Expert Q&A: Hypnotherapy for anxiety, confidence, and performance, with Craig Meriwether
Reviewed by Yuli Ziv, Founder & CEO of Heallist
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
In this episode of the Heallist Podcast, we unpack what clinical hypnotherapy actually involves — the common misconceptions, how a session works, and the everyday challenges it tends to support. Our guest, Craig Meriwether, is a subconscious transformation expert, clinical hypnotherapist, and medical hypnosis specialist with over 15 years of experience helping people break through mental and emotional barriers at the subconscious level.
Craig's work focuses on eliminating limiting beliefs, resolving past emotional patterns, and creating lasting transformation from the inside out. In this conversation, he unpacks how the subconscious mind actually works, why hypnotherapy has nothing to do with mind control, the role of the placebo effect in self-healing, and what really happens during a session — including a striking real-life regression story.
Hypnotherapy Misconceptions
Craig: There's a lot of misconceptions and myths still about these techniques and tools. Hypnotherapy is this umbrella term under which a lot of different techniques and tools are housed. But really, what we're doing is tapping into the power of the subconscious mind to create healing, create resolution, and let go of hurt and pain. This is not mind control or brainwashing — you can't make people do anything they don't want to do. What we're using in therapeutic hypnosis is your ability to heal yourself.
The main job of the subconscious mind is to keep you safe and protected, for survival — it just may be using instructions that are out of date. If somebody's been holding onto something for years, maybe since they were a child, it may have been the right thing to do in that moment to keep themselves safe. If they were going through trauma or abuse — hide, keep yourself small, keep your voice low — that may have been the best thing a child could do, but that's not going to work later in your 30s, 40s, and 50s. You may just be using computer code that was installed unconsciously during a traumatic event. So change the code. You're the one placing new information in your mind all the time — all we're going to do is do it on purpose.
If somebody's struggling with anxiety, anger, overwhelm, worry, or fear, you're already out of control. You may be creating an actual physical response — the fight or flight stress response, elevated heart rate, high blood pressure — through triggers you're not even aware of. People generally aren't born with test anxiety, fear of public speaking, or fear of flying. There may be some innate fears — of tigers, rattlesnakes, fire — but fear of flying or a math test is something you have to learn, and then practice, to the point where it starts reaching into other aspects of life. That's not to blame the person, but if you're the one who created that reaction, that becomes empowering, because it means you're the one who can undo it and change it to something else.
That's why they tell us as we get older to keep learning — new games, chess, mahjong, dance, a foreign language — to keep creating new neural pathways. Let's create new neural pathways around a situation that was harmful to you. It's not about creating amnesia or forgetfulness — there's wisdom in remembering that a hot pot on a stove will burn your hand — but you don't have to keep the hurt and pain of that anymore.
The Placebo Effect And Self Healing
Craig: With this work of hypnotherapy, what we're using is the placebo effect — mind healing body. It's not trickery. Large pharmaceutical companies know they're going to accidentally influence people to heal themselves, so they have to have the sugar pill to account for that. Let's say they're testing a high blood pressure medication — half the group gets the sugar pill. If 30% of the sugar-pill group gets better and 40% of the real-medication group gets better, they actually have to subtract that 30%, because maybe they influenced those people to heal themselves too — so really only 10% got better from the medication itself. But there's no big payout for stockholders in teaching people how to heal themselves — you can't copyright or patent somebody's subconscious mind.
You as a human being are pretty spectacular. You get a cut on your finger, you don't have to think about it — your body and mind know what the problem is and start working together to fix it, and it knows the cut's on the index finger of the left hand, not the pinky of the right hand. If somebody breaks their leg skiing, the cast isn't healing the leg — the bone is fusing back together through a process created by mind, brain, and body, and it started that healing process before the conscious mind was even aware there was a problem. Digesting your food, beating your heart, breathing — these are all things we don't have to think about. The subconscious mind is extraordinarily powerful. It's holding onto habits like walking, riding a bicycle, tying your shoes — but its main job is to keep you safe and protected, and the way it warns you is through feeling states. The feeling state of anxiety, anger, fear, worry, overwhelm — it's warning you there's danger somewhere in your world, based on events and circumstances you've experienced in the past.
