Hypnotherapy has a long history of success in treating bad habits, from nail biting and skin picking to doom scrolling and teeth grinding. On this page we’ll look at how bad habits develop and how hypnotherapy can help reprogram your subconscious mind.
Plus, I’ll introduce you to 7 ways you can start breaking free from your bad habits straight away.
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The human condition – creatures of habit
Humans are habitual creatures…
We mostly get up at the same time each morning (save for the odd lay in at weekends), make our usual way to uni or work, go through the same routines throughout the day, then roughly carry out the the same behaviours each evening. This might involve being slumped in front of the TV, doom scrolling on your phone or playing mindless betting apps, watching porn, or overeating or drinking.
Of course, if you’re more active you might have developed the habit of working out at the gym on a regular basis or going for evening strolls or catching up with friends. Some habits are good…
It’s a good habit to brush your teeth morning and night and to eat regularly to give your body the nutrition it needs. Same goes for exercise or movement; we’re not designed to be sitting about too much. And it’s good to have a wind-down routine each evening to prepare the body for a restful night’s sleep. This too can be seen as a good habit.
But it’s when habits are detrimental to our health and wellbeing that they start to become a problem. Overeating, drinking too much alcohol, smoking, gambling, and over-spending can soon become an addiction rather than a mere habit. We are then emotionally dependant on the activity. We feel uneasy when we don’t indulge.
Just before we explore how habits might develop, let’s take a look at a list of common bad habits…
List of common bad habits…
Take a look at these. Is your bad habit included on the list?
- Nail biting
- Skin picking (on hands, fingers, face, arms, legs etc.)
- Hair pulling (pulling out your own hair, not other people’s!)
- Thumb sucking
- Smoking (cigarettes, vaping etc.)
- Overuse of drugs (weed, ketamine, cocaine, psychedelics)
- Overeating (or regularly eating unhealthy, junk foods)
- Eating too fast/not chewing your food properly
- Skipping breakfast
- Excessive alcohol use or binge drinking
- Spitting (like footballers. Urgh!)
- Teeth grinding (known as bruxism)
- Spending excessive time on your phone (doom scrolling)
- Obsessively checking your appearance in the mirror
- Video gaming or being on Social Media for hours
- Hoarding stuff so you can no longer move in your house
- Swearing (some people can’t string a sentence together without an expletive!)
- Watching porn and/or masturbating
When does a behaviour become a habit?
You might look at that list and think there’s nothing wrong with gaming, looking at your phone or catching up with your friends on Social Media. Indeed, there isn’t. Same goes for the occasional Big Mac or pint down the pub. And who hasn’t watched pornography these days? Like McDonald’s, it’s ubiquitous.
But it’s when these behaviours become too regular that a habit begins to form: skipping breakfast now and then soon becomes skipping breakfast every day. Checking your phone occasionally becomes every few minutes. Masturbating becomes an everyday behaviour (or more than once a day).
When we start repeating behaviours a neural circuit gets established in the brain, especially when ‘feel-good hormones’ like oxytocin are involved. We get a buzz when we win the auction on Ebay or the jackpot on the slot machine. The first couple of beers releases a dopamine rush that tells us something good will happen if we drink another one…and another…
It’s the repetition and the ‘reward’ centre of your brain that lays down the ‘positive’ neural circuit. In other words, when you perform the behaviour the brain expects you to feel better in some way. And you do…until you realise that you actually don’t.
What was an occasional porn watch becomes habitual, almost every night. The occasional drinking sessions turn into all-weekend binges, every weekend. Picking at your face becomes obsessional. And you just can’t leave your phone alone.
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Is your bad habit a coping strategy?
Aside from the involvement of the reward centre and the high you get from carrying out the behaviour, it’s worth considering what might be at the root of the habit. Indeed, this is one thing hypnotherapy helps you to explore…
What was happening in your life when the habit began?
Perhaps there was some sort of emotional upset, such as a break up in a relationship? Maybe the habit started years ago when you saw your parents going through a divorce? What about money worries, health concerns, loss and bereavement? And then there’s trauma to consider. Have you experienced trauma in your life?
