Habits

This discussion will cover how habits are developed over the years and how awareness of negative thinking can become the catalyst for change. You will learn that habits can be either the ‘chains that bind you’ or stepping stones to success.

For the most part we are unconscious of the habits upon which approximately 90% of our waking life depends; from brushing our teeth in the morning to the manner and time we go to sleep at night.

Habits are tools which serve the important function of relieving the conscious mind for more important activities. Habits are stored patterns of behaviour which serve the needs of the individual. But habits are learned, and are formed from what once was conscious behaviour. Over the years, through repetition, this behaviour has become largely an automatic habit pattern. With the use of hypnosis, it is well to remember that as habits are learned, they can also be unlearned.

Learning habit formations means, then, that habits are learned by practice. Consequently, a negative or bad habit can be replaced, substituted for, and erased by a good or positive habit with practice. This is highly important to remember in connection with the practical use of hypnosis.

The kinds of learning we are considering here stress the organisation of positive behaviour into habits – learned stimulus-response sequences for self- improvement. It is the development of new habit patterns and the changing of old ones through hypnotic techniques and auto-suggestion that we are presently concerned with. And the crucible for change is desire. Let this, too, become a habit.

Using hypnosis to develop a new habit

Under hypnosis conscious activity is greatly reduced, and providing the conscious does not disapprove, the subconscious mind becomes receptive to suggestions. While hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, the experience does not distort or block conscious thought. With the hyper-awareness or concentrated attention which is hypnosis, only the critical areas are subdued and the suggestion becomes paramount.

As the suggestions can never describe completely the complex detail of behaviour that we want to become a habit, we make full use of our imagination to integrate the behaviour habit-attitude patterns into our memory.

This is the process:

See yourself as you would like to be, not as you think you are. The subconscious mind will always accept and respond to the images that you give it, and habit change is perhaps the most important instrument of hypnosis; for habit change means behaviour change, and behaviour change means attitude change. We internalize the good and profitable adjustment to create and maintain constructive habit patterns or formations.

While some habits can be established by a single suggestion, most habits require repetition, generally of successive days, to become effective and permanent. This is largely caused by insufficient information for the imagination to completely structure the behaviour required by the new habit. After experiencing a trial or experiment with the new visualised habit, again under hypnosis, we recycle the original suggestion, expand on the image, to more deeply install the new habit. This process of trial and spaced repetition is to be continued until we find ourselves performing the more desirable habit we want.

The subconscious mind resists changes of existing habit patterns, whether they are good or bad. The most effective way to persuade the subconscious to submit to change is through the process of comparative reward. If the subconscious has two or more habit patterns to do the same job, it will select the most self- rewarding habit to use.

The process of changing a habit by hypnosis involves suggestions of a new habit, completion and integration using the imagination and establishing a reward value exceeding that of the old habit. This means, essentially, a sales job to the subconscious mind on the many and varied benefits of the new habit. To do this we picture ourselves in our imagination successfully executing and performing the new with a warm glow of success, satisfaction and elation. It is generally not necessary to extinguish the old habit by hypnotic suggestion, as this comes by a natural process of forgetting through misuse.