Confidence & Performance
Hypnosis for Public Speaking: No Trial on the Fear, Three on What Sits Next to It
There is no randomised trial of hypnosis for public speaking anxiety. I would rather you heard that in the first line than the last. What there is sits one step away — test anxiety, and performing under pressure — and it is better than most people selling this have bothered to read.
The honest position, before anything else.Nobody has put hypnosis and a lectern in the same trial. Anyone quoting you a success rate for public speaking hypnosis has made it up, because there is no study to have got it from.
What has been tested is performance anxiety of neighbouring kinds: students sitting exams, and athletes going into competition. That evidence is real, some of it is well controlled, and it is the only ground I will argue from here.
Written by Ernest McLeodClinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice. About Ernest →
I earn a commission when someone buys a session through this site. So I have put the gap in the evidence at the top of the page, where you can see it before you decide anything.
What is the best study of hypnosis for performance nerves?
Barker, Jones and Greenlees published it in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology in 2010, and it is the study I would hand to anyone who wants to know whether hypnotic suggestion does anything measurable to performance under pressure. It is small, it is about footballers rather than presenters, and it is better designed than most of what gets quoted at you.
They randomised 59 footballers: 30 to hypnosis, 29 to a video attention control. That comparator is the whole point. The control group did not sit on a waiting list; they were given something to do, with a person’s attention on them, for the same time. That strips out most of what people mean when they say “it’s just placebo”.
Three sessions of ego-strengthening suggestion. The hypnosis group came out with better self-efficacy and better actual performance, and both were still there four weeks later. Not a same-day mood bump. A change that survived a month.
Two honest qualifications travel with it. First, self-efficacy did not mediate the performance effect — the confidence went up, the performance went up, and the statistics did not show the first causing the second. Something happened; the mechanism is not established. Second, what shifted was task-specific confidence, the belief that you can do this particular thing. Not self-esteem, which is a different construct and has not responded when anyone measured it directly.
For a speech, task-specific is the useful kind anyway. You do not need to feel better about yourself as a person by Thursday. You need to believe you can get through fourteen slides.
Which part of hypnosis is doing the work?
Boutin and Tosi answered that in 1983, in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Forty-eight nursing students with performance anxiety, split four ways rather than the usual two. Four arms is rare and it is useful, because it lets you watch each ingredient being added and see which one moves the result.
Hypnosis alone beat both the placebo condition and the untreated control. That is worth stating plainly: the suggestion component, on its own, outperformed a credible dummy. And then the more interesting line — hypnosis combined with cognitive work beat hypnosis alone.
So the ranking, from one small four-arm trial, runs: nothing, then placebo, then hypnosis, then hypnosis plus thinking work. Every step up the ladder involves adding something rather than swapping something out.
What does the pooled anxiety evidence say?
Valentine, Milling and colleagues pooled the hypnosis-for-anxiety literature in 2019 in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis: 15 studies across 17 trials. They reported d = 0.79 at the end of treatment and 0.99 at the longest follow-up — large, by the usual conventions, and getting larger with time rather than fading.
Read those two numbers correctly, because almost nobody does.0.79 and 0.99 are probability-of-superiority translations. They are not percentage reductions in anxiety. A page telling you hypnosis cuts anxiety by 79 per cent has misread this exact paper.
The review also reports no confidence intervals and no participant totals, so I cannot tell you how many people are behind it, and neither can anyone else.
And the authors’ own conclusion, which I will quote rather than paraphrase, because it points the same way as Boutin and Tosi did thirty-six years earlier. Hypnosis, they wrote, “was more effective in reducing anxiety when combined with other psychological interventions than when used as a stand-alone treatment”.
That is the same finding Ramondo and colleagues reached in 2021 from a different direction, pooling 48 comparisons of CBT-with-hypnosis against CBT alone across 1,928 people: adding hypnosis produced an extra d = 0.25 to 0.41 at the end of treatment, and 0.54 to 0.59 at follow-up. Three separate bodies of work, one message. Hypnosis is an amplifier.
Where the evidence runs out
Once, properly, and then I will stop.
