Can Hypnotherapy Help With Giving up An Unwanted Habit? New Year's Resolutions

Can hypnotherapy help with giving something up?

Every January we’re encouraged to reinvent ourselves with a New Year's resolution, a new year so new habits and new version of you. New Year, new horizons...And every year, by late January or maybe early February, many people quietly let go of their resolution, often with a sense of feeling bad about themselves. Some people even use the phrase ‘Failed February.’ So why do we sometimes find it hard to give up a habit we don’t want? It isn’t because we’re ‘lazy’ ‘weak’ or ‘unmotivated’ it’s actually because of the way we humans develop habits.

As we know, habits can be both useful and unwanted and both are closely linked to memory, particularly a type called implicit or procedural memory. This part of memory allows behaviour patterns to run almost on ‘autopilot’, without much conscious thought.

A good example is driving a familiar route, maybe a route you’ve driven more times than you can count. You’re able to change gears, steer, respond to traffic, and know when to turn left or right almost automatically, without much conscious thinking at all. Because these actions are habitual, your brain is free to focus on higher-level decisions. You don’t have to think about how to drive because it’s firmly stored in your memory. Contextual cues play a role here too. We sit in the driver’s seat, place our hands on the wheel, and our hands and feet ‘do their thing’. Contextual cues are one of the reasons giving up an unwanted habit can feel hard, this is because our brain notices the context, learns the pattern, and once it’s repeated often enough, it’s as if the brain has a simple rule,

‘When X happens, do Y.’

Now imagine applying that to an unwanted habit. It isn’t that someone bites their nails because they think ‘I will bite my nails now.’ To a habitual nail biter, it feels like it just happens, and then they often feel cross with themselves when they notice they’ve done it again.

The same applies to other unwanted habits such as smoking, vaping, or comfort eating. Each behaviour is often linked to a specific situation or contextual cue, like waking up and going downstairs to make a cup of coffee, and that routine becomes the cue for the first cigarette of the day.Maybe it’s finishing a meal that becomes the cue for going outside to vape.Feeling stressed at work might make us more vulnerable to craving biscuits or chocolate, because that’s what we’ve done before to help manage stress.

Even sitting in a particular chair at a particular time of day can quietly trigger an urge, perhaps it’s the chair where we always sit at the end of a hard day, feeling tired and stressed, and where we ‘treat ourselves’ to some chocolate or other sweet treat even if we’re not hungry.

That’s why people sometimes say things like,

‘I could give up smoking… except I don’t think I could manage without the first one in the morning'.

Or

‘When life’s going well, I don’t think about chocolate, but when I’m stressed, my willpower goes out of the window.’

They’re not talking about the habit as a whole, rather they’re talking about the individual cues their brain has learned to respond to.

This is a good point to talk about willpower.

Willpower can be unreliable, not because we’re weak, but because of the way it fluctuates. It drops when we’re tired, stressed, hungry, or emotionally overwhelmed. Unfortunately, those are often the very times unwanted habits show up most strongly. Those are the moments we reach for the biscuits or light a cigarette.

So what actually does help us stick to change?

Research suggests lasting change is more likely when we make changes smaller, taking one manageable step rather than attempting a giant leap. A ‘one step at a time’ approach tends to make goals feel more achievable.

One helpful strategy is linking a new, wanted behaviour to an existing routine using a simple plan

‘After I do X, I will do Y.’

For example

‘After I finish a meal, I will make a cup of tea and sit in the lounge watching TV’ whereas previously the routine might have been finishing the meal, making a coffee, and going into the garden for a cigarette or vape. By changing the pattern, and therefore the contextual cue, we take a small but meaningful step towards breaking the unwanted habit.

Sometimes it’s easier to change the environment than to rely on willpower and motivation alone.

Another important factor is how we respond to setbacks. When we treat setbacks as information rather than failure, it makes a big difference. Instead of blaming ourselves, we become intellectually curious and ask ourselves

‘What worked better for me before this?

‘What one small adjustment could I make next time?’

This turns setbacks into useful feedback rather than reasons to give up or feel that we’ve failed.

Can hypnotherapy help?

Hypnotherapy may help support the process of changing an unwanted habit by helping people focus their attention on what works for them, rather than on how much they dislike the habit itself. It can help people practise new responses to contextual cues, explore different ways of managing those moments, and feel better about themselves rather than feeling bad for having an unwanted habit in the first place. A more positive mindset can support motivation and persistence.

This is a solution-focused way of working, emphasising curiosity and possibility rather than dwelling on problems. Dwelling too much on problems can sometimes reinforce the belief that change isn’t possible.

There’s a well-known quote, often attributed to Henry Ford,

‘Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.’

A new year doesn’t require a new brain. Sticking to a New Year’s resolution just needs a shift in our mindset and becoming more curious about our habits and how they work, and, importantly, a little kinder to ourselves about how change really happens.

That’s the solution-focused idea.

Refs.

1. Habits and Goals in Human Behavior: Separate but Interacting Systems

Wendy Wood, Asaf Mazar, and David T.Neal

2. Addiction: Motivation, Action Control, and Habits of Pleasure. Roy F. Baumeister and Amber Cazzell Nadal