What’s the Difference Between Meditation & Hypnosis?
8 min. read | Meditation | Self-Hypnosis
They both help link conscious and subconscious, and both help rewire the brain - but meditation and hypnosis can take the mind down different paths. So what’s really happening under the surface that sets them apart?
Meditation and hypnosis both involve shifting your state of mind, but they each partner with the mind in subtly different ways. They may look and even feel similar, but they are essentially different animals (ok, they’re not bird-and-mammal-different; maybe more like like horse-and-zebra-different, or two-closely-related-mammals-different). If you’ve ever wondered how they’re related, or even if they’re just the same general state or phenomenon with a different name, you’re not alone!
Fig. 1. Meditation & Hypnosis - what’s the difference?
There is a lot of overlap between the two, but their objectives, mechanisms, and outcomes diverge in important ways. Meditation is often about being - cultivating deeper awareness, observing without interference. In contrast, hypnosis is a little more about actively engaging the subconscious mind to create change.
While some meditation invites you to sit and observe your thoughts like clouds drifting across the sky, hypnosis can get you in the driver’s seat and steer your subconscious toward change. So, which one is right for you? That depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
The Objective: Awareness vs. Suggestion
Meditation is about cultivating mindfulness, emotional balance, and presence. Whether you’re following your breath, using a mantra, or just noticing the mind’s chatter without reacting or attaching a story, the goal is often to cultivate an open, spacious awareness.
It’s a practice of non-doing, of observing and allowing the mind rather than engaging with it - and there very well may not be a goal or objective at all beyond this awareness cultivation.
Hypnosis can also help you cultivate emotional balance and deeper awareness and presence, but is a more active process moving you towards a goal or objective - more like tuning your mind to a specific frequency. It narrows attention, creating a heightened state of suggestibility where the subconscious mind becomes more receptive to positive suggestions and change.
Whether used for breaking habits, managing pain, or reprogramming limiting beliefs, hypnosis is less about detached awareness of the mind and more about recruiting the subconscious and unconscious for transformation. (For more on what this looks like in real life, check out How Self-Hypnosis Saved My Mental Health.)
The Mechanism: Open Monitoring vs. Directed Focus
Meditation can be likened to watching ocean waves - you notice the ebb and flow of thoughts, emotions, and sensations without controlling, grasping, or pushing them away. This kind of open monitoring helps develop cognitive flexibility, emotional resilience, mental clarity, and a greater capacity for presence. Research shows that regular open monitoring mindfulness meditation can induce neuroplasticity, strengthening brain regions associated with emotional regulation and focus.
If meditation is simply observing the waves, hypnosis is more like guiding a submarine under those waves with a clear destination in mind. It involves a deeper and simultaneously narrower focus that depotentiates the critical factor of the thinking mind, allowing for less thought-mediated communication with the subconscious.
Fig. 2 Same nervous system - different ways to work with it.
Hypnosis doesn’t just allow you to perceive yourself and experiences from different, specific perspectives - it you helps you steer your focus around the old ingrained stories, and then reintegrate that broader understanding you’ve gained.
Like meditation, hypnosis also reorganizes neural activity and reinforces new cognitive patterns and behaviors, but here, it’s more like intentionally updating the software of your mind to better align with your goals.
There are forms of hypnosis that are more like meditation, and forms of meditation that are more like hypnosis, but in general, a key distinction between the two practices is how we direct our focus and attention.
Meditation often fosters a broader, real-time integrated awareness, strengthening the mind’s ability to remain fully present to whatever presents itself to our awareness without exclusion. It encourages full presence, training the brain to observe with non-reactivity.
Hypnosis, on the other hand, steps outside the limited spotlight of the conscious mind and taps imagination to interrupt and rewrite the deeper cognitive and emotional scripts running the show - a level of strategic, temporary dissociation from habitual thought patterns, physical sensations, or self-perception. This strategic dissociative element is part of what makes hypnosis so effective for behavioral change, as meaning and beliefs are updated at the subconscious level.
The Outcomes: Self-Discovery vs. Subconscious Reprogramming
If meditation is about awareness, hypnosis is about transformation. Meditation helps you become an observer of your thoughts, making space for insight and acceptance. Over time with consistent practice, this can lead to profound changes - lower stress, sharper focus, and even structural shifts in the brain that support well-being.
Hypnosis, on the other hand, is often about more specific, targeted results. Need to quit smoking, overcome a fear, or change a deeply ingrained habit? Hypnosis is designed to work directly with the subconscious, creating rapid shifts in perception and behavior.
While meditation encourages letting go of self-referential thinking to discover more about the experience of the self and of awareness itself, hypnosis is more about strategically engaging with aspects of the self to intentionally reprogram patterns and direct change.
