Have you ever wanted to achieve a goal really badly, but you just couldn’t make it work? Perhaps you wanted to rid yourself of a bad habit like procrastination or create positive new habits like exercising regularly and losing weight.  You probably worked very hard at reaching your goal - using all of your willpower to get what you wanted, including self-help techniques such as positive affirmations. 

 

You may even have had some success. But eventually, something failed to work. You lost your feelings of excitement and motivation about your goal, and those positive feelings were replaced with feelings of personal failure.

 

Incredibly frustrating, right?! Well, you’ve got lot’s of company. It’s happened to all of us. The good news is there are techniques such as hypnosis that have been proven by “evidence based” scientific research to be highly effective for a variety of challenges. To help you to understand how hypnosis  can work for you, I need to explain briefly how the mind works and why it sometimes seems to malfunction.  

 

Your mind is like a computer in some ways, but much more complicated and amazing in its ability. The largest  portion of your mind (approx. 95%) is running a lot of “programs” and functions in the background without you being aware of it. I’ll refer to this as your unconscious mind. It controls all of your physiological functions such as your breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure, digestion, nervous system, etc. 

 

Your unconscious mind also has the ability to control everyday tasks just like an auto-pilot computer functions aboard a jet plane. This keeps your 5% conscious mind free to think about the many things that you are consciously aware of -  such as processing this information or solving a new problem. 

 

Think about how overloaded your conscious mind would become if you had to think about how to actually read the words on this page or how to drive a car. You don’t think about it consciously - you just decide to do it and it happens automatically. Of course, you first had to learn how to perform these skills consciously. But after enough practice, the skill became a habit embedded into your unconscious mind. 

 

Unfortunately, not all of your unconscious programming is “installed” with your awareness or intention. In fact everything that you are told or have experienced in your life has been stored somewhere in your brain as a memory. So, your parents, teachers, friends, everyone you have ever met, and all of your various experiences have contributed in some way to the “programs” running automatically in your head. 

 

 As you know, some of your memories are not as significant as others or easy to access. But significant events, especially those with highly charged emotions attached, have a greater effect on your automatic behaviors and emotional responses. 

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For instance, if you had a red-haired teacher in elementary school who yelled at you and treated you badly, you might not consciously think a great deal about them as an adult. But because you were young and highly impressionable, your teacher’s behavior probably hurt your feelings a great deal. Your teacher’s image and negative behavior are stored as a significant event in your long term memory because it’s emotionally charged.