Let’s start with something simple but powerful: your mind is wired for change. Inside the UM experience, we work with both parts of your mind:
The Conscious Mind:
The thinker, the planner, the one reading this right now.
The Unconscious Mind:
The one behind the scenes, running habits, emotions, cravings, and reactions. Who handles 95% of your decisions.
Here’s the twist: while your conscious mind might want to drink less, it’s the unconscious mind that often makes the final decision. That’s why willpower alone rarely works long-term. Hypnotherapy helps you communicate directly with your unconscious, updating the mental scripts that drive your choices around alcohol.
Every UM hypno-session is designed to tap into your brain’s natural superpower: neuroplasticity, the ability to create new neural pathways at any age.
This is the same relaxed, receptive state that advertisers aim for when you’re watching TV or scrolling. But instead of selling products, UM gently introduces empowering thoughts like:
“I feel strong and clear without alcohol.”
“I trust myself to make conscious choices.”
Over time, these messages begin to stick not because you force them, but because your brain begins to accept them as true. That’s the power of repetition, paired with relaxation, and reinforced by chemistry.
UM hypnotherapy is built on the relaxation response, a concept developed by Harvard’s Dr. Herbert Benson. When you relax deeply, your body shifts from stress mode (fight/flight/freeze) into healing mode (parasympathetic activation). This shift reduces cortisol, slows your heart rate, calms your nervous system, and supports immune function.
It also boosts the production of dopamine and serotonin, helping you feel grounded, present, and emotionally regulated all of which reduce the impulse to drink for relief or escape.
This isn’t just theory. Dr. Benson showed that techniques like meditation, yoga, progressive relaxation, and hypnosis all produce measurable changes: lower blood pressure, reduced muscle tension, slower breathing, and more alpha brain waves the brainwave pattern associated with calm focus.
In UM, you’ll learn to activate this state in just a few minutes a day. It becomes your reset button not just for stress, but for those emotional loops and cravings that often lead to drinking.
And How Hypnotherapy Helps You Rewire It
Your nervous system is your body’s command center. It controls how you think, feel, move, and react often without you even realizing it. And when it comes to drinking, the nervous system plays a massive role in cravings, emotional regulation, and your response to stress.
Here’s the science (made simple):
Your nervous system has two main branches:
The PNS includes:
That’s pretty cool, right?
The Autonomic Nervous System has three branches that shape your drinking patterns.
Sympathetic Nervous System (Fight / Flight / Freeze):
This is your body’s emergency mode. When you’re stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed, it triggers your heart to race, muscles to tense, and adrenaline to spike. If you’ve ever poured a drink to “take the edge off,” this system was in overdrive.
Parasympathetic Nervous System (Relaxation Response):
This is your calm and recovery system. It slows your heart, deepens your breathing, and brings a sense of safety and clarity. It also restores healthy dopamine and serotonin levels, which are often disrupted by chronic stress or alcohol use. UM hypnotherapy is designed to activate this system, so your body feels safe, and your cravings begin to fade.
Enteric Nervous System (The “Second Brain”):
This is the network of neurons in your gut. It helps regulate mood, digestion, and decision-making. It’s why you “feel things in your gut.” Alcohol disrupts this system, and UM helps restore its balance.
So what?
You can’t be in both stress mode and healing mode at the same time. And the more time you spend in fight-or-flight, the more likely you are to act impulsively or reach for alcohol to cope.
UM teaches you how to shift into a healing state on purpose. Hypnotherapy helps your body remember what calm feels like, so you can respond to life (and cravings) with clarity.
When your nervous system is balanced and your brain chemistry is stabilized, everything improves: digestion, sleep, immune health, focus, energy, and emotional regulation.
Hypnosis doesn’t feel like you’re asleep or out of control, it’s not like the movies.
You remain aware and in charge the entire time. Most people describe it as a peaceful, grounded state, like the moment before falling asleep or the calm after meditation.
You’ll never be made to do or say anything you don’t want to. In fact, your values and intentions guide every session. UM simply helps you align with them at a deeper level.
When your nervous system is calm, your chemistry is balanced, and your unconscious mind is onboard, change doesn’t feel like a battle.
You can pause before reacting, recognize what you truly need, and make choices that support the life you want. This is what lasting moderation looks like and UM helps you practice it every single day.
Hypnotherapy helps you:
As these unconscious shifts take root, the grip of cravings fades and drinking becomes a conscious, intentional decision.
By Week 2 of your journey, you’ll be able to activate the relaxation response on your own. You’ll recognize the feeling from early UM sessions and it will begin to feel familiar, even safe.
You don’t need to believe in hypnotherapy for it to work.
You don’t need to quit drinking entirely to see change.
You just need to show up and let your unconscious do what it was designed to do: help you grow.