As a way to cope with powerful emotions during such times, we develop coping strategies. Picking our skin distracts us (for a while). Getting stoned helps us to put aside problems in our lives. Hoarding stuff might mean that we don’t have to face the reality of loss and the grief that goes with it.
So what starts out as a valiant attempt to deal with a difficult situation (and emotion) soon becomes habitual. It then becomes an automatic response whenever we get triggered in some way.
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Bad habits and the subconscious mind
In order to fully break free from your bad habit, you’ll need more than a change in your thinking. Habits are not controlled by the thinking part of the mind (the higher cortex) but by the subconscious part that responds before thoughts. I say more about this here in my article about the problems with CBT.
In other words, you might not even be consciously aware of what triggered you, but you’re carrying out the bad habit anyway, almost like in a trance state. Indeed, when we are locked into repetitive behaviours (like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) we are hypnotised, focused solely on the behaviour. The rest of the world disappears. We’re on pure automatic pilot at this point…
A brief glance in the mirror and you’re still there 20 minutes later, obsessing over your appearance. Or you bite your nails or pick the skin around them till your fingers are bleeding. And despite telling yourself you’d only spend a minute checking your emails, you’re still sitting at the computer 3 hours later after your attention got hijacked by YouTube or pornography.
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So, what we can say about habits is that they are controlled by the subconscious (or what I prefer to call pre-conscious) part of the mind. Something triggers you (whether you’re aware of it or not) and before long you’re entranced in the bad habit.
Break Your Habits With Hypnosis…
Incomplete loops in the mind
So how come we get caught up in these ‘habit webs’ when we said we wouldn’t? How did we become hypnotised once again?
The answer lies in something we’ve all experienced…
Have you ever had a conversation and forgotten some detail, like the name of someone or a movie title you can’t quite remember? It’s on the tip of your tongue but no matter how hard you try you just can’t recall it. Then, a couple of hours later, it pops into your head.
This is because the subconscious mind kept trawling through its memory storeroom until it found the answer. And it performs this search because it doesn’t like incomplete loops.
Think in terms of smoking…
You make your first tea/coffee in the morning and smoke your first cigarette. Break time at work and there’s another cigarette. After a meal, one more. One thing gets associated with another and it feels a bit odd if you don’t smoke at those times. Certain times, places, situations, or feelings trigger an ‘expectation loop’. The brain expects you to perform the habit and it feels odd if you don’t.
But when we use hypnosis we have direct access to the subconscious mind so that we can modify your behaviour in those triggering situations.
This is how hypnotherapy helps you to truly break free from bad habits. More than just talking about things with a counsellor or trying to change your thinking with CBT, hypnosis will change the subconscious processes controlling the habit.
7 Ways to Start Breaking Your Bad Habit
So let’s get to work!
Here are 7 things you can do straight away to start changing that behaviour and break free from that habit…
1. Identify what triggers the habit
If possible, try to identify what might have triggered the habit this time…
Whilst you’re biting your nails, picking your skin, or indulging in yet another chocolate cake ask yourself what happened earlier that could have ramped up your emotions and subsequent need to indulge in the habit. (Remember what I said above about subconscious loops? When the loop gets triggered we feel compelled to carry out the behaviour).
It might have been a disagreement with your partner. Perhaps something went wrong at work and you felt disappointed. Or maybe something good happened and you still found yourself performing the bad habit. (Yes, even when things go well we can still get caught up in the habit).
The key thing to try to identify is the emotion surrounding such events. What emotion underpins the habit? And if you can learn to ‘be’ with that emotion where might it lead you to? In other words, when else have you felt like that? What does that feeling remind you of?
This is one way of uncovering the history of the habit, our second point…
2. Explore the history of the habit
Most bad habits are carried out so automatically that we’ve lost touch with the original reasons we started doing them in the first place. Thus, ask yourself what was going on in your life when the habit began. There’ll usually be a significant event or series of events, such as parents getting divorced, death of a pet, death of a grandparent, moving schools or moving house, a break up of a relationship etc.
But even if you can’t consciously recall what was happening back then you can allow your subconscious to reveal the history of the habit…
When you identify the underpinning emotion and simply sit with the feeling – however uncomfortable it is – you can engage your curiosity and allow the feeling itself to take you on a journey through your past. Oftentimes, simply being with the feeling for a moment or two will reveal old memories when you felt the very same way.
