8/4/2019 NLP - Wesley Anderson - Pattern Interrupts

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Wesley Anderson Doctor of Clinical Hypnotherapy Serving Atlanta Georgia

Secret # 1 Pattern Interruptions

The human brain learns habits, that is patterns of behavior,throughout a lifetime. A great many of those habits are useful andworthwhile. Who would want to have to re-think the matter of getting

 dressed in the morning each and every day?

And then, there are those patterns of behavior that are not souseful. For example, do you know anyone whose eating is triggered by

 sensations of boredom, or who procrastinates important tasks, muchto his or her later sorrow?

If you ask people who behave in those ways if they could dosomething else, typically the answer will be something like, "It'sjust what I do" or "I know better, but I can't seem to make myself

do anything else", or "When I'm in the situation the consequencesjust don't seem to matter. It's later that I give myself hell fordoing it AGAIN".

We all know just how easy it can be to change a habit, and just howhard it can be to change a habit. Moving from one house to anothermeans adjusting thousands of habits,where we sleep, the stores that we shop at, and the route that wedrive home from workare all different. All those habits change in the blink of an eye.

Yet, there are those pesky habits that seem to cling on no matterwhat: that snack after

work, the credit card spending, waiting until the last moment to get 

something done. Willpower doesn't seem to work to overpower those habits for very long.

The good news is that our brain is always fooling us about time.It's always later than wethink. To clarify, here's a passage from Training Trances, by JohnOverdurf and JulieSilverthorn.

In a series of ingenious experiments (Benjamin Libet) demonstrated

thatconscious awareness occurs only about a half-second (500milliseconds) after thetime a stimulus is introduced. This makes sense in that it takestime to develop theelectrical activity which eventually results in conscious awareness.

 Here's theinteresting twist. Even though a half-second elapses from a time astimulus isintroduced to the time we are conscious of it, it appears to us asif no delay inawareness has occurred, and we are accurate at identifying the time

and thestimulus. We make a subjective referral back in time. p.5

8/4/2019 NLP - Wesley Anderson - Pattern Interrupts

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And, why is it good news that there is a little lag time between astimulus, its subjectiveinterpretation and a response? Simply put: in that split second wecan consciously chooseto interrupt our normal (habitual) response.

One of the most highly respected hypnotherapists of our time, Dave

Dobson, teaches asimple technique to interrupt an unsatisfactory habitual response.It's as simple as a sigh.Have you ever thought about the purpose of sighing? Animals andhumans both can beobserved to sigh on occasion, and the value of a sigh is simply torelease pent upemotions. A sigh briefly interrupts the emotions of the moment.

So far so good. Yet there's more to Dobson's wisdom. A key toasserting consciouscontrol once we've sighed and interrupted that pattern for a moment

is, simply to stepback and laugh at ourselves. We give the habit power by taking it,and ourselves,seriously. A simple thing to do is imagine how silly it would be totry to fit into ourfavorite clothes from when we were three years old.

The third step is to simply forget about the old pattern and getbusy with some usefultask. Wash the dishes. Get some work done. Not only does thatfurther interrupt thepattern, it gives us a new one. How much more productive would we be

 

if we had thehabit of interrupting old less than fulfilling habits byaccomplishing some useful task?

Don't accept these ideas on faith. Try them on for yourself anddetermine just howeffective they are for you. And, give yourself enough time to testthese ideas thoroughly.A habit that has been repeated 100,000 times might take quite a fewinterruptions toextinguish completely.