The expression mind over matter refers to our mind’s ability to overcome a challenging situation. Giving up smoking, for example, is an ongoing mental battle between wanting a cigarette and equally wanting to resist the craving. The mind has the power to relieve those intense cravings by arming you with the message that you in fact don’t really want a cigarette, and that you’re so much happier without one.

Your intense focus and concentration on those positive thoughts is in itself a degree of hypnosis. You’re utilizing the power of your mind to overcome a challenging situation.

Therein lays the basic principle of self-hypnosis: utilizing the most powerful tool at your disposal, your mind, to help you through challenging situations which you’re unable to overcome through will alone. Whether it be emotional problems, or physical pain of some kind, the power of the unconscious mind can alleviate your conscious awareness of that emotion or pain. But for that to happen, you first need to get in touch with your unconscious mind. That is what self hypnosis can do. It can help you get in touch with your unconscious mind and benefit from its power.

We do it daily. We all learn and benefit from our unconscious mind without being aware of it. We may spend hours so completely focused on a specific thing that we literally don’t recall having a conscious thought throughout that period of time. All this while, our unconscious mind is working for us and we don’t even realize it.

We often step away from a mental debate, which we are unable to resolve no matter how hard we think about it. We choose to “sleep on it” and see how we feel about it in the morning. Usually we feel enlightened the next morning, with a new perspective on whatever was causing us such mental turmoil. What that powerful unconscious mind of ours has done is allowed us to connect with our deepest inner feelings about something, and to tap into our emotions on a conscious level, where we can act on it.

So wouldn’t it nice to be able to call upon that power at will, whenever we want to, and fully take advantage of this natural state of self-reliance? Self hypnosis is the way to do that. You’re already doing it. Your unconscious mind is yours to learn from. Choosing to subscribe to self hypnosis is just taking an already powerful tool to the next level, and getting the most benefit you possibly can out if it.