HYPNOSIS LIFE'S *HEAVES : OPINION

IT had been nearly a week, and I hadn't slept more more than two hours a night. It was the summer of 2016, and I had spent all night with my face in my palms, shaking in the bathroom of my Brooklyn third floor walk up.

The 3 a.m. stroll in my neighborhood that my friend had encouraged me to go on with him had the opposite effect of Xanax, and the speed of my anxious thoughts was physically excruciating.

I was in the midst of a new trial of antidepressants - my Lexapro stopped working after seven years    - and I hadn't been engulfed in anxiety-induced insomnia since college, the kind where sleep doesn't exist without the use of prescription sleep aids. I was so tired, but my anxiety made me fear rest.

I made a decision : I'd check myself into a psychiatric hospital. When my friend woke up, I told him my plan, while attempting not to drown in my shame
''Babe, there's nothing with going to a doctor or a hospital,'' he told me. ''If you broke your arm, that's where you'd go.''

Before I left for the hospital, I decided to call my therapist, for her advice. She revealed that she had an alternative treatment idea for me, cautioning me to ''be open''

''You need to go to Joanne. She's miracle worker,'' she told me.
''What does she do? I don't understand,'' I said.
''She'a hypnotist,'' she replied.

Before this summer, I had assumed that hypnosis involved mind control, a pocket watch swinging in front of my face and me acknowledging and me unknowingly word-vomiting my secrets.

But after hitting rock bottom with my depression, anxiety, insomnia and obsessive-compulsive disorder after layoff from my media job, I was willing to try anything.

At that point life had become amalgamation of ''Groundhog Day'' and ''Russian Doll.'' It was an understatement to say that the cocktail of mental health issues I suffered from was suffocating me. Some days, the extra energy I had made my job as a writer easy - people called it hustle, I called it keeping myself sane.

Other days I could hardly get out of my wrinkled T-shirt and queen-size bed. I had to silence my inner skeptic. I was high functioning zombie who had hit rock bottom. so what did I have to lose? I'd be a fool not to give it a try.

What was comforting to me was that research proved that hypnosis wasn't just a woo-woo concept, and that it did, in fact, have effects.

The honor and serving of this very educating post, would continue daily. The World Students Society thanks author IIana Kaplan.