All of us pick up bad habits. Things that we do that we wish that we didn’t. Some people smoke, others over eat, a large majority of us drink more than we’d like or gamble too much. We all have at least one thing in our life that we wish we didn’t do. So why don’t we just stop doing these things. If we dislike these habits so much why do we continue?
I’ve spoken before about how the mind is split into two parts, the conscious mind and the unconscious or sub-conscious mind. If you’d haven’t read the article I wrote about hypnosis and the subconscious mind I suggest you take a look at that now. In that article I explained how the conscious mind takes care of all the day to day things while the subconscious mind handles everything else.
When you do something repeatedly it becomes what we call a habit. Lets take smoking as an example. When you have your first cigarette it’s just something to pass the time, or maybe it’s a novelty, something that you haven’t tried before. Then you might have a second cigarette, maybe you had it at the same time as the first one, or perhaps you were in the same place, or with the same people. At this point your smoking hasn’t become a habit yet but your conscious mind is already starting to work. It’s remembering that it has done this before. It’s making connections between the situation that you are in now and the situation that you were in before.
|
|
At this point a lot of thoughts and emotions come into play. Are you having fun at the same time as you have a cigarette. Are you enjoying a good conversation? If you are then the brain records these feelings with what you are doing. If you are not having a good time your brain will record this too.
Ok so now you have reached the point where you have a couple of experiences with the cigarette but you can still stop anytime you want. You don’t though, you keep smoking. After a while your conscious mind begins to see a pattern. Your mind knows that at the same time everyday you light a cigarette. Your conscious mind learns and stores this information. This is where the phrase “learned behaviour” comes from.
Your conscious mind has a very specific job description. It works on the day to day stuff, and handles all the mathematical type stuff like rationalisation and analysis. So after a while of doing the same thing over and over again the conscious mind has a quiet work with the unconscious mind. He tells the unconscious mind that he has the same job to do over and over again and doesn’t really have the time to do it. Any chance of some help from the unconscious mind department?
Ever helpful and with unlimited time and resources the subconscious mind is glad to take it off the unconscious mind’s hands. To be honest though the unconscious mind is a touch on the lazy side. He sits in the back office of your brain surrounded by archives and memories. He likes to have his feet up and not over exert himself too much. So he gets this new task sent through to the back office and the unconscious mind thinks “ok how can I make this job easy on myself?” He makes a little autopilot. He has all the information from the conscious mind about when you smoke, how often you do it, how you feel when you smoke. So he records all this information and whenever the right conditions are met your smoking auto pilot kicks in and you light up another cigarette.
It’s at this point that you stop becoming aware that you wanted a cigarette. You just lighted one because you always do at this time. As soon as that autopilot kicks in your smoking changes from something you can control into a habit.
As any of you who have tried to quit smoking knows it’s a lot easier to create a habit than it is to break a habit. That’s because it’s really easy to transfer tasks to the unconscious mind. All you have to do is repeat the action for a few weeks. Sometimes not even that long. Once it’s in the dusty, dark, unorganised back office it can be difficult to get that information back out.
You can focus all your conscious effort on breaking a habit. You can use every ounce of willpower in your conscious mind and still not break through your addiction. That’s because you are now using the wrong part of your mind. Your conscious mind isn’t in charge of your smoking habit any more.
You can use your conscious mind to say no when your unconscious mind tries to kick in your smoking autopilot. This uses willpower which your conscious mind is in charge off. Like the first time round when you refuse your first cigarette your conscious mind records your feelings at the time. If you are trying to break a habit what happens is your conscious mind records your feelings of denial, guilt, and craving. Since these are mostly negative feelings your brain decides that you don’t really like doing these things, and probably won’t want to do this again. The next time you try to stop your smoking auto pilot your conscious mind chimes in and says well you didn’t really like doing that the last time. I’m going to support the subconscious mind this time, I’m not going to give you as much willpower because you obviously don’t have a clue what is good for you. Then each subsequent time you try to not smoke you get a little less willpower.
So all of you who have tried to quit smoking and have failed in the past now know what is going on. It’s not that you are weak minded, in fact it’s because your so strong minded and your conscious mind is just a stubborn old goat that won’t listen to you. So how do you beat habits? Well you go straight to the source. You have a quiet word with the sub-conscious mind, and the best way to do that is with hypnosis.
Tags: addiction, conscious mind, habit, habits, Hypnosis, smoking, sub-conscious mind, subconscious mind, unconscious mind
