Hypnosis In The Treatment of Annoying Habits

Do you remember when you first learned to ride a bike, skate or rollerblade? It took so much effort trying to move forward without falling. How about trying to speak a foreign language? You literally have to think about each word in that sentence. Yet once we've mastered a skill, we can easily and effortlessly ride a bike, skate and talk without paying attention to the task. That's because once you've consciously learned a skill, your unconscious takes over the mastery of that skill to free up your conscious mind to be on the looking out for other important things such as pedestrians!

Like any useful skill, a bad habit such as nail-biting, procrastination, smoking and over-eating can be attributed to the unconscious. If the unconscious mind is supposed to protect us and serve our needs, why would it continue to let us behave in inappropriate and often destructive ways?

Well, as hard as it is to believe, those nasty habits once served a positive purpose. The undesirable behaviour was once your best choice of action at the given time in that situation. Your unconscious mind was protecting you from some perceived threat by doing what it thought was in your best interest at that time in response to some emotional, physical or mental trauma presented in that situation.

The unconscious mind is like a robot. It executes tasks; thousands of tasks, but it doesn't make the decisions. Decision making is the job of the conscious mind. The unconscious mind doesn't know that these annoying habits are bad, even if your conscious knows that they're bad. Once a habit becomes engrained in the unconscious, will power (a conscious process) alone can't change the behaviour.

Hypnosis bypasses the conscious critical part of your brain and talks directly to your unconscious. Suggestions are readily accepted by the unconscious mind in hypnosis and the result is the behavioral change you seek. You'll automatically stop biting nails, quit smoking, stop snacking at inappropriate times, etc...

Hypnosis can help habits such as nervous tics, stuttering, nail-biting and any other idiosyncratic behaviour.