The mind is pulling in everything you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell through this filing cabinet of all the trauma, hurt, pain, anger, fear, embarrassment, and humiliation you've been through in life. If anything triggers one of those files — say, somebody gave a book report in fifth grade that didn't go well and everybody laughed — now there's an instruction that it's unsafe to be in front of a large group of people. Maybe later in life, in their 40s, they have public speaking phobia. The subconscious mind's job is to keep you safe, but it may be using old instructions.
The other big issue is that the mind can't tell the difference between what's real and what's imagined. You'll notice this with a nightmare — it doesn't matter how realistic or ridiculous it is, the mind thinks you're under attack and turns on the stress response even in deep sleep, dumping adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream, racing your heart, until you wake up sweating and screaming. The subconscious mind is this highly emotionalized part of mind trying to keep you safe. The conscious mind — the logical, analytical mind that creates your goals — only makes up about 5% of mind, according to neuroscience. Subconscious mind makes up 95%. When there's conflict between the logical mind and the emotional mind, the emotional mind wins every time. You didn't start off with these issues — you changed to create these safety protocols. So let's create more change.
Craig: You start with the feeling state. Whether you call it anxiety, overwhelm, trauma, tension, or pressure, that feeling state in the body is created by brain chemistry — adrenaline and cortisol, or joy created by oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine. That feeling state is created by mind having a thought, conscious or unconscious. So there's a direct connection between the feeling state and the thought creating it.
With the conscious mind, it's hard to figure out — but we don't use the conscious mind. You're only turning on anxiety or anger or fear in certain situations. Even someone who says they're chronically anxious isn't anxious all 16 waking hours of the day — there are points when they're not, maybe watching a favorite show, working out, or having lunch with a friend. Your subconscious mind knows when to turn it on and off. Someone with a fear of flying isn't anxious going to the store or driving a car — they're anxious getting to the airport. They know when to turn that anxiety on. So in a sense you do know what the problem is, because you're creating a reaction to something — even if the information causing that reaction isn't true or needed anymore. It may have been true and needed when you were a child, but it's outdated computer code.
Regression Story From Procrastination To Worth
Craig: I do most of my work over Zoom now — research has shown Zoom sessions work as well as in-person, because people feel relaxed and safe in their own homes. I was doing classes for a cancer support community, a series on pain control, healing acceleration, and immune system boosting. One older woman, about 70, had done two classes with me, and before the third, we were chit-chatting and she asked if hypnotherapy could work with procrastination. I said yes — that's a mindset issue, something in your subconscious mind feels unsafe about moving forward, so it puts on the brakes.
We set up a session for the next day. She showed up and said, "I know I told you I wanted to work on procrastination, but what I really want to work on is why I don't matter in life." She was a 70-year-old woman who thought she had no worth, no value. So that's what we worked with. Often the subconscious mind will say, we can work on the problem you came in for, but why not work on the real problem — that's what she wanted to do.
We did regression work — going back to the first time she ever felt that feeling of not being worthy. I did my countdown, five, four, three, two, one, and asked, where are you that's causing this feeling for the first time? She said, "I'm standing up in my crib, and my father is screaming at me because I won't stop crying." She would have been around 12 to 14 months old, and given she was in her 70s, this was likely the 1950s — a time when men weren't exactly taught how to deal with babies. Her mother was out of the house, the baby wouldn't stop crying, and her father, not knowing what to do, screamed louder than she did. Needing to justify why the person who was supposed to protect and love her was screaming at her, she concluded: I guess I don't matter. She held onto that instruction for some 70 years, until she decided it was time to let it go — and she did, in that session. I never saw her again.
Craig: That was three classroom sessions plus one solo session, plus practicing with recordings — three weeks leading up to it. But in terms of the actual work, I believe healing can happen in an instant, because oftentimes trauma is installed in an instant too. We've inherited the Freudian idea that it's going to take years to figure this stuff out.
Hypnosis History And Brainwave States
Craig: Freud was actually a hypnotherapist. This more modern era of hypnotherapy began in the early 1800s. Dr. James Esdaile was a surgeon practicing in India, where there were no fancy hospitals or anesthesia yet. He learned to put people into a deep trance state — it took about an hour — so deep it looked like a coma, and then he could perform amputations and remove tumors. He brought the technique back to England, where another doctor, wanting a word to describe this coma-like state, named it after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep.
