Why does depression make everything feel impossible?
Depression makes you think everything is going to be pointless, so it’s very difficult to do anything. It’s also strangely exhausting - because even if you’re not doing very much you still feel tired. Sleep doesn’t help, and you feel emotionally numb and disconnected, and mentally foggy, and you can’t remember the last time you enjoyed anything, you’re just going through the motions. Depression can develop from long-term unemployment or losing a job that gave you purpose, or losing a loved one, or a relationship, or an illness that prevents you from pursuing meaning and satisfaction in your life. If your environment no longer rewards your efforts, everything can seem futile. A common response in any of these situations is to withdraw — stay in bed, avoid social calls, isolate oneself — which provides short-term relief from the stress of facing the world, and gives you space to grieve for your emotional loss, but it also results in missing out on potentially positive experiences, which can deepen the depressive state and lead to further inactivity. It can become a downward spiral: grieving requires withdrawal, withdrawal leads to isolation, isolation means less positive input, and less positive input creates a more depressing environment.
Depression can also develop through “learned helplessness” — Martin Seligman’s research shows that repeated exposure to situations you couldn’t control, like a toxic workplace or abusive relationship, or chronic stress, teaches your subconscious that your actions have no power. Even when circumstances change and you can take action to improve your life, you remain passive because your subconscious no longer believes you have control over outcomes. For some people, this helplessness developed through childhood environments that normalized hopelessness as a response, or a trauma that installed “I have no power” as a core belief. The grieving process for these emotional losses can often become stuck in a loop of denial, anger, and depression - because it’s hard to move into acceptance. In some individuals, depression develops from a heightened sensitivity to rejection, loss, failure, or criticism — causing the person to shut down socially, leading to the isolation downward spiral. All of these behavioral patterns operate at the subconscious level, which controls ninety percent of your behavior, whereas your conscious has only ten percent control, so you can’t force yourself to get over it. Depression also involves physiological factors for some people, and professional medical evaluation is important for comprehensive assessment.
How does Andrew’s Depression Hypnotherapy method work?
My method works by addressing the emotional and psychological behavior patterns consistent with depression at the subconscious level, through transformative hypnotherapy sessions, with personalized affirmations and soundtracks for daily motivation between sessions - while addressing situational conditions practically, providing counseling for toxic relationships or work environments, or recommending supportive therapy such as solar lamps for low light conditions. There is a strong practical component of engaging in exercise and activities that you find rewarding, to give you “small wins” every day, while using affirmations for the subconscious level to provide emotional healing and reasons to re-engage with the world. I use dream therapy throughout, to understand your emotional trauma and grief process so that I can address concerns more accurately in your affirmations. During the treatment your dreams reflect subconscious changes in strength, empowerment and confidence. Your affirmations help you to recover self-esteem and self-worth, and guide your grieving process through the bargaining stage. Affirmations are the primary mechanism that motivates your situational changes and helps you let go of what is no longer serving you. If you’re currently taking medication, hypnotherapy addresses behavioral roots while you continue medical management with your doctor.
In your sessions, I assist you in creating affirmations that remind you of what you enjoy, and reignite your passion for doing what you love, giving back your agency and the belief that your actions do matter. These develop into clear instructions to help you arrive where you want to be in life, in the shortest possible time and with the least amount of resistance. They provide tremendous motivation, reminding you of your personal reasons to take action and engage in life, and this begins with establishing the terms under which you allow yourself to succeed and thrive. Your first affirmations are like your own personal constitution - almost a legal document that you draw up between your conscious and subconscious mind, containing your specific rules for success and happiness. Most people are slightly horrified when they do this because they realize how far their life is from what they want, but the first breakthrough in finding your way back to life is knowing what you want life to be. Then it’s one step at a time, your affirmations keeping you on track. Through neuroplasticity, affirmations rewire your neural pathways — old helplessness patterns weaken from disuse, and new engagement patterns strengthen through repetition.
What happens during a Depression Hypnotherapy treatment?
Your first session is two hours to give us time for a thorough discussion and hypnosis. We spend about ninety minutes in conversation, talking about your situation, self-esteem, past trauma, feelings of emotional loss, and acknowledging which stages of grief you identify with. We discuss your philosophy about life’s purpose, what gives you hope, what your life would be like with your energy restored, and what you’ve always enjoyed doing. We agree on an activity that you can re-engage with that brings you joy and purpose, and explore options for exercise. We talk about your career and how that aligns with your purpose, and explore practical solutions to situational stress or toxic environments. As we are talking I draft your hypnosis script and ideas for your core affirmations, which we refine so that they sound believable to you. These affirmations will develop and become more powerful and meaningful as you progress through the treatment.
Hypnosis takes twenty to thirty minutes. You’re in your own comfortable space at home, listening to my voice and psychoacoustic soundtrack streaming through your headphones, and video allows me to adjust to your reactions. You can communicate with me but most people don’t feel the need to. I guide you into a daydream in which you connect with your inner child, for emotional healing and building self-value, using your core affirmations. Then I guide you on, through scenarios in which you rehearse the solutions we discussed to stress environments, where you resolve a toxic situation and leave it behind. We then return to the inner child work, alternating between these two daydreams, and building trust between your conscious and subconscious mind. I gently bring you out of hypnosis, and we discuss your experience and any insights that came up. After the session you receive your affirmations via email or text, so you can practice with them between sessions.
