One of the most useful metaphors in hypnosis, psychology and psychotherapy is people have unconscious and conscious minds. It’s not a scientifically accurate model because there is no mind to be found though in psychological and therapeutic straight talk we all easily get the gist of this powerful concept.
The conscious mind is everything we are conscious aware of, including thoughts, volitional movement and in this instance the ability to resist powerful unconscious urges such as ‘eat that extra sandwich’ or ‘do the exercise later”.
You will almost certainly have heard one of your friends or perhaps even yourself saying something like “It’s like I have no control over what I ear. I know it’s not helping me lose weight but I can’t stop myself.”
Here we can explore the formation and reformation of habits or ways of behaving and how hypnotherapy can greatly assist in creating new ones and utilise the conscious unconscious mind metaphor to explore how.
LEARNING YOUR HABITS FOR GOOD OR ILL
When we learn anything genuinely new, there is considerable conscious effort involved in internalising a new skill. We all have done this in learning our native tongue, walking and mastering zips and laces. The more internalised a skill becomes ( lets call these unconscious skills ) the more of our conscious attention we can use on other tasks and the more the learned ‘skills’ become unconscious.
Unconscious skills, such as bike riding, driving cars, responding a certain way to a spider have their own real estate in our brain structures and are to some extent hard wired into our behavioural patterns. That is what makes them both challenging to change and for the good ones very useful to have mastered.
We all have habits that we have created over time. And how are habits created? Most are formed very simply through much repetition with either some perceived reward to doing the behaviour or the avoidance of punishment.
THE WEIGHT GAIN SCENARIO
Now lets explore this idea in relation to weight loss and maintenance of keeping to a certain, healthy size.
People who have tended to struggle maintaining a healthy weight, unless there is some medical or genetic condition, which is rare, are eating too much of the wrong stuff and doing too little to burn off the extra energy.
Many, many people have a hankering for sweet carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes. Carbohydrate gives us pretty immediate energy which is turned into glucose which powers our cells. Carbohydrates also not unsurprisingly can elevate a negative mood and improve concentration to task.
We have little reward centres in our brain that ‘light up’ and help us learn certain habits. The main ones in the brain are the Nucleus Accumbens Septi and the Ventrel Tegmental Area, which both are doperminergic pathways. Both of these are involved in all addiction or much more accurately the seeking behaviours which power addictions.
Our unconscious mind, unless it is educated and updated will continue to operate the seeking patterns of over eating and eating the wrong food quite happily while you can feel almost helpless to stop overeating and or eating the wrong foods.
Addressing the why you choose overeating and eating the wrong combinations of food ( the ones that promote fat storage ) is a great place to begin transforming your life. A necessary second step is discovering a deeper motivation than “I want to lose weight”. It’s is exploring genuinely how your life will be different and what are you honestly willing to do to recreate your habits.
WANT TO LOOSE WEIGHT? – IT’S RELATIVELY EASY!
Actually loosing weight is relatively easy. Begin any new ‘diet’ ( I really dislike that word ) and for a while, staying motivated you will begin to drop some pounds. Now add this to some exercise and you will be flying.
I wonder if you have done this before? It worked for a while and then you stopped your new eating regime? Maybe you got stresses and reverted to old habits and maybe stopped going to the gym?
KEEPING THE WEIGHT OFF can as any yo-yo dieter can attest to is much more challenging. Part of the solution is deeply understanding how some food combinations will be more likely to promote fat storage other like eating fatty foods without the presence of carbohydrates does not promote fat storage!
Another crucial aspect is using hypnotherapy to begin the process of changing old habits and keeping deep motivation to help you stay focused long term on the real reasons why you want to lose weight and those deeper reasons are hardly ever “I want to lose weight”!
It is likely you will require more than one session to positively transform your attitude and psychology so please avoid the one session wonder-fix hope because to make a long term transformation it will require effort from you to go beyond the yo-yo diet miracle that never happened and for you to take charge of becoming who you want to be.
When you are honestly willing to make real change, with effort and support, please do get in touch. I offer a completely free telephone consultation to discover how we can work together to help you transform your life.
Call Nigel on 0770 481 8467 to arrange a free consultation now. North East, Hexham and Newcastle Hypnotherapy.