On a cool winter afternoon in 2010, Sunny strolled into a regal London building with the distinct purpose of breaking his three-decade gambling addiction. He’d tried other remedies, such as the 12-step programme and Gamblers’ Anonymous. All were unsuccessful.
This time, as something of a last resort, he was booked in to try hypnosis.
“I was very sceptical, but I was also desperate,” says Sunny, who asked us not to use his full name. “I was the classic addict — I would beg, borrow and steal.”
Things were getting so serious he had contemplated suicide, with his addiction worsening in his 40s after discovering online casinos. His second wife, a banker, discovered his outgoings and urged him to seek help, threatening to leave if he didn’t.
Something happened inside the hypnosis room, Sunny recalled. “I came out and it left me [with] a feeling of ‘I don’t even know what it’s like to gamble’.
“The only way I can describe it is if somebody asked you ‘what’s it like to take heroin?’, you’d say, ‘I’d have no idea’.” He simply couldn’t recall the emotions that once compelled him to gamble.
Now in his late 50s, Sunny has not been inside a casino since. Whether that was entirely down to the hypnotherapy, he can’t say for sure (he had also undergone counselling during this period). Still, his recovery made him a compelling advocate of hypnosis in treating one of the world’s most insidious money problems.
While more readily associated with problems such as sleeplessness, nicotine addictions, or extreme phobias, legions of hypnotherapists around the world today privately offer their services for a range of financial disorders, addictions and unhealthy behaviours. This includes compulsive gambling and trading, overspending, dysmorphic saving and anxiety, even workaholism. Several therapists approached for this article even said they used hypnotherapy to boost clients’ financial stability, by helping them visualise success and “abundance”.
The question is, can it really work?
Clinical hypnotherapists are at pains to differentiate what they practice from the entertainment tricks often seen on television. The endorsement of hypnosis by maverick Hollywood celebrities has done little to aid its reputation; nor has its inclusion on “spiritual healing” menus at five-star hotels, sitting adjacent to crystal readings and chakra realignments.
“The big problem is it’s consistently misrepresented,” says King’s College London’s Devin Terhune, a cognitive neuroscientist who has investigated hypnosis for more than two decades. “Public perception is pretty terrible.”
Yet the tide may be turning. A small, but growing, army of respected doctors, led by Stanford University psychiatrist Dr David Spiegel, argue that hypnosis has been unfairly dismissed in the medical field. Far from being a pseudoscience, these doctors say it is a valuable tool for multiple entrenched psychopathologies. Clinical trials in recent decades have proven so compelling that hypnosis is now widely used to relieve pain in hospitals in France and the Netherlands.
While the application of clinical hypnosis to combat money issues has not been systematically tested, preliminary evidence from a 2014 study focused on gambling addicts looked promising. In that trial, hypnosis proved at least as effective as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in breaking gamblers’ addiction. The participants did not relapse over six months in more than 50 per cent of cases.
“You could speculate that, if they are motivated, it could be effective for gamblers,” says Terhune.
Anecdotally, hypnotherapist Aaron Surtees, who treated Sunny 15 years ago, says that in the past year alone his clinic has seen more than 170 patients for gambling. He puts their (self-reported) success rate at 94 per cent. Dr Kathleen Long, a retired Scottish GP who began delivering clinical hypnosis in the 1980s, says she has also treated several gamblers with success.
Gambling charities also seem open to its potential. Anna Hargrave, deputy chief executive at UK support group GambleAware, told the FT: “Hypnosis . . . is a relatively new approach for treating gambling harm and we look forward to seeing the results. We welcome focus on addressing gambling harm because it is a serious public health issue which can affect anyone.”
In theory, hypnosis success for any pathology depends on a person’s “hypnotisability”, which is shown to follow a normal bell curve distribution. About 20 per cent of the population is very hypnotisable, another 20 per cent feel very little, and everyone else sits somewhere in the middle (Terhune says has never been successfully hypnotised. “I’m very boring,” he offers).
But even people with an “average” hypnotisable level can see an impact if they are highly motivated, Terhune explains.
Technically speaking, hypnosis is when a patient enters “a state of consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness”, according to the American Psychological Association. It feels like deep relaxation, akin to meditation. This allows for an altered level of susceptibility, which hypnotherapists can then exploit through a series of prompts.
To get there, hypnotherapist Surtees employs a particular strategy.
“We’ll just start talking . . . I’ll recline them on the chair, and have them close their eyes. And then I’ll put headphones on them and I’ll talk into a microphone,” he says, arguing the brain can absorb information better through a direct earpiece. It is not quite the “look into my eyes” cliché, but a similar idea of falling under the hypnotist’s spell, he says.
Sunny recalls other specifics. “I remember him telling me I was in an elevator. He asked me things like who my idol would be if I stopped gambling,” says Sunny. He said his father came to mind.
Sessions generally last about 30 minutes before patients are “woken” (and in Surtees’ case, are charged £400 per session). Some specialist apps can also be used for follow-up treatment.
Fellow hypnotist Chris Mead says he works on the basis that unhealthy behaviours — money-related or otherwise — are rooted in traumas hiding in the subconscious, which are seeking distraction or dopamine hits. He therefore spends time trying to “understand what people’s drivers are” for these habits.
He also doesn’t get people to relax in the traditional way. One method he uses is “conversational hypnosis”, where the person doesn’t necessarily know they’re being hypnotised. “You’re making shifts subtly in their reality,” he says.
Other hypnotherapists employ methods such as playing relaxing music, or reading a specific script to clients. There seems to be no standardised formula, but rather certain schools of thought that practitioners follow.
Hypnosis is not a regulated practice in most of the world and medically it still lies on the fringes. Establishing best practices among this booming multibillion-dollar business can therefore be messy.
Dr Long advises that for a clinical issue such as addiction, patients should seek a clinical hypnotherapist — someone with a medical or intensive psychology background. She is part of the European Hypnosis Society, which has a membership base of nearly 15,000 accredited hypnotherapists.
Hypnotherapist Pete Luce warns that it is a “saturated market”, and there are “far too many sub-competent” practitioners among the UK’s roughly 3,000-strong pool.
“I’ve treated people who have seen other hypnotherapists but have definitely never been ‘under’. It’s not just somebody telling you to close your eyes and then yapping at you from a script,” he says.
He advises people to look for practitioners who have trained for more than a year (some “diplomas” require just a three-week course, he says), and whose practice has been operating for at least a decade. He also suggests clients should see definitive results within three sessions, “at a conservative reach”, and to switch if they do not.
Most hypnotherapists we spoke to believe that it works best not as a solitary treatment, but alongside other interventions like CBT. Some also recommend only doing sessions in person rather than via Zoom.
At the very least, therapists should be registered with an organisation accredited by the Professional Standards Authority, which oversees the regulation of healthcare professionals.
As with other mental health practitioners, quality clearly varies. But done right, hypnosis offers some new hope to those struggling with money disorders. While it is unlikely to be a miracle treatment, Terhune says, clinical hypnosis in particular has proven extremely helpful for some.
“It’s not the best [treatment],” he adds. “But it’s far from the worst.”
