If you're not, then you can ignore this post and scroll on.
If you are ready, then here is what you really need to know.
I'm sure you have probably tried so many self-help ways to change your life around.
Yes?
And while it works for a while, something happens, and you fall straight back into that habit or thought pattern that you have been trying so hard to change.
Almost as if you had never stopped.
Does this sounds familiar?
Well, the problem is that you are using your conscious mind to try and change.
Mind over matter?
Yes, well, your subconscious mind does mind and definitely feels the conscious mind doesn't matter.
And ignores you.
Your subconscious mind will humour you all the time nothing is upsetting your balance.
But the moment something comes along that causes what it perceives as a threat to your wellbeing, whether that is emotional or physical, it will override logical thought and drive you straight to that old pattern of behaviour with all those what-if thoughts bouncing around your mind.
And it can be sneakier than that.
If the what-if thoughts have not worked in the past because you used WILL POWER to ignore them, then your subconscious will trigger cravings:
It triggers the craving for a chemical happiness or pleasure fix.
And it knows exactly what you have used in the past to boost the release of dopamine and serotonin whether that is smoking, drinking, or comfort eating.
So before you know it, you have grabbed the smokes, uncorked the wine, or reached for the chocolate bar or family sized bag of treats.
And because you have had a break from these, the chain reaction is so much quicker and stronger.
The release from the problem is amazing.
And your subconscious mind is smugly telling you it was right, everyone else was wrong, and why did you ever give it up when it makes everything right.
But it is still just a bandaid because it will wear off and you will be back in the cycle of needing more and more to get the same release because you become tolerant to all of these whilst it starts to damage your health again.
And even worse, you start to feel guilty, you feel stuck, you feel useless, you feel you have to hide it from everyone who thought you had stopped.
You feel like you failed.
So what is the point of trying?
Okay, enough doom and gloom.
That's your subconscious talking.
It has you in freeze mode.
It likes freeze mode.
In freeze mode, you don't try to be creative or change things.
You do as you are told, which keeps you safe from all the stress and upsets.
So what do we do about this maniacal dictator sitting in your head?
We work with it instead of against it.
And that is where hypnosis and NLP come in: working directly with the "boss".
So how do we approach this?
Like all 7-year-old children (that is the suggested age of your primitive mind but don't tell it I called it primitive or a child or it will get stroppy!) your subconscious gets the hump if ignored and will start objecting very loudly and putting up all sorts of barriers to change.
And I'm not surprised.
After all, it's on duty 24 hours a day, always working, accepting every bit of data from your life, everything you see, hear, feel, smell and taste and it filters it before generalising stuff, discarding what it feels you don't need and paying attention to what it thinks you do need.
And all of this seems to go into two boxes.
The positive box sits on one side with all those happy memories that are stored away.
And then there is the negative box that seems to be dipped in and out of so frequently, your subconscious mind has installed a revolving door.
This is the section where everything is measured against to see whether it is a threat to you and needs acting on.
Anything that is similar to a negative experience sets off alarm bells and the subconscious mind goes straight into fight, flight, or freeze mode.
The positive stuff is "all good" so it can be stored without investigation because it won't harm you.
And that can also include stuff that will harm you but hasn't yet but makes you feel good and stops the immediate threat to you.
Your subconscious mind can be really creative about perceived problems and how to solve them!
Yes, I know this is a gross simplification but it is as good an analogy as any.
And this is how unhealthy habits start and become the go-to when something throws a huge spanner in the works.
So we work with the subconscious mind using neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis to first find the part or parts that are running the pattern of behaviour or thoughts so your subconscious knows exactly what we want to work with.
No ambiguity - the subconscious mind likes to hide there, although we do use ambiguity to bypass critical thinking... but that is another story.
We ask to find the part or parts that are responsible for the behaviour we are wanting to change and we thank it for all the time it has spent working in your best interests.
And having thanked it for all the hard work (we all like to be thanked) we then ask to speak to the creative, problem-solving part of the subconscious mind (again we like to think we are good at what we do and problem-solving and being creative is special, right?).
And then we start asking the subconscious mind to find a new and healthier way to (insert what we want to work on) without the old behaviour.
There is more to it but to go into all the nitty gritty would make this like reading War and Peace rather than a blog post.
Besides… why read it if you could live it…
So if you are ready, let's start working at the level where all change is possible!