Your weekly sessions are one to two hours depending on your preference. We always begin by talking about your affirmations and how they effect you emotionally (making any adjustments or additions that you may have thought of over the week) and any dreams you remember. Then we move on to your situation and assess the current solutions to your environmental stresses. We explore improvements that empower you to move out of or avoid those situations, and protect your emotional energy, refining your affirmations as your clarity deepens. Through this process I guide you through the bargaining stage of grief, in which your affirmations allow you to let go of the past losses or trauma, and move on with your life. During each hypnosis session you teach this bargain to your inner child, explaining that a country has a constitution, and your affirmations are your set of rules that keep you safe, and give you the terms on which you have the right to happiness.
How many sessions will you need to start moving out of depression?
Most people feel a shift in the first session - it’s encouraging to know that you have a plan and that you’ve started your journey. By around the 3rd session your affirmations are usually developed enough to raise your motivation levels to lift you through the week. But you only start actually moving out of depression when your subconscious mind has enough repetition of your solution in hypnosis and your own affirmation work, for neuroplasticity to come into effect. On average, it takes about 66 days (9 weeks) for a new behavior to become automatic. However the timeline varies significantly depending on the person and the complexity of the habit. Creating a new constitution for yourself that rewards you emotionally is a complex habit, and quite often requires more than 9 weeks to establish subconsciously.
For each individual person there will be a different set of rules that you make for yourself as your personal constitution to use as affirmations, and every person has different level of resistance to those new suggestions, based on how your life has conditioned you - what conclusions you’ve made about how much control you actually have. Moving out of depression also means completing your grief process so that you can let go of the emotional loss that caused your initial depression, and this requires an unspecified time for emotional healing. If there is a situational element, for example unemployment or a toxic domestic or work environment, it can take months to reclaim your sovereignty. If you’re experiencing severe depression with inability to function or suicidal thoughts, professional medical evaluation is essential before beginning hypnotherapy.
Is Andrew’s Depression Hypnotherapy method effective?
Hypnotherapy is highly effective for mild-to-moderate depression. For severe depression, medical management may be important, and hypnotherapy can address behavioral patterns alongside medical care. A comprehensive research review analyzing results from multiple clinical studies found that the average person receiving hypnotherapy showed more improvement than 76% of people who didn’t receive hypnotherapy. Clinical trials demonstrate that hypnotherapy achieves results on par with established psychological treatments, confirming its effectiveness as a primary treatment approach. In my fifteen years of practice working with over ten thousand clients, depression is one of the most common presenting concerns among people seeking behavioral approaches to their mental health. What makes hypnotherapy effective is that it accesses the ninety percent subconscious level where learned helplessness beliefs, avoidance cycles, and stuck grief patterns actually operate—these are patterns that formed at the subconscious level through repeated experiences of uncontrollable situations, and your ten percent conscious willpower can’t override them alone.
Hypnotherapy addresses three components simultaneously: it transforms subconscious patterns through your Constitution and inner child work, provides practical counseling for toxic environments, and supports behavioral activation through small wins and exercise. The daily affirmation soundtrack between sessions reinforces the new patterns through repetition, while dream therapy reveals subconscious shifts showing you’re moving through the grief process toward acceptance. Online sessions are often more effective for depression work because your home environment eliminates the energy expenditure of commuting when you’re already depleted, and the privacy makes vulnerability easier during deep emotional work.
What can you expect from a treatment?
You’ll feel a shift in your first session - it feels good to know that you have a plan and you’ve started your journey. Creating your Constitution is initially daunting because it shows how far you have to go, but hearing it read back to you in hypnosis, and reading it over later by yourself, and working with it and refining it, gives you a tremendous feeling of self-ownership and doing something powerful about your situation. In hypnosis you rehearse scenarios in a daydream state, to train your subconscious mind to learn that behavior, and at first these scenarios seem difficult to believe or far fetched, but after a few weeks of using your affirmations those empowering scenarios in your hypnosis sessions begin to feel more natural to you. The inner child work creates a familiar space that feels easier to be with yourself, or forgive yourself and be more supportive. You replace self-criticism with positive encouragement. You inwardly celebrate small wins like exercising or doing an activity that brings you joy. Your affirmations develop and become more ambitious because you’re proving them through your own experience. You become more motivated in the mornings, it’s easier to get up, you have more energy to engage, and hope appears more frequently.
Your affirmations state your rules and terms of engagement - how you agree to engage with life - and in this way bring you into a space where you can move out of grieving - let go of any anger or sadness connected with your emotional loss, and walk away stronger. You’ll notice dreams beginning to shift, reflecting strength and empowerment instead of trauma. Small wins accumulate momentum, and what used to take enormous effort starts feeling normal and every-day to you. When circumstances are supportive this transformation can be a gradual continuous flow, but in a toxic environment (unemployment, abusive relationship, toxic workplace) the timeline extends because you’re building internal strength while simultaneously changing or moving out of a toxic situation. It’s like drying yourself with a towel while standing in the rain - not entirely futile because this lets you see where you are going, but it requires constant motivation as well as strategical planning. You have to build your self-worth inside that adversity, but when you are free of the environment, most of the work is over because your self-worth has grown in spite of adversity, which actually makes you stronger. You’ve already reclaimed your sovereignty - that’s why you were finally able to walk away.