Given that the festive season is now out of the way, many of us will turn to our health and look for strategies to make it better.
Over the festive season it is fairly common to overindulge, both on food and drink, and not just on Christmas day. The Christmas events and New Year’s festivities are prime culprits – the results are normally evident on our waistline and when we get on the bathroom scales. It is this evidence, and the knowledge of what we have done to our bodies over the last few weeks, that drives us to think about making some changes. The top three problems that are usually tackled are drinking, weight and, of course, smoking. But, how successful are our efforts likely to be?
The problem is that trying to hypnotherapy for Stop Smoking, reducing the booze and getting motivated to lose weight all require behavioural change. This is something human beings are just not very good at. We have a huge capacity to learn, but virtually no capacity to unlearn. Can you unlearn how to ride a bike, drive a car or even walk? Of course not. So there’s the rub. How does one make these changes – and even more importantly – create a permanent change to your behaviours?
Can hypnotherapy techniques really make the difference?
The answer resides in replacing old thought processes with new and improved ones. Hypnotherapy gives us access to the subconscious, where our behaviours are stored; we can actually overwrite the old behaviours and swap them with the new ones.
Maybe you are in the habit of buying some treats like pastries or sweets whilst you are shopping every week. By making use of hypnotherapy, we can help you to change that behaviour so that the idea does not even cross your mind.
It will be the same process for many behaviours, not just eating and drinking. Changing habits is what we do every day at the Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy. Do you reckon you would find it easier to slim down if you just didn’t fancy those sugary foods any longer? How much easier would it be to reduce your drinking if you stopped using drink to relax you?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could avoid making and breaking the same old resolutions on a yearly basis? That’s what it really means to make improvements at a subconscious level. That’s because making subconscious change is more powerful than a half hearted drunken New Year vow.
Paul White, from The Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy, is well qualified and has many years of valuable experience of eliminating problem behaviours using hypnotherapy in their clinic located in Wallington, Surrey.