Self-hypnosis for insomnia: a tool for falling back asleep

Self-hypnosis is a way to get back to sleep by calming the body first and letting the mind follow. It is a skill, learned quickly and done alone, with no drug involved. The honest limits are that the strongest trials behind it are for pain, not sleep, and that about a third of adults are not hypnotizable.

David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who has studied clinical hypnosis for more than 40 years, defines it plainly: "Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention." People fear losing control, he says, when in fact they gain it. His exercise for the night has a few parts. If you wake, don't look at the clock, which he calls an arousal cue. Imagine your body floating somewhere safe and comfortable, such as a bath, a lake or space. Put whatever is worrying you on an imaginary screen. Keep one rule: whatever appears on the screen, your body stays comfortable. The worries are allowed. They just no longer drive the body.

His evidence for sleep is his own practice and emails from people who say they now sleep after years of not sleeping well. His controlled trials are in other conditions. In one, patients trained in self-hypnosis during long procedures cut their pain by 80 percent compared with standard care while using half the opioids. He usually teaches the method in one or two visits. About two-thirds of adults are hypnotizable, the trait is largely fixed by the early twenties, and he sends low scorers to other approaches such as medication or mindfulness.

Andrew Huberman uses hypnosis as a ten-minute reset after lunch and as one of several tools when he wakes at night, beside yoga nidra and long-exhale breathing. He reports waking at three in the morning, doing such a protocol and sleeping until 6:30. His explanation: "it's very hard to control the mind with the mind." So you use the body to shift the mind. He puts behavioral tools first, before supplements or sleeping pills, and warns that anxiety about sleep itself makes sleep harder.

They agree on going through the body, on long exhales, and on trying this before drugs for most people. They differ on detail. Spiegel prescribes one exercise; Huberman treats hypnosis as one of several interchangeable rest protocols. Spiegel screens for hypnotizability; Huberman recommends broadly. Huberman says practice trains the nervous system to calm down, while Spiegel says that is plausible but there is no evidence yet.

Hypnosis is the wrong tool when the problem is timing, such as waking early after pushing through evening sleepiness, which Huberman treats with an earlier bedtime and light.

What to do with it: try Spiegel's eye-roll test as a rough guide. Learn the exercise in daylight with a guided session, then practice a short version. At night, begin with a slow exhale, skip the clock, float the body and put the worries on the screen. Keep lights dim and do it from memory, without a bright phone. If it does nothing for you, switch to yoga nidra or breathing. Don't make sleep a test.

If sleeplessness persists or comes with other symptoms, see a physician. Spiegel recommends a licensed clinician also trained in hypnosis, who can make sure it is not masking something serious.