Does Hypnosis for Breaking Bad Habits Actually Work?

Video – Vlog #27

Can hypnosis help you break those unhealthy habits?

Does hypnosis for breaking bad habits actually work?

During this video we explore how hypnosis via hypnotherapy can work.

Script – Vlog #27

David Logan: Hi and welcome to week 27 of The Techno Dinosaur Meets the IT Geek. My Name is David Logan. I’m based here in Annan, South West Scotland. It’s a sunny day. With me today is my partner in crime Willie Nicol. So, Willie, how are you? And, where are you?

Willie Nicol: Hi David, I’m very well thank you. I’m based in Loans, near Troon, South Ayrshire in Scotland.

David Logan: Fantastic. So, in this video I am the IT geek, I’m the guy that helps the home worker work remotely with the right technology. And you, if I’m not mistaken, are the techno dinosaur.

Willie Nicol: Absolutely correct, but I also manage to make a living as a personal development coach.

David Logan: Very good. This week’s question to you. We all have habits good and bad. How does hypnotherapy break down these habits? Can you explain that?

Willie Nicol: Yes, I can David. I’m assuming that you’re talking about the bad habits. This has been discussed before, I think, in vlog number 11. We talked about hypnotherapy and I might be covering some old ground, so I apologise if there is some repetition.

Willie Nicol: Hypnosis is letting people, allowing them, to become very, very relaxed so they are able to break bad habits.

Willie Nicol: For example, hypnotherapy is the therapeutic use of hypnosis for that purpose so if you can say hypnosis is the tool and hypnotherapy is the way you use the tool. So, the therapeutic use of hypnosis for a therapeutic and beneficial result.
Habits apparently can be formed fairly quickly and it’s sometimes not quite as easy to break them. Hypnotherapy is useful in helping us break the bad habits.

David Logan: Break the habits?

Willie Nicol: I say break the habits yes, get rid of the habits, delete the habits. Habits are like behaviours which we adopt, and I won’t go into it too deeply why we adopt these behaviours. We’ve talked maybe before about how people cope with stress by smoking, which is a bad habit – and I can say that as a former smoker.
Or they may deal with a stress through overeating or over drinking or biting their fingernails or whatever. Now, we recognise all these things are bad habits and sometimes we can’t break the habits easily.
So, I understand that you have broken your bad habit of drinking ten cups of coffee a day because you recognise that, that wasn’t a great habit to have. What we do with hypnotherapy is we induce in the subject a deep trance like state.

Willie Nicol: Now I’ve touched upon trance before and said that being in a trance like state is perfectly natural. In fact, we do it all the time, maybe sitting at your computer looking out the window and daydreaming. You’re in what we call in the West of Scotland a ‘dwam’, a daydream, a ‘reverie.’ Where you’re not thinking of anything in particular but you’re kind of in a wee trance.
There’s the other analogy I’ve used before. We jump into our car to drive on a journey we’ve done many, many times before. We kind of do it automatically, in a trance like state, so we reach our destination, we get out the car and realise we’ve no recollection of actually making the journey because we kind of did it on autopilot because we’re in a kind of trance driving state.
There are other cases, for example, when we are engrossed in a book or fixated on a television programme or a movie. You exclude everything else round you because you’re so engrossed or should I say entranced in that activity that you forget about what’s happening around about you.

Willie Nicol: Hypnotherapy is just a much, much deeper version of that and the beauty of hypnotherapy is that the subject becomes so relaxed and so deeply within the trance like state they kind of forget about their habit and they work out other ways of dealing with their habit which are not as, should we say, unhealthy. So, if for example, your go to remedy for stress is smoking, your body automatically thinks “I’m stressed, let’s have a cigarette”. During hypnotherapy we can ask the subject in this trance like state if they could possibly think of another way of dealing with their stress which would be healthier for them.
For example, when they get stressed as we’ve alluded to before, get some exercise, breathing, meditation. Now I don’t suggest to the subject that they do these things. They have to come up with their own solution of how to deal with that behaviour, the stress, in a manner which is more healthy than smoking, overeating, drinking, whatever it happens to be. And hypnotherapy is a really good way of inducing that environment where they can come up with that answer.

David Logan: It’s very simple, it’s breaking that habit.

Willie Nicol: It’s breaking that habit. Now, if you’ve done it through will power, as I say, well done to you. However, had you not been able to break that habit, what would you have done?

David Logan: Kept drinking.

Willie Nicol: Exactly. In the knowledge that this is actually not very good for me, ten cups of coffee or ten mugs of coffee a day. Right, and then you might have thought I need some help to break this habit which is where you would approach someone like me, and I would probably, but not almost always or exclusively, recommend hypnotherapy. Right, sometimes that’s not the most appropriate technique to use but all I’m saying is it’s a very useful technique to help you break a habit.

David Logan: Good, brilliant, fantastic. That’s approaching the end of our time available. I’ll cut you off there Willie. To the viewer, if you’ve got that addiction you can’t break, I’ve got a good tip for you, speak to my good friend Willie Nicol. He’ll be able to give you some good advice and if he can’t help you, he will help you through one of his connections. Won’t you Willie?

Willie Nicol: Absolutely.

David Logan: So, to the viewer thank you for listening. We are looking for questions for myself next week to help Willie. If you’ve got struggles with technology, phones, computers, video technology, give us a shout, drop a comment down below. We are on many of the different social media platforms – YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Please, connect to our YouTube channel, subscribe to it, subscribe button down here. The person, the one hundredth subscriber, we’ve got a session for you, free of charge. So, for now be safe, be healthy, thanks for listening, have a great weekend everybody. Thank you.

Willie Nicol: Yes, thank you David. I’ll repeat that. Stay safe, keep well. If you have any habits you want to break, let us know. Until the next time, goodbye.