Nothing above was a study of public speaking. Footballers are not presenters, and a nursing-school performance task is not the quarterly review. The transfer is an argument I am making, not a result somebody published, and you should weigh it as such.
If what you have is not nerves but a diagnosed phobia — if speaking is one of several situations you now avoid, and the avoidance is shaping your job or your friendships — the evidence changes and it does not favour me. Pelissolo’s 2016 review put it bluntly: evidence is negative or insufficient for hypnosis in chronic anxiety disorders in any category whatsoever, phobia included. What does have large randomised effects there is graded exposure. Wolitzky-Taylor and colleagues pooled 33 randomised studies in 2008 and found exposure beat no treatment, beat placebo, and beat other active therapies. See a psychologist, and get the thing with the evidence.
The format question is the one piece of good news I can offer a site selling recordings. Yim and Derbyshire ran the subgroup analysis in 2026 and found no significant difference between self-hypnosis, therapist-delivered and taped delivery, p = 0.94. Montgomery and colleagues compared live against audiotape directly in 2002 and reported no significant differences between methods of induction. The subgroups were small and the work was in pain, not speaking. But where anyone has checked, a recording has held up.
What is a session actually for?
Every strand above says the same thing. Hypnosis added to work beats hypnosis in place of work. So the honest job description for a twenty-minute recording is this: it is a rehearsal tool you bolt on to your preparation, in the fortnight before the thing.
You still write the talk. You still say it out loud, standing up, more times than feels necessary. You still find out what the room is like. The recording is the part where you practise being the person who walks to the front — which, in Barker’s trial, is roughly what three sessions of ego-strengthening suggestion produced and held for a month.
Buy it for that and it is a reasonable A$27. Buy it hoping it replaces the rehearsal, and you have bought the one arrangement that every study here says works least well.
- Public Speaking ConfidenceThe general one, for the walk to the front of the room.
- Long Term Presentation AnxietyFor dread that starts weeks out, not on the day.
- Stage FrightFor performing something you already know cold.
- Beat Interview AnxietyOne room, two people, and questions you cannot script.
Each is US$18.95, about A$27, an instant download inside the publisher’s ninety-day refund window. The catalogue also carries Speak Without Notes, Questions from Hell in Presentations and Speaking in Groups if your version of this is narrower than the four above. The rest of the confidence category is here. If your version is an exam rather than an audience, that has an actual trial behind it — see hypnosis for test anxiety.
Is it safe?
Bollinger reviewed adverse events recorded across hypnosis clinical trials in 2018 and found serious adverse events attributable to hypnosis reported at zero per cent, with other adverse events at 0.47 per cent. His own limitation: those trials were treating medical conditions and procedures rather than psychiatric ones. Never listen while driving.
Common questions
Does hypnosis work for public speaking anxiety?
No trial has tested it on public speaking specifically. The nearest evidence is adjacent: Barker 2010 randomised 59 footballers to hypnosis or a video attention control and found better confidence and better performance, still present at four weeks. Boutin and Tosi 1983 found hypnosis alone beat a placebo condition in 48 students with performance anxiety. Encouraging, but one step removed.
Is hypnosis better than just practising the speech?
Nothing suggests it replaces practice, and two separate reviews say the opposite. Valentine 2019 concluded hypnosis “was more effective in reducing anxiety when combined with other psychological interventions than when used as a stand-alone treatment”. Ramondo 2021 found the same pattern adding hypnosis to CBT. Use a recording on top of your preparation, not instead of it.
Does a recording work as well as seeing a hypnotherapist?
Where anyone has tested it, comparably. Yim and Derbyshire’s 2026 subgroup analysis found no significant difference between self-hypnosis, therapist-delivered and taped delivery, p = 0.94, and Montgomery 2002 compared live against audiotape directly and found none. The subgroups were small and that work was in pain rather than in speaking.
What does the 0.79 figure mean?
It is an effect size from Valentine 2019, expressed as a probability of superiority. It is not a 79 per cent reduction in anxiety, and any page telling you it is has misread the paper. The same review reported no confidence intervals and no participant totals, so nobody can tell you how many people sit behind it.
