Can hypnotherapy make your breasts bigger?
The deputy leader of the Green Party has admitted to using hypnotherapy to enlarge women's breasts. Where do you even start with THAT?
I was supposed to not be doing any new blogs or articles for a while. I have a book I need to write, that I technically should have finished months ago, and you can only put off important work (and legal obligations) for so long.
However, the churning chaos engine that is ‘the modern world’ keeps throwing up distractions. Most of which I am able to ignore, because even if there is something particularly relevant to your interests that you could comment on happening right now, in the current climate there’ll be another one along in a day or two.
The notion of ‘seizing the moment’ doesn’t really carry much weight when there’s a new horrifying ‘moment’ happening every 67 seconds, it seems.
And yet, lo and behold, a link shared in a Facebook post1 by friend and peer Kate Bevan led to me finding out that Zack Polanski, the deputy leader of the UK’s The Green Party, in an interview “admitted to performing hypnotherapy to 'enlarge' women's breasts in the past”.
Now, let’s leave aside the bleakly unsettling fact that this probably isn’t even in the top 100 most ridiculous things said by an elected politician in the developed world this year alone.
Let’s also leave aside that I can totally sympathise with the arguments that, despite being a much longer established and objectively more successful (and increasingly so) political party, the Greens persistently receive far less coverage than UKIP, or Reform, or whatever Team Force Farage are calling themselves at present.
Let’s also, begrudgingly if not quite entirely, leave aside that fact that The Green Party, so named for being the part most concerned about environmental issues (which is good) have, in the most diplomatic wording possible, a so-so reputation2 for policies based on science and evidence (which is… not so good).
No, let’s focus on the most obvious question; can hypnotherapy make your breasts larger?
The short answer is… no!
The longer answer is… not really, no.
You might be wondering where the ambiguity in that last sentence comes from. Surely the title of this article is and open and shut case of Betteridge’s law? But as a man of science, I am compelled to consider all options. And in some ways, the brain has more power over the body than you may think.
The power… of suggestion!
Let me level with you up front; I don’t know a great deal about hypnosis. In around 25 years of studying all facets of neuroscience and mental health and psychiatry, it’s rarely come up.
One might argue that this is indicative in and of itself. I couldn’t really comment.
The Wikipedia page for hypnosis is fairly comprehensive, but, in a very succinct nutshell, hypnosis is regarded as a state of extreme focus and attention, where peripheral awareness is drastically reduced, and the individual in this state is very receptive to external suggestions.
Admittedly, when you consider how the brain works, this sort of makes sense. If all of your mental processes are shunted towards your conscious awareness, much of which is determined by your phonological loop (discussed in a previous article) then yes, things any external persons “say” to you (i.e. information supplied phonologically, so would slot right into your dominant cognitive process) potentially would dictate/determine your thinking and behaviour.
Basically, if you tell someone in a hypnotic state “you’re a chicken”, that will carry a lot more mental weight than usual. Enough to make them believe it? Perhaps.
There’s also the whole ‘mind over matter’ thing, which is actually a rather significant aspect of how we work. People often see the brain and body as two connected, but distinct, things. Like a jockey riding a horse, or pilot flying a plane.
But they’re far more intertwined than that, and what’s going on in the brain can have direct physical outcomes in the body. Like the placebo effect, making painful things less so. Or how depression causes a suppressed immune system. Or how eating disorders like anorexia exist in the first place. Your brain believing (wrongly) that you’re considerably overweight can cause you to reject the act of eating food, in defiance of the laws of biology and survival.
Hypnotherapy is a practice that supposes to exploit this deep and fundamental brain-body connection. Because if you can ‘suggest’ to someone in a hypnotic state that their health concerns shouldn’t be concerns, their brains will take this message on board, and their body should respond accordingly.
Despite the questionable history of hypnotherapy as an actual science, evidence suggests it can be pretty effective. For irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), specifically.
Why IBS? Well… why not, I guess. In fairness, the brain and digestive system turn out to be far more interdependent than we first assumed. Accordingly, the gut-brain axis is the target of much research into new mental health interventions.
