We get bombarded by well-intentioned advice to quit bad habits – the NHS’s Stoptober campaign for smokers, experts advising us to go teetotal for two days a week, celebrity diets; by now we should all be healthier.

And yet we see the same campaigns every year because people aren’t listening, or they try to quit a habit and fail.

At The Yellow Couch, I work a lot with clients trying to break a habit, often smoking but others too. It can be easy to develop a habit but very hard to change one, so it’s important to approach it the right way for success.

Habits: easy to make and hard to break

We’re familiar with the phrase “practice makes perfect” but that’s not really true. I believe practice makes permanent. The brain’s a complex machine but it’s constantly having to cope with complex situations. Life often follows regular patterns so, when a behaviour needs to be done regularly, it can become imprinted in our neural pathways as a shortcut, through repetition.

Bad habits arise because we aren’t always aware when we’re creating those shortcuts until it’s too late – smoking a cigarette whenever we’re stressed, having a cookie every morning at 11 o’clock, or opening a bottle of wine at home.

Why is it so hard to break a habit?

Health campaigns can fail to change people’s behaviour because they appeal to reason. Habits are wired into the most primitive parts of the brain, areas linked to instinct and survival rather than rational thinking. Being preached at won’t work, even when you do it to yourself.

Habits also come in three parts, described in Pulitzer Prize author Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business”:

  • A cue that triggers a subconscious behaviour. This can be the time of day, a place, the presence of certain people or a sensory stimulus, like a smell.
  • The habitual action itself.
  • The result, which gives you a reward. This isn’t always directly linked to the habit. You may enjoy the rush from nicotine or sugar, but it may be the camaraderie of the smokers’ shelter or relief from hunger by eating a cake that you’re really craving.

Attempts to change behaviour often fail because they only deal with the action.

Finally, past failures make it harder to break a bad habit because your mind can self-sabotage new attempts with negative thinking.

Changing your habits successfully

There are several approaches we can use to reset the mental template that’s causing you habit:

  • Change your routine, your environment, even the people you mix with, to avoid the triggering cue.
  • Substitute a healthier but equally pleasurable result. Chat to people by the coffee machine instead of outside, in the smokers’ huddle. Instead of collapsing with a drink when you get home, ask your partner to be ready at the front door with the dog and go for a walk.
  • See a hypnotherapist who can help you to overcome any mental blocks from previous failures and introduce a more positive, supportive mindset.

The Yellow Couch can help you to beat your habit

Hypnotherapy is a therapeutic technique, a form of neuro-linguistic programming that makes use of your mind’s most receptive level of awareness to help you process negative behaviours and overcome them.

The Yellow Couch is a professional, results-focused hypnotherapy service for introducing a more positive way of thinking to the subconscious mind. We help clients with a range of issues including anxiety, phobias, professional development, confidence, public speaking and quitting smoking.

Contact The Yellow Couch now and find out how you can transform your life.