Though it remains unclear exactly what happens in the brain during hypnosis, this acute state of focus resembles the one that can be reached during meditation. “The ability to focus in this way gives you the ability to alter your attention,” Dr. Spiegel says. “It can enhance the typical mind-body control.” In other words, hypnosis might work by distracting you from symptoms of IBS or anxiety and help you literally think your way into relief.These days, you can find a hypnotherapist with a simple Google search. But in order to get the most out of the treatment (and to avoid any funny business), the best advice is to seek out a mental health professional, like a psychologist or psychiatrist, who is also trained and licensed in hypnotherapy, Dr. Spiegel says. A good place to start your search is an integrative or complimentary medicine center affiliated with a local hospital.There is one major caveat to all of this: As many as one-third of adults are simply incapable of being hypnotized.Part of the reason hypnosis might not work is a patient’s attitude, Falissard adds — if you don’t think it’s going to work, it won’t. But there may also be physical differences between people who are hypnotizable and those who are not.For one thing, there is evidence that there’s a genetic component to “hypnotizability” — one small study found that some people who are hypnotizable have a genetic mutation that enables their brains to make more dopamine, a chemical essential to attention.In another study , Spiegel and his colleagues compared the brain waves of people with high and low hypnotizability while they were at rest. The people who were highly hypnotizable had greater connectivity between the two sides of their brains, indicating that they likely have stronger executive control function, the ability of the brain to prioritize one thing over another at any given moment. “When the two [sides of the brain] work together, you tend to get more engaged in what you’re doing, because you’re not worried about what you’re not doing,” Dr. Spiegel says.For similar reasons, it doesn’t seem to work so well for people with bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or schizophrenia. That's because these illnesses act on the parts of the brain that help you pay attention, making it harder for sufferers to focus hard enough to actually achieve a state of hypnosis.Because of all this, a hypnotherapist will usually first conduct a pre-hypnosis assessment to see where a patient lies on the hypnotizability scale and whether or not they can be hypnotized at all, Dr. Spiegel explains.While it’s not right for everyone, there’s lots of room for hypnotherapy to be adopted by even more people as a compliment to traditional treatment, especially for those suffering from complex conditions like IBS or chronic pain. For these conditions, Western medicine is sometimes just not enough, Falissard says. “People are searching for something less conventional, less biological.” Only time will tell if hypnosis really can be the answer.