Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

One of the simplest and most powerful techniques in the hypnotherapist’s repertoire is anchoring, in which you associate a touch with a mental state or mood. Anyone can use this; it doesn’t even require hypnosis, though it will certainly be more powerful with hypnosis. (My free Therapeutic Relaxation hypnosis recording includes anchoring, if you want to try it.)

The easiest form of the technique is this: Imagine yourself as vividly as possible into the mental state or mood you want – calm, confidence or whatever you like. Start with a memory of being in that state, and make the memory big and bright, loud and clear, firm and strong; see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt, if there are smells or tastes include them too, and turn up the power on the memory as if you were adjusting the controls on a TV or radio. You could use Michael Breen’s “nested images” technique to build it up even stronger.

When you have the state or mood as clear as possible, and are experiencing it very strongly, touch your thumb to one of your fingers – it can be any one, though most people pick the forefinger – and press firmly for a few seconds.

Fore Fingers and Thumbs by ThunderChild5

You need to practice this a few times, but once you have done so, that mood or state is available to you at any time simply by using the thumb-and-finger press. Try it.

Why does this work? It’s based on what is known as Hebb’s Law, usually paraphrased as “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” As Norman Doidge points out in his fascinating book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, Freud had actually stated it in 1888, almost 60 years before Hebb, as the “law of association by simultaneity”. For that matter, it can be looked at as Pavlov’s “classical conditioning“. A neutral stimulus that occurs at the same time as a stimulus that produces an automatic response eventually can produce that response by itself. The most famous experiment is that of Pavlov’s dogs, where he rang a bell and fed the dogs, and after a while was able to make the dogs salivate just by ringing the bell. The bell had nothing inherently to do with food, but because it had been repeatedly associated with food in time, the neurons (brain cells) that were set off by the bell became connected to those for the response to food. The food was an “unconditioned stimulus”, and the salivation an “unconditioned response”, because they actually had an inherent connection; the bell was a “conditioned stimulus” because it had no inherent connection to salivation but was now producing salivation by association.

In the case of anchoring, the unconditioned stimulus is the memory you summon up, which is already strongly linked to the mood or mental state (the unconditioned response). The conditioned stimulus is the touch of the finger and thumb. What you have done by practicing and repeatedly associating the two in time is to create a link – a mental pathway in your brain – between the two, so that the mood or state is now available to you on demand. You’ve reshaped your brain using attention, which is possible because your brain is “plastic” – capable of being changed in response to what it processes.

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