In therapy we call this an ‘Affect Bridge‘; you use the emotion (the affect) as a bridge to the past. With practice you can do this on your own, though sometimes it’s best done with professional guidance.
In hypnotherapy old memories can be updated and you can break the emotional attachment to them. And in so doing, you break free from the habit. In effect, once the emotional aspects of the memory are dealt with you don’t need your habit anymore.
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3. Assess your current stress levels
One of the problems with psychoanalysis and psychodynamic-type counselling is that session after session is spent trawling through your history.
It’s all well and good to identify the causes and underlying memories and gain insights in therapy, but to spend weeks and months (or even years) looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack is mostly time wasted (and a stack of money!)
Not only that but revisiting the past is contraindicated for things like depression. If you’re feeling depressed, wallowing through your past will only dredge up other woes. You see the world – and your life – through the eyes of depression.
Therefore, instead of spending too long searching through your past, assess your current stress levels. This can easily be done by carrying out an emotional needs audit. It will identify what emotional needs are currently not being met in your life, giving rise to heightened stress levels.
But when needs are met, stress levels fall. And less stress usually results in less compulsion to indulge in the bad habit.
4. Calm the body and mind
If stress and unresolved emotional issues from the past underpin your habit, it makes sense to learn a reliable way to calm both body and mind.
I teach 80% of my clients a breathing technique which I’ve called Zen Breathing. You might already know it as 7/11 breathing. It’s a simple technique that you can learn in minutes to help the body and mind calm down, increasing a sense of control in yourself.
Alongside the development of your Observing Self, you’re able to step aside from any emotions and compulsions driving the bad habit.
5. Mentally rehearse a new response
This is where hypnosis and the use of your imagination comes in…
Like top sports people, if you want to perform well in the game see things going well in your mind’s eye.
Thus, instead of anticipating a repeat of the bad habit, see yourself doing something different. Rehearse in your imagination a rew way of dealing with the underlying emotion when it gets triggered.
But bear this in mind: get calm first before you do any visualising. Do some Zen Breathing for a few minutes and only then mentally rehearse a new response or a new behaviour. Doing this in a calm state will link the new response/activity to a feeling of calm.
Mental rehearsal is something I help all my clients to master in hypnosis sessions. When you’re in the situation for real you feel calm and relaxed because you’ve already laid down the template in your subconscious mind.
Learn Hypnosis in 5 Days – FREE video course
6. Ask yourself the Miracle Question
This could be one of the most important questions to ever ask yourself…
“If a miracle happened and this bad habit disappeared, how would I know? What would be different in my life? What would other people notice different about me? And what would I be doing instead of that old habit?”
Perhaps even more important: how will I feel when I don’t have this bad habit anymore?
The miracle question is a classic solution-focused therapy technique, helping you to fire up your imagination and create a new template in your brain. Explore the possibilities and dare to dream! But try to keep things in context. In other words, when imagining your life without the bad habit, try to imagine specific things, people, places, situations.
The more specific, the better your brain will get what you’re trying to teach it. Otherwise we lose ourselves in words and ideas that are too abstract or vague. It’s no good just saying, “I’ll be happy when I don’t do that habit anymore.” Where will you be happy? With whom? What will you be doing exactly?
7. Use hypnosis to start reprogramming your mind
If you can’t wait to see me in person or online and you want to start breaking free from this habit right away then check out these 15 habit-busting hypnosis downloads.
Regular listening – once a day for the first week – will help you begin to break the habit by reprogramming your subconscious mind.
These downloads are produced by the people who trained my in therapy and I can vouch for their effectiveness. I’ve used them myself as have many of my clients over the years. And all come with a 90-day money back guarantee.
How to break bad habits – summary
I hope you’ve found the info on this page helpful and encouraging. You can break free from your habit with the right help!
The best way to do it involves changing patterns in the subconscious mind as this is where the habit is controlled. (Conscious willpower will only get you so far before the habit returns). And the best way to reprogram the subconscious is through the skillful use of hypnosis.
Carry out the 7 steps above and/or use a habit-busting hypnosis download and you should start seeing a difference sooner or later.
Alternatively, if you feel you need professional help consider booking a Free Discovery Session with me.
