In the second of our series on Behavioural Psychology in Hypnotherapy, we are going to look at habits: how we form them and how we can break the ones we do not want.
Rewiring Neural Pathways: How Hypnotherapy Affects the Brain
Just as strength training can improve your body, targeted therapy delivered by a professional can help your brain work better for you. Hypnotherapy techniques such as those described below can help form new connections between neurons, making it easier to adopt positive behaviours.
Brain scans have shown that hypnosis can alter activity and connectivity within the brain. This is especially useful for controlling emotional responses, changing habits, and reinforcing more constructive patterns of behaviour.
MRI scans reveal that hypnosis can reduce activity in the brain’s fear centres while enhancing the prefrontal cortex—an area associated with decision-making. A therapeutic programme that helps clients associate negative behaviours or difficult situations with calmness and positive emotions can significantly enhance this process.
How Do We Form Habits?
Habit formation is… well, a habit. It’s a behaviour that becomes automatic because we repeat it regularly, often without conscious thought.
Typically, there’s a trigger that sets off the behaviour. This could be a certain time of day (do you always light a cigarette after a meal?), an emotion (do you reach for a drink or a cake when you feel stressed?), or a particular place (do you feel energised when you arrive at the gym?). These triggers can be pleasant or unpleasant, and they can lead to behaviours that are either beneficial or harmful—ones you may wish to change.
After the trigger comes the behaviour, which is often ritualised too. You might drink a particular wine, smoke a specific brand of cigarette, or always use the same running machine at the gym.
Then comes the result. The key point here is that the result is something we desire on some level. It has a positive aspect—even if the behaviour is harmful. You might enjoy the rush from nicotine or alcohol. You might feel the gym provides a long-term benefit that makes you feel good, or it might be the short-term rush of endorphins that makes it worthwhile.
This mechanism applies to both good and bad habits. Therapists often spend a lot of time helping clients break bad habits. However, it’s also useful to encourage clients to reflect on their good habits. What can be learned from those behaviours? Sometimes, a positive habit can be remodelled to replace a negative one.
Where Do Bad Habits Come From?
We’ll explore some techniques for addressing bad habits shortly and in the next blog in the series. But first, let’s consider some of the underlying causes. We need to understand these if psychological approaches—such as hypnotherapy—are to be especially helpful here.
Here are a couple of examples:
- If you grew up in a household where your parents always seemed jolly and fun as they opened a second bottle of wine, you may have developed a subconscious belief that drinking is a positive or necessary part of socialising. If you are struggling to control your drinking, or if it’s affecting your health or relationships, it may be time to confront and revise that belief.
- Or suppose you’re trying to build a good habit, such as regular exercise, but you grew up in a household where your father was rarely around because he was always training for marathons. In that case, you might have some subconscious resistance to overcome.
Building on the positive
Our memories, beliefs, and the experiences that have shaped our character all matter.
When using hypnotherapy to address bad habits, it’s often most effective to pair the breaking of a negative behaviour with the formation of a new, positive one. This creates a sense of progress rather than just loss—an approach that fosters a more successful mindset.
The focused, relaxed state of mind induced by hypnotherapy is ideal for identifying behavioural patterns and discovering effective triggers for change. A trained hypnotherapist may use techniques such as visualisation, where, in a state of calm focus, the client imagines themselves in situations where they no longer perform the unwanted habit.
Positive belief in alternative behaviours can then also be introduced. For example, a client who wishes to drink less alcohol might visualise themselves at a party holding a glass of mineral water, feeling relaxed, happy, and in control. The therapist might suggest that, because they are sober, they are more then usually perceptive and sharp. They might respond to others with wit and empathy or notice someone across the room they’d like to engage with—and approach them with confidence. In this way, not drinking becomes associated with success, happiness, and self-control.
The hypnotic state is also a great place to explore and address the triggers behind bad habits. In our earlier example, if a client drinks before social occasions due to nerves, teaching them relaxation techniques can be extremely helpful.
A hypnotherapist may use a variety of techniques. These include:
- Visualisation, as mentioned above, where the client imagines themselves in new or challenging situations without resorting to the bad habit.
- Regression, where clients are guided back to earlier experiences that may have given rise to unwanted behaviours.
- Reinforcement of positive behaviours, such as through anchoring, where a specific physical action serves as a powerful reminder to avoid a negative behaviour or stick to a positive one.
We will look at these techniques in more detail in the next blog.
Contact Me
I hope this overview has helped clarify how information is processed during hypnosis and its implications for therapy. Feel free to reach out with any questions or let me know if there are topics you’d like me to explore further.
Coming Next
Next time, to sum up our short series, we will get down to the nitty gritty and look at Integrating behavioural principles into hypnotic suggestions