Changing habits

How does the brain work? What makes it change?

Most people will at some point in their life come through a behaviour or habit they have that limits their life. Whether it’s using food as an emotional crutch, having a bumble bee phobia, biting their nails or even smoking. A lot of the time, we simply need to learn to live with those, but sometimes therapy is necessary when those bad habits get too debilitating. But how does therapy help?

When you look at the brain from a neuroplasticity perspective, I believe it is quite important to target the right therapy. A lot of issues and patterns have their roots in our past, and a lot of the time the first step towards healing is to actually understand where and when those patterns got created. Perhaps one of your parent was quite critical and as a result you developed a people pleasing behaviour or a fear of getting into trouble. Perhaps your parents paid more attention to one of your siblings than you and you developed a core belief that you are not loveable nor worth being loved.

Traditional therapy or talking therapy can be of great help in order to identify the discomfort and where it comes from. It can also allow emotions to be released instead of being stored in the body and later create depression or illness. However when does it become useful to move to the next level? What happens to the brain during those extended talking therapy sessions?

Neurons that are used frequently develop a stronger connection where those almost never used frequently die. But what happens when a neuro connection gets stronger? What does that concretely mean? Norman Doidge explores in great extent the power and structure of our brain in his book The brain that changes itself and if you’re interested in neuroscience I strongly suggest to read it. But for now let’s look at the impact of talking therapy when it happens over a few years.

As I explained in a previous post, when we revisit traumatic events from the past, we reinforce the neuroconnections associated with that memory. Which in turn reinforces the negative emotional impact and strengthens the behaviours and patterns that were created as a result. Take the example of a phobia; imagine you’re sitting in your psychotherapist office talking in great length about that fear, say for example around spiders. You go into details on where it first started, or how strong it is and how often you have it. As you describe those emotions, how are you likely to feel? you may notice your heart start pounding or you start sweating again. And would happen if at that time you were to spot a dark shadow in the corner of the room? yes, you would probably jump on your feet and scream because you might have believed it was a spider. Simply because in that moment your neuro-connections around that phobia have been triggered and reinforced, recalling and deepening every single emotions and reactions associated with it. So how do we change?

I believe there is a point where dwelling on the issues becomes detrimental and not useful. Once we’ve understood the root cause and the impact it had, we need to heal the negative emotions and learn more useful and empowering new behaviours. The brain learns trough repetition and new habits, whether they are behavioural or thinking habits, are installed through being repeated consistently. The same way you learnt how to drive or ride a bike by practicing, we can practice new behaviours and thoughts processes and allow them to become automatic and replace the old unuseful ones.

And of course the million dollar question is how do you do that?

Once you are aware of those unwanted habits and understand where they come from, the first thing I suggest is to look at the negative emotions that stem from past events and heal them if needed. That will clear the field so to speak and prevent those memories to recreate the neuro-connections you want to get rid off. And you can heal those emotions using any kind of solution focused therapy such as Hypnotherapy, NLP, EFT or EMDR to name a few 🙂

Then I would suggest to look into the behaviours and thoughts processes that came along those emotions and practice changing them implementing new unconscious strategies. You can use CBT or NLP for example, as it is essential to understand that healing the past sometimes needs to be combined with a “new training program” for the brain to make sure your behaviours and thinking also reflect your change work.

That functional change happens through creating new neuro-connections and consistently practicing them to ensure their permanence. The brain learns very quickly and I really believe, having seen it hundreds of times with my clients, that it is possible to change life long issues in just a few months. After all, how long did it take you to learn to ride a bike? Why would learning a new behaviours or thought process should take any longer when it’s processed by the same brain?!

Having your cake and eat it at the same time

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you want something but there’s a part of you that gets in the way? Such as having lots of work to do but procrastinating on social media instead?! Or being on a diet and not being able to resist that chocolate cake?! I certainly do! (especially the chocolate cake one…)

Isn’t it intriguing that we do things that we know aren’t good for us and yet we do them anyway? It’s as if there was this part of us that we don’t control but seems sometimes to be in charge of our reactions and emotions…

There’s a brilliant NLP process called Parts Integration that addresses those inner conflicts. One of the things I really love about this process is how imaginative and elegant it can be. I have mainly seen this technique performed quickly, as it is indeed possible to resolve that type of conflict swiftly. But I found that by giving it a more meaningful approach, the changes my clients were getting were more profound, more significant.

