Can Everyone Be Hypnotized?
A number gets quoted a great deal. It is worth knowing where it came from.
Somewhere in your reading you have probably met a figure, usually around twenty percent, for the share of people who simply cannot be hypnotized.
It gets used confidently by both sides. Sceptics reach for it to suggest hypnosis only works on the suggestible. Some hypnotists reach for it to explain away the clients it did not work for, which is a tidier story than the alternative.
It is worth knowing where that number actually comes from, and not only because you may be wondering whether you are in it. The answer turns out to be a small education in how to read every other claim in this field, including the ones on this website.
So Where Does the Number Come From?
Researchers measure something they call hypnotic responsiveness, and they measure it with a standardized scale. A person is read a fixed induction and then given a set list of suggestions, the same ones in the same order, usually in a laboratory or a lecture hall full of strangers. Their responses are scored. The scores spread across a range. Some people score high, some low, most sit in the middle.
That is a real measurement of a real thing and there is no point pretending otherwise. People do vary in how readily they respond to a script read out by somebody they have never met.
And What Does It Not Measure?
Whether you, working with a particular person, on something you chose and paid for, across several sessions, will get anything useful out of it.
Those are two different questions, and only the second one is any of your business. Scoring low on a fixed list of laboratory suggestions is not the same as being unable to use hypnosis, any more than a poor score on a standardized reading test means you cannot lose an evening in a novel you picked yourself.
It is also worth saying plainly that the state itself is not exotic. You move in and out of absorbed, inwardly focused attention all day. The familiar drive you do not remember making. The hour that vanished into a book. Arriving at the bottom of the stairs with no memory of the steps. The capacity is entirely ordinary. What varies is the conditions under which any particular person settles into it, and a laboratory is not most people’s conditions.
Why Does Almost Every Hypnosis Study Have This Problem?
Because that gap, between what a study can measure and what happens in a room, runs through nearly all of it. Not through conspiracy and not through incompetence. It is simply the cost of doing research properly, and it shows up four ways.
Everyone gets the same script. A trial has to standardize what it is testing or it is not testing one thing. So the session is written in advance and delivered identically to every participant, which is close to the opposite of practice, where most of the skill is in adjusting to the person in front of you.
Almost nobody gets a full course. Trials are expensive, so most test one or two sessions. Very few follow a person through the number a private client would actually have, and almost none include support afterward.
Participants are assigned rather than choosing. In a trial people are allocated at random. In life, somebody decided they wanted this, picked the practitioner and paid for it. Those are different populations, and motivation is not a small variable in changing behaviour.
Nobody agrees what the thing is. There is no single agreed protocol called hypnosis across these studies. Reviewers in several fields have reported that the interventions varied so widely they could not sensibly be combined into one analysis.
Does That Mean the Research Is Stacked Against Hypnosis?
No, and this is the part usually left out, including by hypnotists making exactly this argument.
Those same limitations mean the flattering studies cannot be trusted either. A small trial with no real control group, run by people who believe in the method, measuring results a few weeks later by asking participants how they got on, will regularly produce a spectacular number. That number is not evidence of much. It is where the ninety and ninety-six percent success rates on hypnosis websites come from, and it is why you will find them on so many websites and in so few journals.
This site used to run some of them. They came down because the obvious question about where they came from had no good answer.
So the honest position is not that the research is rigged. It is that it is thin in both directions, and anybody quoting a precise success rate is telling you more about their marketing than about your chances.
What Does the Evidence Actually Show?
Remarkably consistent across everything hypnosis gets used for: encouraging signals, weak trials, and reviewers asking for better studies.
For smoking, the most rigorous assessment is a Cochrane review from 2019 covering 14 trials and 1,926 people. It concluded there is insufficient evidence to determine whether hypnosis is more effective than other behavioural support or than quitting unassisted, and that if a benefit is present it is small at most. It rated the certainty of the evidence low to very low, and judged only one of the fourteen trials at low risk of bias.
Barnes, J., McRobbie, H., Dong, C. Y., Walker, N., and Hartmann-Boyce, J. (2019). Hypnotherapy for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
For weight, two research teams analysed overlapping data in 1996 and reached different conclusions in the same issue of the same journal. One reported a substantial benefit from adding hypnosis to behavioural treatment. The other reappraised the same material and concluded it produces, in their words, at most a small enhancement of treatment outcome.
Kirsch, I. (1996). Hypnotic enhancement of cognitive-behavioral weight loss treatments, another meta-reanalysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(3), 517 to 519.
Allison, D. B., and Faith, M. S. (1996). Hypnosis as an adjunct to cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy for obesity, a meta-analytic reappraisal. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(3), 513 to 516.
For pain, the signal is the most encouraging, and it is worth being precise about that too. A scoping review of 13 systematic reviews, covering 77 clinical trials, found hypnosis may be effective across a range of clinical pain conditions, that in no case was it found to be worse than a control condition, and that the efficacy is, in their words, yet to be verified in high-quality trials. All thirteen reviews called for better studies.
There is an honest irony buried in that last one. The area with the most promising evidence is also the one that is squarely medical territory, where the first conversation belongs with a physician and not with a hypnotist.
So How Do You Judge Any of This?
When somebody quotes you a number, three questions settle it quickly. Where did it come from. Who checked it. And does the study actually say what the website says it says.
That third one catches more than you would expect. Citations get copied between hypnosis sites for years without anybody opening the paper, and every so often you find a claim attributed to the very study that argued against it.
Better still, stop asking about success rates altogether. Ask what the work involves, how many sessions, what happens if it does not take the first time, and what the person will tell you they cannot help with. That last answer is the most informative thing you will hear all day. Anybody who says they can help with everything has simply never thought about where their limits are.
And Can Everyone Be Hypnotized?
The honest answer is that people vary, that the scales measuring it are measuring something narrower than the question you are really asking, and that nobody can tell you in advance how you personally will find it.
The more useful answer is the one at the top of this page. You already do this. On the drive home, in the book, at the bottom of the stairs. Whatever a laboratory scale says about how you respond to a stranger reading from a card, the capacity itself is not in question. It is yours and you use it daily.
The only part that is new is doing it on purpose, with somebody who knows the way.
District Hypnosis works with everyday stress, habits, motivation and personal goals in Washington DC. 202-853-8400.
The research referenced above is provided for information and is not a claim about what results any individual will get. District Hypnosis provides hypnosis for everyday stress, habits, motivation and personal goals, and does not diagnose, treat, cure or manage any medical or psychological condition. Hypnosis as offered here is not medical care, is not psychological care, and is not a substitute for either, and nothing on this page is medical or psychological advice. Work involving a diagnosed or suspected medical or psychological condition requires a written referral from a licensed provider. Individual results vary.