According to research, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviours
What are habits? According to James Clear “Habits are the small decisions you make and actions you perform every day”. “Your life today is essentially the sum of your habits.
How in shape or out of shape you are? A result of your habits.
How happy or unhappy you are? A result of your habits.
How successful or unsuccessful you are? A result of your habits”.
How are habits formed?
The linking of cue, action, and reward is how a habit is born. Habits are actions that are triggered by cues, such as a time of day, an activity, or a location. They culminate in a feel-good reward that, through repetition, fuses the connection between cue and reward firmly in the brain.
Most habits are based on experience-dependent neuroplasticity. This is a passive process whereby we reinforce habits by doing them unconsciously over and over again, whether they’re good or bad.
So why are habits so hard to break?
When your brain recognizes a pattern, such as a connection between action and satisfaction, it files that information away neatly in the same area where we develop emotions and memories, but it’s not where conscious decisions are made which is the prefrontal cortex. When we’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired the decision-making part of our brain goes offline. That’s why trying to think your way out of anxiety, or a craving doesn’t work. This is why habits are so hard to break, they come from a brain region that’s out of your conscious control, so you’re barely aware you’re doing them, if at all.
Rather than this experience-dependent process, hypnosis gives you access to the unconscious, habit forming part of the brain, to allow you to engage in self-directed neuroplasticity to intentionally to short cut the process to breaking habits and/or to install new ones.
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