Change seems difficult, which should seem odd, if you think about it. You know what you want, you know what you need to do. You commit or resolve to get it done. And then – what happens?
New Scientist magazine begins an article on ways of stopping smoking with these words, “Hypnosis is the most effective way of giving up smoking, according to the largest ever scientific comparison of ways of breaking the habit. Willpower, it turns out, counts for very little” (Matthews, 1992). Willpower – a commitment of the rational faculties – is the normal way we try to make changes. That’s what New Year’s Resolutions are all about: Resolution.
Yet resolutions usually fail. Williams (2010) notes, “The first two weeks usually go along beautifully, but by February, people are backsliding and by the following December, most people are back where they started, often even further behind.”
The key is that emotion, not information, drives behavior. People generally know how to achieve typical resolutions like exercising, losing weight, stopping smoking, or getting out of debt. More information is not the key. In fact, in a meta-study of 381 studies involving 48 ways to beat alcohol dependence, Hester and Miller (2003, p. 19) found that providing education was the least successful of all approaches!
Take stopping smoking for example. Everyone knows smoking is bad for you (it even says so on every package sold). Telling a smoker, “You could get emphysema or lung cancer” is not new information. Moreover the solution is simple – just don’t do it. The behavior looks entirely voluntary. Smoking does not “happen” to anyone. You have to go to the store, spend money to buy cigarettes, carry them around with you, take them out, open the package, put one in your mouth, and light it. Everything about that looks volitional – and a rational solution is to simply say, “Just don’t do any one of those steps and you will stop smoking.” Yet smokers know it is not that simple, and neither are the other resolutions.
Why? Because even though the behavior looks voluntary it does not feel voluntary because it is driven by emotion. Miller and Rollnick (2002) note that people who are seeking to change are ambivalent. Think about it – people who want to make a change and just do it obviously have no struggle, and people who don’t care to make a change are not struggling either. People who want to make a change but have not done so are the people who make resolutions, and often fail.
One part of the problem is that at an emotional level the behavior provides some benefit. No one smokes to get cancer or overeats to become obese or diabetic. People smoke because they say it reduces stress (never mind that nicotine is a stimulant), and they eat because food tastes good. In other words, there are emotional benefits to maintaining comfortable habits – even ones that are killing you. That is the source of emotional ambivalence: my bad habit is both a problem (I think) and it feels good (emotionally).
Miller (himself a hypnotist, Miller & Rollnick, 2002, p. 172) has developed Motivational Interviewing as a powerful process to facilitate change. He writes:
“How is it that having a single session of motivational interviewing before beginning a course of outpatient or inpatient rehabilitation program can double a person’s chances of abstinence three months later? The person has learned no new coping skills or conditioned responses, and there have been no changes in the ‘actual’ external contingencies operating in the person’s life.” (“Competing Motivations,” Miller, 1998, para. 5)
In other words, the process is not about new information – but how does it work? “Whatever it is, it seems to involve a sudden shift in meaning… In another sense, it is as if the person steps outside the self for a moment, to see himself or herself from another perspective.” (“Competing Motivations,” Miller, 1998, para. 4)
Real change is not fundamentally about information, cognition, willpower, or resolution. Change is the result of a profound emotional shift in meaning. Hypnosis is a process for emotional change.
At Watermark, consultations are always free. We can work nationwide and worldwide via phone and video teleconference (for instance, Skype). For your free consultation or to ask a question, please contact us at http://watermarkcolumbia.com/contactx.html
Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/watermarkhypnosis
Hester, R.K. & Miller, W.R. (2003). Handbook of alcoholism treatment approaches (3rd ed). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Matthews, R. (1992). How one in five have given up smoking. New Scientist, 1845. Preview retrieved from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618450.700-how-one-in-five-have-given-up-smoking-.html
Miller, W. (1998). Toward a motivational definition and understanding of addiction. MI Nordic. Retrieved from http://www.motiverandesamtal.org/miwiki/Toward%20a%20Motivational%20Definition
Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2002). Motivational interviewing: Preparing people for change (2nd ed.). New York: The Guilford Press.
Williams, R. B. (2010). Why new year’s resolutions fail. Psychology Today. Retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail