Posing the question ‘am I hypnotised or just pretending?’ here today with a view to helping understand genuine hypnotic responses…..
Imagine you are using self-hypnosis and experimenting with a simple hand-lifting suggestion. You focus on one hand. You imagine lightness spreading through the fingers. Perhaps you picture balloons tugging upwards, remember the strange buoyancy of your arm in water, or simply anticipate that the hand will begin to move.
Then it does.
One finger twitches. The wrist loosens. The hand begins to rise from your lap.
For a second, you are intrigued. Then suspicion arrives.
“I knew what was supposed to happen. I imagined it. I could have stopped it. Perhaps I lifted my hand deliberately. Maybe I was only pretending.”
This is one of the most common ways people dismiss a potentially useful hypnotic response. They expect hypnosis to feel as though an outside force has taken control. If they notice any intention, participation or choice, they assume the experience cannot be genuine.
That is an impossible standard. Hypnosis does not require you to vanish from your own mind. It does not depend upon surrendering authorship of your behaviour to a hypnotist, a recording or some mysterious entity called “the unconscious”. You remain a participant. Your attention, imagination, expectations, interpretation and willingness to engage all matter.
So, if you have wondered whether you are hypnotised or just pretending, the answer is rarely found by asking whether you played any part in the response. A better question is whether the suggestion changed how you experienced, anticipated or carried out that response.
The impossible test people apply to hypnosis
Popular portrayals have taught people to expect something rather dramatic. A “real” hypnotic response is supposed to arrive without their involvement, override conscious choice, become impossible to resist and leave them baffled about how it occurred. Ideally, there should be a hypnotist staring at them as though attempting to open a stubborn jar using only their eyebrows.
Stage hypnosis can reinforce this impression. A performance highlights the largest, quickest and most entertaining responses. It does not usually pause so that each participant can offer a careful report about effort, expectation, social pressure and the precise quality of their sense of agency. That would be scientifically interesting, but it would make for a very long evening.
Fiction goes further. It depicts hypnosis as sleep, possession, mind control or a switch that disables judgement. Older ‘trance’ language can add to the problem when metaphors such as “going under”, “bypassing the conscious mind” and “surrendering control” are treated as literal descriptions.
Contemporary scientific definitions are much less theatrical. The American Psychological Association Division 30 definition describes hypnosis in terms of focused attention, reduced peripheral awareness and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion (Elkins et al., 2015). Researchers continue to debate theories and definitions, but loss of control is not a required ingredient.
If your standard of success is “something made my body move while I contributed absolutely nothing”, most ordinary hypnotic experiences will fail the test before they have had a fair hearing. In my self-hypnosis trainings, I ask individuals to do all they can to make the responses to suggestions feel automatic and convolutional, but they ultimately create that very sense.
Pretending compliance participation and hypnotic response
Several different processes can produce behaviour that looks similar from the outside. A raised hand tells us that a hand rose. It does not, by itself, tell us what the person experienced or why the movement occurred.
Pretending means knowingly presenting an experience or response that is not genuinely occurring. A person says that their hand feels lighter when it does not, or lifts it solely to create the appearance that a suggestion has worked.
Behavioural compliance means carrying out an instruction, perhaps because of politeness, social pressure or a desire to cooperate, without a meaningful suggested change in experience. Someone hears “raise your hand” and raises it in the ordinary deliberate way.
Active participation means honestly using attention, imagination, expectation and an appropriate mental strategy. The person is not waiting passively. They are engaging with the suggestion to discover what develops.
Hypnotic responding involves a suggestion-related change in experience or behaviour. The change might concern sensation, perception, emotion, thought, memory, movement or the subjective quality of control. A movement may feel easier, more compelling, less effortful or more self-developing than an ordinary voluntary action.
These categories are useful, but lived experience will not always fit them into tidy separate boxes. A person may begin by deliberately imagining lightness, notice a growing urge to move and then experience the movement as increasingly automatic. Another may feel a vivid sensation without any visible movement. Someone else may lift their hand chiefly because they think that is expected.
This is why responsible hypnosis cannot be judged solely by outward performance. Behaviour matters, but so does the person’s report of what happened.
Deliberate involvement does not make an experience false
Consider what happens when you read a novel. You deliberately look at the words, interpret the sentences and imagine the events. Yet amusement, tension or sadness may develop quite genuinely. Your participation does not make the emotion fraudulent.
An actor intentionally enters a scene and can experience real emotion. An athlete deliberately rehearses a movement and that imagery may influence later performance. You can choose to think about biting into a sharp lemon and notice saliva gathering in your mouth. You can intentionally slow your breathing and experience a change in arousal.
In each case, deliberate action creates conditions in which further effects can occur. We do not dismiss the effects because the person helped to produce them.
Hypnosis is similar. A suggestion is not normally a command issued to an inert nervous system. It is an invitation to organise attention, expectation, imagination and action in a particular way. How you interpret and implement that invitation affects the result.
My own research with Dr Ben Parris has repeatedly stressed the role of the self in hypnosis. Treating people as active participants gives a more accurate and more useful account of what they bring to the process (Eason & Parris, 2023). Our earlier systematic review and meta-analysis also found encouraging evidence for clinical applications of self-hypnosis, while noting substantial variation in methods and study quality (Eason & Parris, 2019). Self-hypnosis would make little sense as a learnable procedure if any deliberate involvement automatically disqualified it.
What automaticity means in hypnosis
The word automatic can create another all-or-nothing test. People assume a response must be either consciously manufactured or completely involuntary. Human action is rarely that neat.
In everyday life, many intentional actions unfold without conscious supervision of every component. You decide to walk across a room, but you do not usually specify the angle of each joint. A familiar phrase arrives while you are speaking. A rehearsed sequence becomes fluent. Attention returns repeatedly to an unfinished concern without being summoned each time.
In hypnosis, automaticity can mean that a response develops or continues without the person consciously directing every part of it. A hand may lift with less deliberate effort. A sensation may become more compelling. An imagined movement may acquire momentum. A word may appear unexpectedly. The person may know that they are involved while also feeling surprised by the way the response unfolds.
Research on hypnosis often treats alterations in the sense of agency as important. The Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS as we refer to it when working with our research participants) for example, distinguishes aspects of involuntariness and effortlessness, and these dimensions relate to hypnotic responsiveness (Polito et al., 2013). Experimental work has also found measurable changes associated with suggested involuntariness, including changes in intentional binding, a laboratory measure connected with the experienced relationship between an action and its outcome (Lush et al., 2017).
None of this means that hypnosis transfers literal control to someone else. It means that the experience of authorship can change. The action may remain intentional at one level while feeling less consciously authored at another. Different theories explain this in different ways, and no single subjective feeling can settle the theoretical debate (Martin & Pacherie, 2019).
Automaticity is better regarded as a continuum. At one end, you deliberately perform a movement in the familiar way. Further along, you set the response in motion and allow it to develop. Further still, the response may feel notably effortless or surprising. You may be encouraged (as within my own training and direction) to imagine the responses happening by themselves to create an illusion of such. Hypnosis does not require everyone to reach the far end of that continuum.
The shifting experience of agency
Agency is the ordinary sense that “I am the one doing this”. Under suggestion, that experience may shift in subtle ways:
I am doing this.
I am allowing this to happen.
It seems to be developing by itself.
I could intervene, but I am not directing each moment.
I expected something, but the result still surprised me.
The suggestion seemed to produce the response.
These descriptions are subjective, but subjectivity is not irrelevant when the phenomenon under examination includes changes in experience. Researchers therefore use both observable responses and self-report measures rather than assuming that behaviour alone tells the whole story.
There is no need to exaggerate. A tiny shift in effort is not proof that an invisible force has seized your arm. Equally, the fact that muscles produced the movement does not expose hypnosis as fake. Of course muscles moved the hand. The psychological question concerns how suggestion influenced the organisation and experience of that movement.
But I could have stopped it
The ability to stop a response does not show that nothing hypnotic occurred.
You can experience an urge without being compelled. You can become absorbed in a film while retaining the ability to look away. A practised habit can unfold automatically even though you can interrupt it. A daydream can carry your attention while leaving you free to return to the room.
Hypnotic effects can operate in much the same territory. Retaining control is desirable, especially in therapeutic work. A person does not need to become powerless for a suggestion to influence sensation, expectation, emotion or action.
If you consider stopping a suggested response, ask more precise questions. Did stopping require a definite change of intention? Had the response become easier to continue than it had been to initiate? Did the suggestion alter the amount of effort involved? Did the movement feel different from simply deciding to lift your hand? Was there an urge, anticipation or momentum that had not been present before?
“I could stop it” and “the suggestion changed nothing” are not the same statement.
Social influence and demand characteristics
There is, however, a danger in becoming so keen to defend hypnosis that every cooperative action gets counted as evidence. Hypnosis occurs in a social context. People infer what is expected from the wording and tone of a suggestion, previous demonstrations, the reactions of other participants and cultural stories about hypnosis.
Researchers use the term demand characteristics for cues that help participants work out what a study or situation appears to require. Expectations can shape both behaviour and reports. A wish to be helpful, a reluctance to disappoint or simple uncertainty about the task may also influence what someone does. Demand characteristics are not unique to hypnosis; they present a wider challenge across behavioural research (McCambridge et al., 2012).
Acknowledging these influences does not mean that all hypnotic responses are fake. Social context, expectations and genuine experiential change can operate together. The sensible response is to investigate them, not to choose between “pure hypnosis” and “mere compliance” before listening to the participant.
Practitioners should reduce performance pressure. They should invite accurate reports, including reports of no change. “What did you notice?” is usually more informative than “Your hand felt completely weightless, didn’t it?” A client should never need to perform success for the therapist.
Why people sometimes pretend
People may pretend during hypnosis, but the reasons are often ordinary rather than deceitful. They may feel embarrassed, want the exercise to succeed, assume cooperation means acting out the instruction, fear appearing resistant or hope to please a practitioner. In a group or on a stage, the pressure to keep things moving can be powerful.
There is also a legitimate strategy sometimes called “acting as if”. A person may temporarily behave as if a suggested quality were developing so that they can explore the associated imagery, posture or expectation. Used openly, this can help someone discover a more effective route into an experience.
The distinction is honesty. Exploring “as if” is not the same as falsely claiming that a sensation or change has occurred. If you deliberately lift your hand as an experiment, say so. You can then notice whether the movement begins to feel different as you continue. Accurate reporting produces useful information; a convincing performance does not necessarily do so.
The REAL framework for honest evaluation
I use the word REAL as a simple teaching framework. It is not a validated scientific scale, and I do not present it as one. It is a practical reminder for examining a response without either inflating or dismissing it.
R means report what you actually experienced. Describe the movement, sensation, imagery, thought or emotion as accurately as you can. “My index finger moved slightly” is better evidence than “It worked brilliantly” or “Nothing happened” when either summary hides the details.
E means examine differences in sensation effort and expectation. Compare the response with ordinary deliberate action. Did it require less effort? Did anticipation build? Did the imagined event become more compelling?
A means allow participation without demanding total involuntariness. Use the strategy sincerely. Do not fake the outcome, but do not remain rigid and wait for hypnosis to overpower you.
L means learn which strategies strengthen a useful response. Treat the result as feedback. Change the wording, imagery, pace or focus of attention and try again.
This approach replaces a crude pass-or-fail verdict with careful observation. That is more consistent with both good self-hypnosis practice and good clinical work.
Questions that reveal more than did it work
After an exercise, ask yourself:
What did I deliberately do?
What did the suggestion add?
Did the experience change as time passed?
Was the response different from ordinary movement or imagination?
How much effort did it require?
Did anything surprise me?
Was there an urge, expectation or sense of momentum?
Did sensation or meaning change?
Could I stop, and what happened when I considered stopping?
Did the exercise contribute to the outcome I wanted?
The final question matters. Hypnosis is frequently reduced to demonstrations because they are visible and entertaining. Therapeutic work has a more important purpose.
Try a deliberate movement and suggested movement experiment
You can explore the difference between ordinary action and suggestion-mediated action with one finger. Sit comfortably and place one hand on your thigh or a table. Keep the experiment safe and stop if you experience discomfort.
First, lift your index finger deliberately. Decide to raise it, contract the relevant muscles and put it back down. Repeat this two or three times. Notice the familiar sense of intention, effort and control.
Now let the hand rest. Focus on the same finger without deliberately lifting it. Imagine a gentle upward pull. You might picture a thread attached to the fingernail, silently repeat the word “lighter”, anticipate the first millimetre of movement or remember how a hand feels when buoyed by water. Give the idea time to develop.
Do not strain to prevent movement, and do not consciously perform the movement merely to achieve a result. Your job is to engage with the suggestion and observe. Tiny muscular adjustments may occur. The finger may rise, twitch, feel lighter, develop an urge to move or remain still. Each is a reportable outcome.
If movement develops, compare it with the deliberate version. Did it feel slower, easier or less precisely initiated? Did you notice a point at which anticipation became movement? Did it seem to gather momentum? Were you surprised by the timing?
Repeat the experiment on different days and vary one feature at a time:
Imagine an upward pull.
Repeat words such as “light” or “rising”.
Concentrate on expecting movement rather than picturing it.
Recall buoyancy or weightlessness.
Attend closely to the smallest muscular adjustments.
Use a personally meaningful metaphor.
This is not a supernatural test. Ideomotor movement involves the body’s ordinary motor systems. The interesting issue is whether a suggestion alters how action develops and how you experience it. A small response can be informative. No response is also information.
What non-response does and does not mean
If your finger remains exactly where it is, you have not proved that you cannot be hypnotised. You have discovered that this suggestion, in these conditions, using this strategy, did not produce an observable movement.
Perhaps the imagery did not suit you. Perhaps you misunderstood the instruction, divided your attention, monitored yourself too closely or found the demonstration pointless. Another wording or another kind of suggestion may produce a different result. Some people find sensory or cognitive suggestions easier than motor responses. People also differ meaningfully in hypnotic responsiveness, and standardised research measures show that responses vary across suggestions and individuals (Kihlstrom, 2015).
Non-response does not justify telling someone that they resisted, failed, lacked imagination or “did not really want it”. Those explanations can protect the practitioner’s ego at the client’s expense. A competent practitioner treats the response as data, explores the strategy used and adapts the intervention.
Formal hypnotisability research uses standardised inductions, suggestions and scoring procedures. Measures may combine observed behaviour with subjective reports, and some research examines experienced involuntariness or effortlessness. A single hand-lifting exercise from an article or social-media video is not a validated assessment of your general hypnotic ability.
Hypnosis is not a talent show
A dramatic arm levitation may be interesting, but it is not the purpose of therapeutic hypnosis. Someone who never experiences a spectacular motor response may still use self-hypnosis to support pain management, emotional regulation, behavioural rehearsal, sleep routines, confidence, exercise motivation, stress management or habit change.
Clinical outcomes should be assessed on their own terms. Did pain intensity or unpleasantness change? Did the person practise the planned behaviour? Did pre-sleep arousal reduce? Did they cope more effectively with a stressful situation? These questions matter more than whether a hand floated elegantly towards the ceiling.
Evidence reviews suggest that hypnosis can improve a range of mental and physical health outcomes, though effect sizes, methods and the certainty of evidence differ across conditions (Rosendahl et al., 2024). My systematic review with Ben Parris reached a similarly measured conclusion about self-hypnosis: the findings were promising, but the research base was heterogeneous and needed stronger studies (Eason & Parris, 2019). Responsible evidence-based practice allows room for both usefulness and uncertainty.
What this means when using hypnosis recordings
A recording cannot watch your response and adjust its language in real time, so your active role becomes especially important.
Follow the suggestion rather than waiting for the audio to seize control. Interpret the words, imagine in whatever way works for you, and allow degrees of change. Do not deliberately fake a result, but do not hold yourself rigidly against responding either. If visual imagery is not your strength, use sensation, sound, inner speech, memory, spatial awareness or simple conceptual expectation.
Avoid checking every few seconds to determine whether you are “deep enough”. Constant surveillance competes with involvement. Notice what occurs, then evaluate the intended outcome over repeated practice. A lack of response is feedback about the current method, not a verdict on your mind.
My hypnosis audio programmes are designed for this kind of active participation. You do not need to lie there waiting for a recording to take you over. Listen, interpret, imagine, respond and adapt the suggestions in ways that help you pursue the intended outcome.
What practitioners need to understand
Professional hypnotherapy requires more than producing impressive-looking behaviour. Practitioners need to understand suggestion, agency, expectation, social influence and subjective experience.
That means asking neutral questions and accepting honest reports of no change. It means distinguishing what a client did from what they experienced while doing it. It means exploring the mental strategy they used, then adapting the suggestion intelligently. It also means avoiding claims that automaticity amounts to a transfer of control.
A practitioner who pressures clients to demonstrate success corrupts the feedback needed for good therapy. Collaboration produces better information. The therapist offers a structure and relevant suggestions; the client reports, tests and refines the response.
This is central to the way I teach hypnotherapy. My hypnotherapy practitioner diploma trains students to recognise genuine responses, gather useful feedback and adapt interventions instead of treating clients like performers in a hypnosis display.
You do not have to disappear from the process
If you ask, “Am I hypnotised or just pretending?”, begin with honesty rather than drama.
Did you knowingly manufacture a performance and claim an experience you did not have? That is pretending. Did you merely obey an instruction in the ordinary way because you felt expected to do so? That may be compliance. Did you engage with a suggestion and notice a change in sensation, effort, expectation, emotion, perception or the quality of control? That deserves closer attention, even if you retained choice throughout.
You do not prove that hypnosis is genuine by disappearing from the process. You explore it by participating honestly and noticing whether suggestion changes what you experience, anticipate, feel or do.
If you want to develop that ability systematically, my book The Science of Self-Hypnosis explains how to learn and apply self-hypnosis without the myths about surrendering control. You can also explore my self-hypnosis teaching and audio programmes, all of which place the participant where they belong: inside the process, not absent from it.
References
Eason, A. D., & Parris, B. A. (2019). Clinical applications of self-hypnosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 6(3), 262–278. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000173
Eason, A. D., & Parris, B. A. (2023). The importance of highlighting the role of the self in hypnotherapy and hypnosis. Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 53, 101810. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctcp.2023.101810
Elkins, G. R., Barabasz, A. F., Council, J. R., & Spiegel, D. (2015). Advancing research and practice: The revised APA Division 30 definition of hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 63(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2014.961870
Kihlstrom, J. F. (2015). Patterns of hypnotic response, revisited. Consciousness and Cognition, 38, 99–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.11.001
Lush, P., Caspar, E. A., Cleeremans, A., Haggard, P., Magalhães De Saldanha da Gama, P. A., & Dienes, Z. (2017). The power of suggestion: Posthypnotically induced changes in the temporal binding of intentional action outcomes. Psychological Science, 28(5), 661–669. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616687015
Martin, J.-R., & Pacherie, E. (2019). Alterations of agency in hypnosis: A new predictive coding model. Psychological Review, 126(1), 133–152. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000134
McCambridge, J., de Bruin, M., & Witton, J. (2012). The effects of demand characteristics on research participant behaviours in non-laboratory settings: A systematic review. PLoS ONE, 7(6), e39116. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039116
Polito, V., Barnier, A. J., & Woody, E. Z. (2013). Developing the Sense of Agency Rating Scale (SOARS): An empirical measure of agency disruption in hypnosis. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(3), 684–696. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.04.003
Rosendahl, J., Alldredge, C. T., & Haddenhorst, A. (2024). Meta-analytic evidence on the efficacy of hypnosis for mental and somatic health issues: A 20-year perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1330238. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1330238
