Can the use of hypnosis be incorporated into our regular training routines, exercise, cardio, field and hitting practice to improve our skills as a baseball player? We readily acknowledge the extreme importance of the mental side of the game, mental toughness, visualization and positive affirmations to name a few, but could hypnosis help us harness powers we may not realize we have? We need to first verify a few issues and dispel a few others, before we can arrive at an objective, non-bias assumption of this question.
Hypnosis, including Self Hypnosis, has been utilized throughout time, as a method, similar to meditation, to gain control of your own mind, which then controls the body.
Many famous personalities such as Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, and Mozart were known to incorporate hypnosis into their attempts to enhance their particular talents.
The general public is quite resistant to the utilization of hypnosis due to the negative and silly examples Hollywood put forth of people being turned into mindless zombies, walking and clucking like a chicken on a stage, while the audience laughs and mocks them.
In reality, the assumption a person who is hypnotized is unconscious and unaware of their surroundings, able to be controlled to perform acts against their will, is just not true.
Nor is the belief a person can be hypnotized without their cooperation and total consent.
Now that we've dispelled a few misbelieves, it is time to give serious investigation into the possible benefits of hypnosis and that requires an elementary explanation of how the brain functions in order to know if an action, hypnosis in this case, can actually change or affect the mind.
Obviously, the mind is a complex organ which scientists fail to fully comprehend, so our explanation of how everything operates will be shallow, yet sufficient for us to reach a possible conclusion.
The mind is divided, for our purposes, into two different parts, known as the conscious and unconscious mind, which is where we'll begin.
The Conscious Mind is also referred to as our "Logical Mind," as it performs analytical duties, rationalizes, controls will-power and serves as our "Short Term Memory" mechanism.
The "Subconscious Mind" is the second part of our mind, which deals with emotions, habits, self-preservation and long-term memory and is the basis for the old saying "Let me sleep on it," which is actually based on scientific logic, whether the creator of the saying knew this or not.
The proposed benefit of using hypnosis to improve our baseball skills, is that it can bring the conscious and unconscious mind together in order to eliminate barriers which, perhaps unbeknownst to us, is holding us back from improving.
For instance, let's say we're having difficulty hitting a curve ball, and who doesn't, we may have unconsciously, developed a mental block which is sending messages to the body, it can not coordinate the specific body parts and motions required to hit a curve ball.
If our mind is convinced we can't hit, our body will adhere to those thoughts.
The use of Hypnosis, is a tool which can change the mental mindset of, "I can't hit, to "I can hit," which the body will now readjust its functions in order to comply with the new instructions.
The exact benefit of hypnosis and baseball is still not perfectly clear, but more and more professional athletes, and even Pro-Teams, are beginning to use professional hypnotist as another tool to enhance performance.