Why Bad Habits Are Not Your Fault!
As hypnotherapists we work with the ‘mind’, however it is in the brain where our habits ‘good’ and ‘bad’ originate and so it deserves a little consideration.
Your brain is the CEO of a giant complex company - you - whose sole purpose is to keep ‘you’ the company alive and make no mistake it’s very good and extremely efficient at doing so.
There’s nothing particularly magical or mysterious about it and its relatively simple to understand and predict because your brain is just a ‘recognition device’ floating about in its silent black box, a biological engine that takes in information from the outside world via all your senses and then recognising and matching it with behavioural patterns that have been learnt and used before, when similar information was presented. For instance, I know I like chocolate because I have a memory of eating it, and it tasted really good so when I see a chocolate bar, my brain recognises it, remembers that it was pleasurable, and I find I very much want to eat it again!
Habits ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are just the result of a healthy functioning brain.
Consider this, the brain doesn’t care if you’re successful or living a happy contented life. That’s not its main concern. Instead, it spends its time – that’s 24 hours a day - on your behalf assessing situations and marking them as ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. This processing is automatic and fast. It has to be because we may not have the time to consciously decide on a course of action, before being eaten by that large sabre-toothed tiger lurking behind that rock – or at least that was the case thousands of years ago - and the brain hasn’t really changed much since then.
A very long time ago we started out as reptiles. Life was simple back then - eat or be eaten!
Lizards Will Starve, We Just Pop Off to McDonalds
Human and reptile brains actually have a lot of the same parts. Human brains are just a little more sophisticated. Similarly, our brains are designed to act fast to fight, grab, flee and eat in response to the input from our senses. Our environment however is more complex than the stomping grounds of lizards. Whereas they will die when getting too cold and starve when a particular food is unavailable, we can just hot foot it to McDonalds or pop some toast in the toaster.
The human brain is adaptable and ever changing, this is essential because as babies we are born completely helpless. We all start out with the instinct to survive but we can’t feed ourselves or keep ourselves warm we must learn how to take care of ourselves. Our brain, in order to function successfully, needs to change and adapt throughout our lifetime, whereas lizards don’t really learn much because their survival skills are innate.
Your Brain the Sociopath
You long for a healthy happy fulfilled life, yet you just can’t seem to stop imbibing chocolate; ultra processed food; nicotine; cocaine; heroin; alcohol or whatever your poison is.
Why? It’s simple, because your brains primary concern is to keep you alive at all costs and make no mistake it will do anything to do this, including manipulating you by way of DESIRE and PLEASURE aka ‘instant gratification’ in order to get its bidding done. In other words, it drives us towards pleasure and repels us from pain because pain might indicate threat and ultimately death and remember the brains primary drive and function is to keep us safe and alive.
Your brain is not an evil sociopath, you are not self-harming or self-sabotaging by continuing to eat the wrong foods, smoke cigarettes or gamble all your savings away, it’s just getting the job done and doing what it thinks it needs to do. You’re still alive why change? All’s good.
The brain is a body part whose concern is the satisfying of desires and avoidance of risk, goals carried out by hand, tongue, teeth, feet, and genitals. Rationality, planning exetera is not the front runner when it comes to eating, sex, pain, pain relief and so on.” (Biology of Desire by Marc Lewes PHD)
YUM YUM YUM MORE MORE MORE!
Pleasure and Desire are your problem not the substance or the behaviour.
PLEASURE and the anticipation of it DESIRE, or more of it, is your problem NOT the food, drug or activity you are impulsively or more worryingly compulsively chasing. Whether it be the substances themselves or activities mentioned.
What do these things have in common… DOPAMINE.
Dopamine is a brain chemical closely associated with impulsive behaviour.
So, we are driven towards pleasure and repelled from pain because pain can be life threatening and if we are experiencing pleasure, the oldest part of our brain the ‘lizard’ or ‘animal’ brain - no logical conscious processing here - the part that hasn’t adapted to our complex modern world and doesn’t like stress or fear and would much prefer us to feel good by whatever means available. Why? Because then it can take a break and relax…. PHEW. Instant gratification is the name of the game. More More More! Yum Yum Yum! Yes please, give me more….. NOW!
“Brains do what hundreds of millions of years of evolution have determined to be useful, and that includes identifying things that taste good or feel good to us. The brain distinguishes those things from everything else - and propels us to go after them. Psychologists call those things “rewards”. (Ripe peaches, fresh bread, orgasms, cuddles, money, good looks, power. Oh and drugs). Addiction may be the uncanny result of a brain doing exactly what it’s supposed to do” (Biology of Desire by Marc Lewes PHD)
Your Mind
Simplistically your ‘mind’ could be described as the translator or ‘carrier’ of information, interpreting the brain’s particular desire and communicating this to us, by using internal imagery or dialogue to encourage us to carry out the behaviour.
This internal ‘voice’ sometimes referred to in therapy as the AV or Addiction Voice - “Sod it’, I deserve it’, ‘Go on, do it anyway’ - and the internal pictures and images it conjures up (thinking about that lovely cigarette we’re going to reward ourselves with when we get a break or that nice chocolate bar we’re going to buy at the service station) are its foot soldiers. These two can be very powerful often teaming up with their good mate and cohort RESISTANCE. Cunning, highly manipulative and rather irritatingly… ”….resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher one. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an initiative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, or spiritually (work on ourselves in order to resolve a life limiting issue, lose weight etc.). If you’re in Calcutta working with the Mother Teresa Foundation and you’re thinking of bolting to launch a career in telemarketing… relax. Resistance will give you a free pass.” (The War of Art by Steven Pressfield)
We know the long-term side effects from smoking or eating too many of the wrong foods and yet we persuade ourselves we’ll give up tomorrow or stop smoking after our holiday “I can’t think about that now”, “I deserve it”.
Strong emotions can also create a compelling environment towards repeating a problem behaviour.
“….When our experience of the world is fraught with strong feelings - whether attraction, threat, pleasure, or relief - brain change takes on extra momentum. Emotions drive this momentum, focusing our attention and our thinking. Particular emotions call up particular thoughts and behaviours fuelling the feedback cycle.” (Biology of Desire by Marc Lewes PHD)
Blimey. How Can I Change This Then?
You can probably forget all of the above as ‘knowing’ all of this most likely won’t ‘change’ it much, because the behaviour is not located in the logical reasoning part of the brain – the frontal part - it’s lodged further inside.
To stop negative automatic patterns of behaviour there needs to be an effective way to communicate with the part of the brain causing these problems. Just saying to ourselves ‘I need to cut back on sugar’ or ‘I really must stop smoking’ often just gets ignored or even hijacked by the more powerful ‘Don’t worry, carry on today and you can stop tomorrow’.
Turns out tomorrow never arrives, because the conscious or logical part of the brain has ceased to have any power or control over these unconscious drivers. The habit has lodged in our ‘unconscious’, in the same way that certain important bodily processes continue without our conscious involvement. For example, our sense organs - breathing rate, blink rate, digestion, heart rate – these things continue functioning in the background without us having to think about it.
And that’s where I come in - I have specialised in this issue for over 10 years now and along the way I have gained considerable knowledge from the people I have worked with. As a result, I offer a powerful way of working using Hypnosis to change automatic unhelpful behaviours (bad habits), a tried method of communicating with this mysterious part of the brain, using the mind to create an intervention and encouraging the changes necessary for long term health, wellbeing and happiness - drug free! (RueAsher2025)
FOR A FREE CONSULTATION: 01273 470498 / 07989713848 | rueasher@hotmail.com
