I know hypnosis can be great for dealing with anxiety, negative self talk etc, but has anyone had experience with hypnosis to help you “dig deep”? In a perfect world, I’d love something to help my unconscious pedaling power (when I’m zoned out and just not paying attention to speed or power) so that it doesn’t drop to endurance but stays up at tempo or above, but I’m not sure if that’s something you can do hypnosis for.
Thoughts
Entirely plausible, I’ve had some in the past for nerves/rock climbing performance.
I’ve no idea if it would work since mine worked on silencing a noisy brain but I’d love to dig deeper and would definitely be willing to pay for a couple sessions of that.
This is not proven. How do you “know” this?
The NIH (here:The effectiveness of hypnosis for the treatment of anxiety: a systematic review - Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE): Quality-assessed Reviews - NCBI Bookshelf) states that “the evidence from current randomised controlled trials was insufficient to support the use of hypnosis for the treatment of anxiety”.
YES!!! It can help. Actually @jamieborg is an expert here and could talk a lot more about this - he even is developing an app to help with these sorts of mental skills. I’ve tried it out and it can really help. I’ve used it to help focus and reduce the pain sensation. I’m not sure about the specific use-case you mention of when you zone out and lose focus; that’s a different sort of thing. But mental skills can help with the “digging deep”, definitely!
Thanks @dhellman !
Yes absolutely mental training skill can help with this. From purely a digging deeper perspective you can use a process of alert hypnosis to reduce pain (this is how I started helping cyclists, when I trained in Clinical Hypnosis the plan was to work with people in chronic pain as theres tons of clinical evidence showing the efficacy of hypnosis/self hypnosis for pain but then I started playing with the techniques I was using with clients when I was riding and it just snowballed from there). One of our testers used the turbo trainer audio a couple of times and just did a famoud ride in the UK which has climbs which touch on 35% in places and he said being able to do this made a big difference. Essentially you just follow a process to go into a very light trance and you can reduce sensations and this can be trained to be able to do it more quickly and at will. We will have audio sessions you can listen to on the turbo for this in the app im launching next month. Regarding the actual keeping power up while ‘zoning out’ yes, essentially by using visualization regularly while off the bike, you can create a new ‘habit’ of keeping the power on even while paying attention elsewhere. We do cover this issue a bit in the time trial sessions and there will be a session for this for general road rising when we launch at the end of June if thats something you might want to explore? Often people think mental training is something thats really time consuming but most of our audios will be 10-20 mins and even just doing mental training/visualisation a couple of times per week will make a difference. If you follow the link Diana sent we have the option to get informed when the app will be launched.
I think that analysis is pretty old though (2007 I think). There are more supportive analyses including other meta analyses that show an impact now that hypnosis is a more recognised as a valid mind-based therapeutic intervention and more better studies are being funded. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207144.2019.1613863
Frontiers | Meta-analytic evidence on the efficacy of hypnosis for mental and somatic health issues: a 20-year perspective
Thank you for the info, I’m looking forward to the app!
From the study you link to, " Notably, the largest effects were found when hypnosis was used with child/adolescent patient populations, to treat pain, and to aid medical procedures.**
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I am not finding enough evidence to support OP’s opinion that “hypnosis can be great” for anxiety/etc and definitely not one iota to support using this to “improve performance” which is the question posed here.
Hey look if thats the conclusion you reach then great. I just think thats different to what is reflected in the current evidence. “17 trials produced a mean weighted effect size of 0.79 ( p ≤ .001), indicating the average participant receiving hypnosis reduced anxiety more than about 79% of control participants. At the longest follow-up, seven trials yielded a mean weighted effect size of 0.99 ( p ≤ .001), demonstrating the average participant treated with hypnosis improved more than about 84% of control participants”. I can only comment on my findings, my own learnings on what evidence there is out there, my own experience and that of people ive worked with 
Not to deviate from the hypnosis topic, but positive self-talk could also be very helpful. This book has been helpful for me. Achieving Excellence: Mastering Mindset for Peak Performance in Sport and Life: Hacker, Colleen M., Mann, Mallory E.: 9781718207707: Amazon.com: Books