Since then, this altered state has grown to encompass all sorts of states — the daydreamy alpha brainwave state when your mind drifts off during a boring meeting or class. The brain communicates through electrical pulses between cells, and how fast that happens determines your brainwave state: beta, alpha, theta, delta. In conversation, we're in beta, firing about 18 to 20 cycles per second. Drifting off daydreaming is alpha, about 12 cycles per second. Getting hazy and drowsy is theta, about six cycles per second. Falling into REM sleep is about half a cycle per second. If you get startled back to attention, you jump into high beta, around 30 cycles per second, from the stress response. In a boring math class you might alter your brainwave state three or four times in ten minutes — that's the natural trance state hypnotherapy works with. It's nothing unnatural — you do it driving home on autopilot, not remembering the last few minutes of the drive, because your subconscious mind knows the route.
In the late 1800s there were two schools of hypnotherapy in Vienna. Freud was at one — but he had a speech impediment, and hypnotherapy requires a lot of talking. He also wanted to delve into and analyze the "shadow self," so he developed what he called talk therapy — writing down what people said and telling them what their problem was. He said hypnotherapy wasn't "a poor man's therapy" because it would take hundreds of hours — and it wasn't working that well for him, so he'd prescribe cocaine. Talk therapy has done a lot of good over the last 100-plus years, but it uses the 5% conscious mind, whereas working with the subconscious creates deep healing more directly.
Generally I tell people we're looking at three or four sessions on average — not one, not eighty or ninety over two years. There's a wealth of research on Google Scholar — search hypnotherapy and anxiety, hypnosis and quit smoking, irritable bowel syndrome, overactive bladder — decades of research, especially the last 20 years, showing the power of the subconscious mind to create healing. I don't fix anybody as a hypnotherapist — hypnotherapy in and of itself doesn't fix you. You fix yourself, because who better to know you than you?
Skeptics, Stage Shows, And Consent
Craig: This isn't mind control or brainwashing. You know it works because you've hypnotized yourself many times in the past — maybe around anxiety, anger, or fear. You can't make somebody do something they don't want to do. Think about it this way: left-leaning people aren't influenced by right-leaning news, and right-leaning people aren't influenced by left-leaning news — yet each will be influenced by news aligned with their own beliefs. That's why commercials and political messaging work on certain people and not others. It doesn't work on everybody, but it works on a certain group.
If somebody says "I tried hypnosis and it didn't work, I'm one of those people who can't be hypnotized" — that's not really a thing. Alpha and theta brainwave states are a natural process of the brain. More than likely, you unconsciously didn't want to be hypnotized in that situation — maybe you didn't feel comfortable with the person or the setting. Academics love their research about how a percentage of people can't be hypnotized — but really, they just couldn't be hypnotized by that particular person in that particular moment, because you're hypnotized all the time — watching TV puts you in the alpha brainwave state.
Even those Las Vegas stage shows — everybody up there volunteered to be there. You can't make somebody do anything they don't want to do. Every person up on stage is an extrovert or exhibitionist who wanted to be there. That's why hypnotists always pick more people than they need — usually 12 to 14 — because two or three will get excused once the lights and cameras hit and their stress response kicks in. Professional hypnotists look for body language cues — a relaxed jaw, drooping facial muscles, an arm that stays raised versus one that drops — to identify who's actually receptive. They can't make anyone do anything they don't want to do — the same way I can't make somebody quit smoking if they don't actually want to quit. It's not a hundred percent guarantee. But if you want to do this work, you can do it — you've already done it, because you created the problem you want to get rid of. All we're going to do is reverse engineer it. That's the power of you — you can create healing.
Want to go deeper? Because at the end of the day, the most surprising part of this conversation might be this: you don't need to be "fixed" by anyone. The subconscious mind that once protected you as a child is the same mind that can release what no longer serves you as an adult — often faster than you'd expect. As Craig points out, decades of research on the mind-body connection are just a Google Scholar search away. Sometimes healing isn't about digging for years to understand why something happened. It's about finally giving your mind permission to let it go.
Curious to explore hypnotherapy? Search the Heallist Network for the right practitioner.
