Hypnosis - The Bad Habit Solution

By Gayle North, Positive Change Coach

"Hypnosis is considered to be one of the best tools to access, mobilize, and actualize human potential."  

             -  Dr. A.M. Krasner,  author of  The Wizard Within

If you have decided to make positive changes in your life? Is it time to escape the hassle of a bad habit like compulsive eating or smoking or anger responses to triggering words ot situations? Or maybe it would be a good time to improve yourself acceptance and self confidence.

If so, CONSIDER HYPNOSIS. You can use hypnosis to ignite and augment your personal "can-do-it-power".

Here's what you need to know about hypnosis.

First, your mind has two levels, your conscious mind and your inner genius, your sub-conscious mind. Your conscious mindis aware of approximately 5 or 6 pieces of information at any point in time. In contrast most researchers agree that the subconscious can process millions of bits of information every second!

Because of this capability, your subconscious is an expert multi-tasker. It is constantly managing your body functions in partnership with your autonomic nervous system. The reason you don’t have to tell your body to breathe or to keep your heart beating is because your sub-conscious mind is monitoring all of these operations within your body. The autonomic nervous system is run by your sub-conscious mind. It makes sure you’re your body breathes, pumps blood around your body, and manages the chemical factory that allows you to move and experience emotion.  It is your auto-pilot. It literally runs your life for you.

Another function of your sub-conscious is the cause of the struggle you may encounter when you want to change an old habit. Your sub-conscious has been building habits for you perfectly since the day you were born and they are deeply embedded out of reach of your conscious mind now.

You conscious mind is useful when you are learning to drive. You have to think, look in the mirror, change gears, use turn signals, turn the wheel, etc.. Once you have it all down pretty well, the little conscious mind downloads the information into the powerful sub-conscious mind, and driving becomes easy and natural. You hardly have to think about it anymore. Your driving skill helps those things became automatic habitual behaviors.

Any time you create a new behavior or thought and repeat it three, four, or five times, the unconscious mind takes it over to make it an automatic resoonse.  It says, “Aha, I’ll do that job for you so your conscious mind doesn't have to work so hard". That behavior comes on board as a habit in the sub-conscious. Some habits are useful, like driving a car, getting up at a certain time in the morning.

Some habits, like smoking and overeatingbecome useless or detrimental. Almost everything you do is an unconscious habit. You are basically a robot controlled by the habits already stored in your deeper mind. The way you brush your teeth or put your shoes on in the morning are automatic for you.You could say that you are hypnotized to behave and respond in all of these ways!

Your Unconscious Protects All Habits! You can try – and you probably have tried to change unhealthy habits with conscious will-power. But the far more powerful unconscious mind will protect these habits along with the useful ones. Otherwise, a person could forget how to drive on the way somewhere, or forget how to swim in the middle of a lake. It is a survival mechanism. This is why a battle goes on between the conscious and the unconscious mind when we want to change a habit.

Think about habits with food: When you were small, did your parents say, ”Eat everything on your plate - there are starving children in the world?” Most of us heard it a few times. And so here we are – years later- and we’re still doing it even though it may no longer be a good thing for us.

Lets look at smoking. Most people try smoking when they are young. Some of us persisted through the coughing, sputtering, dizziness, and burning eyes – not to mention the awful taste – and repeated this behavior until the unconscious mind said, “OK, let’s make it an automatic habit.”

From that moment on you become a smoker. Even if you say to yourself, “I will not smoke – I will not smoke”, you find yourself wanting to reach for one because the conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg and the unconscious mind is the like the iceberg itself! It is bigger, stronger, and far more powerful. When ever you have conscious will-power versus unconscious imagination - the imagination always wins.

Hypnosis is A Powerful Tool for Change. The reason why hypnosis is so powerful for changing unconscious habits and behaviors is because you don’t have to consciously try over and over again to think a certain way, or behave a certain way. Hypnosis makes it instant. It makes the change automatic, because it offers the ability to communicate directly with the unconscious mind – the place where all the habits are imprinted.

Myths and Misconceptions About Hypnosis

“I’m afraid I cannot be hypnotized.”  Hypnosis is simply a state of relaxation.  I often say to clients before a session, “Don’t expect to feel hypnotized, just expect to feel deeply relaxed.   Hypnosis is a familiar feeling. This is why when people ask, “Can I be hypnotized?” I tell them ANYONE can be hypnotized because we are all going in and out of trances all day long. 

For example, have you ever been at a stoplight and suddenly you hear this “honk-honk” and then notice the light  is green?  You had drifted into a relaxed state which is the alpha brain-wave state which is a state of light to medium hypnosis.  Hypnosis is something you already know how to do.

 “I don’t want anyone to control my mind.”  This is a classic fear.  Because people have seen old movies and stage shows, and sometimes it seems as though the person is under the control of the hypnotist.

People you see in stage shows volunteer to be silly because they have a

desire to entertain. They know very well what is going to happen and they want it to happen.  The hypnotist cannot make them do anything they do not want to do.  The hypnosis relaxed them enough to overcome their fears of doing what they really wanted to do.

You can be confident that any instructions that conflict with your ethics, morals, values, or beliefs would be quickly filtered out by the deeper structures of your mind.  The real value of hypnosis is that IT CAN HELP ANYONE DO WHAT THEY REALLY WANT TO DO.

Is hypnosis safe?  There was an 18 month British government investigation into hypnosis after a lawsuit was filed against a stage hypnotist by a schizophrenic.   The case was dismissed and the government concluded that hypnosis is 100% safe. 

Does hypnosis work?  YES – Hypnosis works if done competently and if the client is wanting the change for his/her own reasons.  It does not work well when people feel forced to change by a doctor or spouse. 

The American Medical Association approved hypnosis as a viable treatment in 1958 and since that time many important scientific research papers and books have been written on the effectiveness of hypnosis.  Dr. Dednroth MD did a study published in 1968 on 1000 people using hypnosis for smoking cessation. After 18 months he found that with his method, 94% had remained non-smokers. 

Further improvements have been made in the methods recently by combining the best of traditional hypnosis techniques with the fairly new science of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and other empowerment technologies.  We can now offer this high success rate for STOPPING SMOKING.

If you want to make positive changes in your life, why struggle?  Consider taking advantage of the wonderful empowerment techniques available today!

Gayle North  offers Personal Coaching for Positive Change using recently developed empowerment technologies to clear mental and emotional blocks that keep people stuck in unhealthy habits and prevent them from performing at their highest potential  in school, sports, relationships, work and finance. Call 406-837-1214 for your free hypnosis screening appointment.