result of their association with the incentive, certain stimuli—persons, places or things—become salient. If you allow them to capture your attention they can elicit trances that will distort your perception, motivation and other state-dependent phenomena in ways that are counter to your interests.

Your biology, past reinforcement history, and current social environment determines what is salient. Your rational processing system gets to determine what is meaningful. To follow your path of greatest advantage you will have to know what it is, and develop the competence to resist the pull of highly salient stimuli and willfully select the target of your attention.

Suggestions are invitations to explore a particular subjective reality. Whether the entity that creates it is a hypnotist, salesman, or you, the suggestion is always a creative fiction rather than a claim of objective validity. Typically, the suggestion is designed to promote the interests of its creator—unless that entity is neurotic.

The interests of the stage hypnotist are served when the subject performs foolishly and the audience laughs; the interests of the salesman are served when the customer buys. Your interests are served when you get yourself to act as you intend despite the influence of local conditions that would promote relapse.

The method of hypnotic suggestion, demonstrated by stage hypnotists, can be a powerful tool in the service of behavior change. But because the procedure is portrayed as comedy, the public has developed the wrong idea of how it works. The popular misconception that hypnosis compels the mindless subject to obey the suggestion of the controlling hypnotist probably results from the stage demonstration called the challenge—for example: “Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/you can try to lift your leg/but it will be so heavy/that you won’t be able to do it.” This sounds like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject, but it is not. In fact whatever happens is produced completely by the subject and is an intra-personal rather than an inter-personal phenomenon. After you have read the explanation, you can experience this classic hypnotic phenomenon by exercising your faculty of imagination with the Heavy Shoe audio invitation.

As you will see, the script is full of lies, such as “your shoe is made of lead/ your leg is too heavy to lift” Scripts such as this are used to demonstrate that simple verbal suggestions can influence the experience and behavior of a cooperative subject. The demonstration can produce humorous or shocking consequences when the subject acts as if the reality suggested by the hypnotist were actually true. Acting as though an objectively false suggestion were true—e.g., your shoe is made of lead—produces behavior that would appear absurd to an observer, and so the audience, who are not asked to buy into the false suggestion, finds it humorous.

Barry’s Neurotic Trance
But some things are neither true nor false. Are you a hero or a loser? There is no objective answer to that question. Concepts like that exist only within your mind. But how you perform in the real world depends, to a large extent, upon your subjective reality at that moment. The heroic version of you would react differently than your loser persona. Consider Barry’s predicament: He wants, very badly, to perform well, but his self-evaluative perspective produces the wrong trance:

Barry exhibits a much sharper wit in social environments where he expects to perform well than in situations that evoke his “loser” persona. The appraisal: “I’m a loser,” or the expectation: “I will perform well,” exists only in Barry’s mind and not in the objective world. Nevertheless, his subjective reality influences how he will behave in the objective world. Whether he reacts to the snide insult at the office party with a witty come back or humiliation depends to a large extent on his subjective reality at the time. His retort is more likely to be clever if he is in a confident trance than if he is in his “loser” trance. He wants to bring on the clever version of himself and enjoy a social victory for a change, but he expects to be weak and intimidated as usual. Observers who know Barry have their predictions—one expected an embarrassing pause and another expected him to say something stupid. But these expectations exist only in their minds. Whatever Barry actually does becomes part of objective reality, while all the other possibilities fade into oblivion.

It would be good for Barry if he performs well during his crisis. But there is a conflict between his intentions—to be the cool and clever Barry—and his expectation of humiliation. Will his expectations or his intentions determine which Barry shows up at the critical moment?

Expectations have the advantage—both Barry and his friends believe them to be true. From our dispassionate perspective we can see they are merely creative fictions which are neither true nor false. Barry’s only real limitation is the one that he created.

Unlike insults and injuries that come from outside and tend to heal with time, Barry’s recursive problem has been with him for a long time and continually diminishes his fun, increases his misery, and prevents him from establishing an intimate partnership. Such problems tend not to go away by themselves but strengthen with practice.

The illusion of state permanence, a variation of the Soul Illusion, refers to the tacit premise that we will always perceive things as we do now. This may be true for you now as you read, as it is for my clients during their therapy sessions. If only you had access to these cognitive gifts when next you encounter a high-risk situation. Sadly, this is not to be. Instead, you will be influenced in the same way you were the last time you were in a similar circumstance.

The hypnotic state clients experience in my office as a result of a formal trance induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. Subjective experience emerges from the Psyche’s attempt to interpret sensory input. The interpretations are biased by a range of factors, including beliefs. For example, skiers with different beliefs about their abilities may experience different subjective realities on the same slope.

There is nothing unusual about hypnosis—everything we experience is trance phenomena. You can evoke one kind of trance by listening to a trance formation audio file, but you don’t need a formal hypnotic induction to change your experiential state. Consider the following thought experiment:

Thought Experiment: The Emergency. Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, and experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience relief, a very different trance. Objectively, the report was never true, yet it had a great impact on your physical and emotional state.

State-dependent phenomena—including motivation, perceptual bias and response probability distribution—are determined by the subjective reality that existed in your mind, not by what was objectively true.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you are continually inventing. To be sure, your overt behavior becomes part of world history (and so can never be undone), but the trance that gives rise to it is purely subjective and does not exist outside your consciousness.