So, could hypnotherapy lead to larger breasts?
Well, there’s a condition in women known as False Pregnancy, where the patient isn’t pregnant, but legitimately believes she is, and so displays the symptoms of being legitimately pregnant. Including enlarged and lactating mammaries. The exact mechanism is unknown, but stress and related hormones are often invoked as causes.
But if you could, hypnotically, convince a woman she’s pregnant, then she may subsequently grow larger breasts. So hypnotherapy can give you larger breasts, right?
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and… wake!
If nothing else, that last section provides a very stark example, for both myself and any readers, of how easy it is to construct a convincing-sounding argument via very selective cherry picking of useful data. Reality is far less accommodating.
Does the brain have a lot of overlap with how the body works? Yes. But it’s like how my neighbour has a tree that overlaps my garden, and a lot of the leaves from it end up on my shed roof. Is this entirely legal and normal? Yes.
But if I found said neighbour in my house, wearing my clothes, eating my food, putting the moves on my wife, and kicking my dog,3 I’d be entirely within my rights to (enthusiastically) physically hurl him out the front door and into the gutter. Because overlap does not mean total synchronicity or dominance.
That’s why hypnosis as a method of anaesthesia shows limited results, at best.
That’s presumably why hypnosis as a therapeutic tool for (mild) mental health disorders is, if we’re very generous, on a par with CBT. At most.
And so on.
Also, the very idea of convincing a woman she’s pregnant when she isn’t just so she might grow larger breasts?? That’s a morally abhorrent notion on so many levels I can’t even begin to explain them. Any ‘therapist’ who attempted it should be struck off and blacklisted immediately. And maybe jailed for a few years, just to be safe.
There’s also no known mechanism, be it neurological, biological, or psychological, to directly, and specifically, increase the size of a fully formed appendage just by thinking about it.
Sure, overall breast size fluctuates with overall body weight. But not just breast size. They usually don’t naturally expand while everything else stays exactly the same. And that’s fine! That’s how bodies work. Male ones too. Men’s pectorals get bigger and more pronounced the heavier they get. It’s just biology.
I’m not providing a link to that last point, as it’s based on more, shall we say, ‘personal’ data.
But here’s the thing; if the links between our brain and body were genuinely so deeply connected, so fundamentally intertwined, that our physical configuration were generally altered by us thinking about it long and hard enough… do you honestly think we wouldn’t have noticed by now?
There are countless women in the world who long for a larger cup size, or to be ‘beach body ready’, to the extent that it occupies their most of their waking life. And yet, gyms and ridiculous diets and cosmetic surgery as as popular (and profitable) as ever. Weird.
And let’s not pin this all on women. If humans could alter their appendages by focussed thought alone, would a micropenis even exist? Seems unlikely.
That’s probably for best, if we’re honest. Imagine if men could alter the size of their intimate organs by thought alone? I’m not saying the world would be a very different place, but one would assume that wheelbarrows would be a lot more common, at the very least.
Anyway, the point is, there’s no obvious mechanism whereby hypnosis can make a woman’s breasts larger. So, you have to raise an eyebrow about anyone, particularly a man, who claims otherwise, particularly when he wants to help determine national policy.
It could all go, if you’ll pardon the amusingly appropriate expression, tits up.
You should buy my latest book, which mentions boobs and hypnosis precisely zero times.
Which, for the record, was not supportive or complimentary of the subject matter. Just so we’re clear.
Whether this reputation is deserved really depends on who you ask, what their sources are, and how far back you go. We’re talking about a political party, so ideologically-weighted less-than-objective ‘insights’ are abundant, and hard to filter out. However, the subject matter of this very article strongly implies there’s at least a grain of truth in this reputation.
This fourth thing would completely undermine the third thing. Nobody in our house disrespects the dog! You can disrespect the cat all you want, because he’ll ‘take care of you’ himself. The cat is… notorious, shall we say.
On the efficacy of hypnosis, I have often wondered what would happen if a hypnotist hynotised a receptive subject to believe that hypnotism didn't work and was a load of baloney.
I like your style. A very amusing read :-)