What does "bypass conscious awareness" mean?

Conditioned response. Was Pavlov's dog consciously aware of what Pavlov was doing? No. It worked nevertheless. Salivating wasn't particularly beneficial for the dog, I imagine, but the same technique could be used to effect the dog in more beneficial ways.

You know that at one time, researchers believed that dogs did not feel pain, and the noises that they made when you tortured them was actually just the sound of a spring somewhere in their physiology they had yet to identify.

Hypnotherapy for boredom eating seems to be popular. Perhaps there's one for boredom posting.

Ouch... this cat's got claws. You're right though, I'm more procrastinating than satiating boredom though. I ought to be updating my resume and finding a job now. My sister found a new job, and a decent one, and started today. I plan to have one by the end of the week... but procrastination!

I know the feeling well.

Incidentally, they say procrastination is an expression of stress.

Life's full of stress, and mine is no different. Got mouths to feed and bills to pay, people to deal with. I don't exist in some magical place without stress heartache or trauma, nor am I perfect if you think I'm making claims that I am. If you're looking to point out flaws in me, then it will not be difficult, I'm riddled with them.

No just something I learned recently and thought might be a helpful insight.

When I've worked at home freelance in the past I would procrastinate like a mofo, and it created more stress. Kind of a vicious cycle.

Only if you aren't all into procrastinating, or aren't agreeing with yourself about it. Stress is everywhere, gravity itself is stress. I'm not opposed to not being completely productive all the time. You don't want to be a tyrant to yourself. A lot of valuable stuff comes out of procrastination too.

I'm not as familiar with hypnosis as I am with placebo, but with placebo, it seems like belief gets focused on as the driving factor, where expectation might be a bigger factor. That might be a subtle distinction, so let me give an example. If I take a placebo pain reliever for a headache, and after some time, my headache subsides (as it is bound to eventually), I will ascribe the pain relief to the pill, because that meets my expectation. This doesn't account for the entirety of the placebo effect, but covers a big chunk of it. I suspect that some similar mechanism is at least partly involved with hypnosis. Something that seems less mundane, but turns out not to be.