I was working once with a person who suffered from travel sickness and found it very debilitating as he had always dreamt of being an airline pilot. We started to look into the part of him that was producing the symptoms and he realized he had created this part when he was a little boy. He had been stuck in a traffic jam in a car with his dad who was verbally very abusive. As a child he found this situation so unbearable that his unconscious mind started to develop this physical reaction as a coping mechanism. I must say It was actually fascinating to see such an example of mind-body connexion…

So when my client started to understand where his issues came from, it produced a very deep shift and he burst into tears, remembering the despair and pain he had experienced as a child. But as we progressively unravelled the thread of his subconscious, he recognized this part of him was only trying to protect him, and then he was able to develop some compassion and love towards himself. I was very moved by how this person managed to connect deeply with the child within, and I discovered how NLP can sometimes be connected with some other models of therapies, such as Transactional Analysis in this case. And I realized that through helping people to connect and communicate with the deep parts of themselves they’ve been rejecting for years, some amazing changes can take place that go beyond a simple conflict resolution.

My client called me a few weeks later, thrilled to announce he had started his training as a pilot as he was no longer experiencing any of the symptoms he had been suffering from during the last 30 years…he’s today working with one of the biggest airline company and I will always remember the face of the boy in tears in front of me as he was reconnecting with such an important part of his history…

So I’m wondering, what inner conflict are you currently experiencing that is getting in the way of what you want to achieve?

Counselling or NLP therapy?

Why would you choose NLP therapy rather than counselling or psychotherapy?

Most clients I see in my practice bring up issues that could very well be treated via traditional talking therapy. Such as stress, anxiety, low self-esteem or even depression. In most cases, it only takes a few months for their symptoms or issues to be completely solved using integrative NLP and hypnotherapy processes. So how come it generally takes much longer with traditional talking therapy?

The main focus of counselling or psychotherapy sessions is on the problems. Where they come from, what caused them, what are the emotional roots as well as analysing the impacts they have in one’s life. However, once you’ve done this work, where do you take it from there? How do you go from understanding the root causes and impact of your issues to solving them? Who has ever stopped smoking, lost significant amount of weight or cured a strong phobia by only talking about it?!

In my personal experience of counselling, after having analysed the ins and outs of the issues I’ve been often told “You can’t solve your issues; You can only learn to live with them” and the following sessions then become focused on learning the coping mechanisms to do so. However I strongly disagree with that statement. Those are beliefs that were appropriate perhaps in the early days of therapy, but nowadays, with the incredible development of new approaches and alternative therapies, I don’t believe there is such thing as an impossibility to resolve an issue. Don’t get me wrong, it might only be a belief, but at the end of the day, what is most useful? To believe you can’t resolve your issues and you merely have to live with them and reduce the damages they have in your life, or actually believe there’s a way to totally free yourself from them? I know what my clients who completely recovered from chronic fatigue, M.E or depression would say…

Counselling and Psychotherapy can be very useful however. Sometimes people don’t feel happy but they have no idea why. In those situations, it can be extremely helpful to get the support of a qualified therapist to shed light on what is causing those negative feelings. And sometimes as well, talking for the first time about traumatic events to a therapist can be extremely relieving and the first step towards healing.

However, even if analysing and understanding one’s issue is an essential initial part of the recovery process, it has never made the issues fully disappear on the long run. It’s like saying that when my car broke down a few weeks ago, simply knowing that the clutch wasn’t working any more because it was rusted was enough to magically make it work again ; Or that I needed to learn to drive the car without it. I obviously needed to do something about it, go to the garage who has the tools to repair the car…

On the neurological level as well I believe it is crucial to have a different approach towards our issues. The brain adapts itself according to how we use it (that’s called neuroplasticity) and when you keep talking about your issues every week for years in your therapy sessions, you actually reinforce the neuro-pathways that were created at the time of the issues. As a result, the emotions and the behavioural patterns that are associated to that neuro-connection keep being reinforced on a weekly basis. In other words, the more you think and talk about something painful, the worst you will feel. But if you keep talking and thinking about it on a regular basis, how can you expect those emotions and patterns to disappear?

However with NLP and other solution focused therapies, the emphasis is put on solutions and change. Once you understand where your issues come from and you’ve explored their root cause, you then need the tools to solve them. And because of how the brain works it is also essential to mentally rehearse the new emotions and behaviours that will occur as a result. In NLP jargon this is called doing some future pacing.

All those new approaches help rewire the brain in a much more useful manner, instead of reinforcing old patterns and issues, and as a result I’ve found that it is no longer necessary to spend decades in therapy to start freeing yourself from the past and start living your life the way you truly deserve to.