Addictions

Cant live with 'em.

Can't live without 'em.

All human behaviour is only conscious for so long. Once its been done so often, it quickly drops out of conscious awareness and becomes what we call automatic - or subconscious. This means you do things on auto-pilot without having to have the hassle of thinking about it.

It is this human ability to brush your teeth, get ready for work, make coffee, read the newspaper and think about planning your morning all at the same time.

And we've all done that on a Monday morning at some point.

Yes, its a skill.

Yes, its a handicap. But only if you automate programs that don't get you the result that you want. Or worse still - if somebody installs an automatic program in you, that you don't consciously reject (ENTER ADVERTISING AND MARKETING - oooh that was a cynical one, but I couldn't resist.)

Automatic programs are sequences of events that your brain can run without you having to constantly think about them. The classic 'driving a car' metaphor. At first when you learnt you had to think every step out. Ok, now I'm gonna press the clutch. Now, I'm gonna release the gas, change the gear from 2nd to 3rd, wooops, I should really watch the road, and then a little gas....damn stalled!

And we've probably all done that once upon a time, most often talking ourselves through each step. For those of us who DID pass our tests and have been driving awhile can remember this phenomenon and realise now that someone else, or some other part of your brain, runs the driving automatically, so that you can skillfully talk to your passengers, listen to music and think about what you are going to do when you arrive at your destination - all at the same time.

Now ADDICTIONS are just the same. Sequenced patterns of human behaviour that have slipped out of consciousness and gone unconscious (no not to sleep - but into the realm of the brain that handles the automatics.) You don't have to think about how to breathe do you? Yet when I mention that, you may become consciously aware of your breathing and can take a little control but lets face it, there is a part of your brain that automatically controls your breathing. And your heart. And your blood pressure. And your habits.

This is all good and exciting news. Its very straight forward and people all seem to grasp this fact very easy. I was laughing to myself the other day when a client was in an altered state of consciousness (some people call a trance or hypnotised - which I don't often use these very terms) - simply put, their mind was elsewhere consciously thinking thoughts, while we spoke to the clients subconscious mind.

Now, they (the client) had a phobic response to something. What made us laugh was that this automatic (phobias are a ONE TIME learnt automatic program) program had been around for about twenty something years. When we discussed this with the subconscious mind of the patient we got quite a funny reply. The subconscious actually said it had FORGOTTEN why it was doing what it was doing in the first place, and because it felt dumb that it had forgotten, it had just kept up the pretence for so long and continued to do it.

Now we've all heard of multiple personality syndrome and schizophrenia and a lot of you know my beliefs here. Especially on the power of belief (the power of the almighty PLACEBO). Simply having this one conversation with a clients rather humerous subconscious (whether it really existed or was a fantastical hallucination/creation) the belief in what was happening resulted in long term cure. And this is what we like about NLP. IF it works - keep it. If its broke, do something else. Do ANYHTING ELSE.

On a more serious note though, I am compiling research on ADDICTIONS and unwanted HABITS and people thoughts about them. Well, their conscious thoughts anyway. Anybody wishing to assist in research, if they could post their info on the message board, forum or simply email, then that would be absolutely fantastic.

We will print the reports on our findings and maybe package together a new book all about addictions specifically, as that is what we are getting a lot of feedback about at the moment. Especially when researching new and better methods to assist people to gain exceptional results from exercise.

Simply because people would attain greater results by being addicted to good productive behaviors rather than unwanted and bad behaviors like drinking, smoking and not exercising. By becoming addicted to the activities that make you healthier and impact the people around you in a positive way then you are guaranteeing your eventual success at anything. And now we know that positive mental and physical addictions are under our control as much as the negative then we know that we can accomplish just about anything we set our mind to.