What the Experts Say
Guy Montgomery, PhD, a professor of psychology and director of the Center for Behavioral Oncology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, highlights a key distinction between the two practices: “Hypnotherapy has some important advantages,” he explains. “Whereas meditation helps you accept a problem, hypnosis allows people to make changes to do something about the problem.” Montgomery’s research on clinical hypnosis with cancer patients demonstrates how hypnosis can be a powerful tool for directed change.
Psychologist and dream scholar Deirdre Barrett, PhD explores the overlap between hypnosis and meditation, noting that both enhance creativity and problem-solving in unique ways. Meditation allows the mind to roam freely, while hypnosis directs it toward a specific outcome - like setting your mental GPS.
Dr. David Spiegel, a leading hypnosis researcher at Stanford, explains that meditation encourages acceptance, while hypnosis is designed for active cognitive change. Spiegel’s research shows that hypnosis and meditation engage the brain in distinctly different ways. In a state of hypnosis, there’s stronger communication between the prefrontal cortex - our executive decision-maker - and the insula, the region tied to body awareness and interoception, or internal sensing. At the same time, hypnosis dials down the connection between the control networks and the default mode network - the part of the brain responsible for self-reflection and internal narrative. In plain terms, that means more focused attention, less overthinking.
Long-term meditation practice also quiets the default mode network, but it tends to do so gradually, over time. It’s part of how meditators begin to “get over themselves,” letting go of the mental chatter and stepping into a more spacious state of awareness. Different tools, different tempo - but both with powerful effects on how we relate to our thoughts, our bodies, and ourselves.
A Peek into Ancient Traditions
While science is trying to work out the mechanics of these practices and measure these non-ordinary states of consciousness in various ways, ancient traditions have harnessed and experientially realized their power for centuries.
Clearly, Eastern wisdom traditions like Buddhism have explored these phenomena of consciousness and developed meditation systems extensively. Even though the term hypnosis and the formalized practice is relatively new, there’s something very akin to hypnosis going on with Dzogchen meditation in Tibetan Buddhism, where selective attention, visualization, and posthypnotic suggestion are used to facilitate profound states of awareness.
Some tantric and Taoist practices use breathwork and visualization techniques that functionally feel a lot like self-hypnosis.
From ancient China, the I Ching talks about “quieting the heart-mind” to access deep intuitive knowing - a concept that also resonates with both meditation and hypnosis.
In ancient Egypt, “sleep temples" served as healing centers where priests used chants and guided trances to induce therapeutic dream states - and we might consider this an early form of hypnosis.
The Greeks had similar practices in Asclepieia, sacred healing temples where patients engaged in "incubation," a process of meditative sleep intended to bring about divine healing insights.
The Stoics engaged in practices akin to modern meditation and self-hypnosis. They emphasized prosoche, or continuous mindfulness of one's thoughts and actions, to live in accordance with reason. Techniques included morning reflections to prepare for the day and evening reviews to assess one's behavior, fostering self-awareness and virtuous living. Additionally, premeditatio malorum, or negative visualization, involved contemplating potential misfortunes to build resilience and appreciation for what one has.
These ancient traditions remind us that humanity has always been drawn to non-ordinary states - not as escape, but as a doorway to healing, insight, and transformation (and this isn’t even considering even more ancient shamanic practices - that’s a whole other topic!). Despite the heightened authority of today’s “hard science,” we’re really just beginning to see how modern research aligns and catches up with some of these ancient insights on the mind’s function and potential.
So, Which One is Right for You?
For anyone curious about the power of the mind who wants to explore their own consciousness, both meditation and hypnosis are highly effective, integrative, and restorative practices - each a powerfully transformative tool, but they each help you in different ways. Think meditation for cultivating mindful presence and deepening self-awareness. Think hypnosis for reprogramming subconscious patterns and creating targeted change. While hypnosis often brings faster, more specific results, meditation often offers its benefits gradually, through consistent practice.
But really, why choose one? With regular practice, meditation strengthens your awareness, presence, and ability to observe your own mental and emotional patterns, while hypnosis helps you transform limiting beliefs, apply updated understanding, and live into new mental and emotional patterns. Together, they become a very dynamic duo for mental and emotional transformation.
It’s also essential to mention that thinking, writing, or reading about either practice can really only deepen your understanding so far. Meditation and hypnosis are experiences, and the deeper understanding is experience-based. So, to learn more from here, I encourage you to explore one or both through your actual lived experience. (Let’s talk, because here’s where I can help further!)
So whether you’re surfing the waves of your subconscious with hypnosis or simply watching them roll through with meditation - together or separate - you’re cultivating a more empowered, integrated, and harmonized heart-mind.
