Habit Breaking Hypnosis in Manchester
Nail biting, unconscious scratching, constant cleaning, eating chocolate, alcoholism, smoking, gambling, hair pulling are all examples of bad habits that people have. But how do habits form and how does hypnotherapy break habits?
Humans are creatures of habits. Our mind creates patterns and habits constantly to help us make faster unconscious decisions. You no longer have to think about “how to brush your teeth” your unconscious does it for you, allowing your conscious mind to focus on other things. We all have habits from brushing your teeth, the order of clothes you dress yourself in each morning, your response to flashing police lights, your thoughts when some says “dog” to your response to stress.
Your mind has an award system for some habits such as drinking, gambling and smoking your mind rewards this behaviour and releases positive chemicals that help reinforce the habit. A gambler as an example will feel the same emotional response when they nearly win a bet, as they do when they actually win a bet.
Most habits such as brushing your teeth, getting dressed or stopping at a traffic light are so ingrained that it’s hard to recognise that you in actual fact are playing out an unconscious pattern.
Wide Spread Negative Patterns
Negative bad habits can spread to other parts of your life; The gambler on a losing streak may not pay the bills, which can result long term in becoming homeless. A client of mine always looked on the negative side of life, no matter what the situation was she would focus on what could possibly go wrong. This became limiting to her life and in the end she wouldn’t go on holiday, she stayed in a job she hated and even met up with people she new were bad for her, as the thought of finding new friends seemed to be filled with problems. She came to me, once she had let her problems get out of hand and was depressed and constantly stressed with her life.
Breaking Habits is Easy
A large number of clients who come for hypnotherapy for bad habits have several commonalities. A key commonality is their focus. Many will have an external focus; there focus is on the real world. This means the brain energy is spent on outside perspective rather then internally. When we focus internally our brain helps us sort out the millions of pieces of information we take in each day. We all need time to relax, to daydream, to meditate and to focus internally – a time to recharge our batteries.
To change patterns you need to understand your cue – the cue is the stimulus that causes the habit to happen. When you think about the habit you will often remember a particular event, image or movie. When we visualise something we will associate a feeling to this, smoking as an example may be associated with relaxing. By changing the emotional associated state you can change your response and your habit.
You can change the response to the cue so instead of associating relaxation with cigarettes you can associate disgust, once embedded the thought or seeing a cigarette will only produce the feeling of disgust, which will lead to you becoming a none smoker.
Six Step Habit Breaking Process
1. Think of an unwanted habit you want to delete. Identify a Cue image for this situation that triggers the automatic response.What is it that you respond to? – this thought may be represented as a large bright picture or movie.
2. Now imagine how you would be if you didn’t have this problem, if you were habit free. Ask – how do I want to react instead. See this new you and notice how you respond different to the stimulus or cue.
3. Enhance the detail and the quality (submodalities) of this resourceful image until the image is quite compelling; make it brighter, louder, turn up the volume etc
4. Think about the original CUE image. In the corner of this image place the resourceful image, shrink it so it ends up around the size of a postal stamp (it will now be small and dark)
5. Now you want to make both images change simultaneously, so the large cue images becomes small and dark, and the resourceful image becomes big and bright. Say Swish as you do this. Repeat the swish around 10 times, between each swish make the frame go blank. Each time you swish, speed it up until you are swishing within a second.
6. Test to see if you can restore the old Cue picture, if you find it either won’t come back or the image is dark and dim, then the swish has worked (you should now only see the new picture and feel the new associated state). If not start repeat this exercise.
Chris Delaney NLP Life Coach, Hypnotherapist and Career Advisor is available for booking for One to One Private Sessions, Group Training Sessions and Public Speaking Events
Other People Who Read This Article Also Read:
- Creating Milton Model Scripts
- Google Brain Therapy
- The Neuroscience of Phobias
- Mindfulness, NLP and Hypnosis
Chris Delaney Specialise in:
FREE Life Coaching Downloads
Sponsored Adverts
Train to Be a life Coach and Make Money as a part time or full time Coach
101 Life Coaching Tools and Techniques
Chris Delaney NLP Life Coach, Hypnotherapist and Career Advisor is available for booking for One to One Private Sessions, Group Training Sessions and Public Speaking Events
Venues
DIDSBURY: 4 Birley Park, Didsbury, Manchester, M20 2TL
MANCHESTER: The Triangle, 37 Exchange Square, Manchester M4 3TR
E-MAIL: chrisdelaney7@gmail.com for more information
Chris Delaney 