When should I see a psychologist instead?
When it has stopped being nerves. If you are avoiding situations, turning down work, or the fear runs across several settings rather than one, that is closer to a phobia, and hypnosis has no supportive evidence in that territory. Graded exposure does: a pooled analysis of 33 randomised studies found it beat placebo and beat other active therapies.
How far ahead should I start listening?
No study answers that for speaking. The one useful data point is that Barker’s effect came from three sessions and was still measurable four weeks later, so a fortnight of repeated listening alongside real rehearsal is a defensible plan rather than a tested one. Listening once the night before is not what any of this evidence describes.
Free and confidential, open now. Tap to call.
Where these numbers come from
- Barker J, Jones M, Greenlees I. Assessing the immediate and maintained effects of hypnosis on self-efficacy and soccer wall-volley performance. J Sport Exerc Psychol. 2010;32(2):243-252. doi:10.1123/jsep.32.2.243
- Boutin GE, Tosi DJ. Modification of irrational ideas and test anxiety through rational stage directed hypnotherapy [RSDH]. J Clin Psychol. 1983;39(3):382-391. doi:10.1002/1097-4679(198305)39:3<382::aid-jclp2270390312>3.0.co
- Valentine KE, Milling LS, Clark LJ, et al. The efficacy of hypnosis as a treatment for anxiety: a meta-analysis. Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2019;67(3):336-363. doi:10.1080/00207144.2019.1613863
- Ramondo N, Gignac GE, Pestell CF, et al. Clinical hypnosis as an adjunct to cognitive behavior therapy: an updated meta-analysis. Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2021;69(2):169-202. doi:10.1080/00207144.2021.1877549
- Pelissolo A. [Hypnosis for anxiety and phobic disorders: a review of clinical studies]. Presse Med. 2016;45(3):284-290. French. doi:10.1016/j.lpm.2015.12.002
- Wolitzky-Taylor KB, Horowitz JD, Powers MB, et al. Psychological approaches in the treatment of specific phobias: a meta-analysis. Clin Psychol Rev. 2008;28(6):1021-1037. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2008.02.007
- Yim TH, Derbyshire SWG. A systematic review of hypnosis for clinical pain relief. Eur J Pain. 2026;30(8):e70369. doi:10.1002/ejp.70369
- Montgomery GH, David D, Winkel G, et al. The effectiveness of adjunctive hypnosis with surgical patients: a meta-analysis. Anesth Analg. 2002;94(6):1639-1645. doi:10.1097/00000539-200206000-00052
- Bollinger JW. The rate of adverse events related to hypnosis during clinical trials. Am J Clin Hypn. 2018;60(4):357-366. doi:10.1080/00029157.2017.1315927
- Better Health Channel (Victorian Government Department of Health). Hypnosis [Internet]. Melbourne: State of Victoria; [cited 2026 Sep 24]. betterhealth.vic.gov.au
Related
- Hypnosis for test anxietyThe one topic here with a trial against an active comparator.
- Every confidence sessionThe full category, sorted by which room you are walking into.
- Does hypnosis work?The whole evidence base in one place, good and bad.
Write the talk, say it out loud standing up, and put the recording on top of that. Every study on this page points the same way: hypnosis is what you add, not what you substitute.
The two sessions on this page
Every one is an instant MP3 from the publisher at US$18.95, about A$27, with ninety days to change your mind. I earn a commission; it changes neither what you pay nor what I list.
Public Speaking Fear
The general one, for the room and the lectern.
Stage Fright
For performance rather than presentation — a stage, not a meeting.
These are self-help audio sessions, not medical treatment, a diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. No trial of hypnosis for public speaking anxiety exists, and no outcome is claimed for any session sold on this site. The studies described here concern test anxiety and sport performance and were delivered by therapists in person. If fear of speaking is part of a wider pattern of avoidance, that is a matter for a psychologist, where graded exposure has the randomised evidence. Better Health Channel advises avoiding hypnosis with severe depression, psychosis, or a drug or alcohol problem. Never listen while driving or operating machinery, and do not stop prescribed medication without your doctor’s approval.