Re-education is the process of unlearning something and relearning it in a way that you find beneficial to you. For example, over the course of your life, you may have learned to respond with anger when someone fails to agree with your point of view. This may have resulted in a lot of angry moments over the course of your life and, perhaps also damaged relationships and lost opportunities.
At some point, you may decide that want to stop reacting this way and you would rather react with curiosity instead of anger when someone disagrees with you. Despite this decision, you discover that it’s harder than expected to make this transition from reacting in anger to reacting with curiosity.
So you try to exert willpower and present moment awareness to make this transition happen. On the days when you are fully present and feeling good, you succeed; however, most of the time, you fail and continue to react in anger. What gives?
The reason that most people are unable to make fast, smooth and seamless transitions from established, well-worn behaviors to new ones is due to a few neuroscience principles:
Neurons that fire together, wire together
It’s an established fact in neuroscience that neurons which continually work together by firing signals at the same time become associated with one another and form a neural superhighway in our brain.
For example, if a certain person, place or event continually elicits a sense of fear inside you (e.g. every time you walk into your home, a family member aggressively makes a derogatory remark about what you’re wearing or verbally assaults you about where you’ve been), a neural superhighway will form in your brain so that when you think or imagine that person, place, or event, the familiar feeling of fear will suddenly fill your body even though you are not directly encountering that person, place, or event in that moment. The same synapses are simultaneously firing because your brain has learned with repetition that these two things go together.
This neural superhighway is responsible for all of the good and bad habits in our lives. Everything from smoking to overeating to nail biting to exercising are habits that have formed because of repetition and the association of two or more neurons in your brain through the process of firing their electrical signals simultaneously.
Change the pathway, change the behavior
In order to change a habit, you must first replace the old neural superhighway with a new neural superhighway that supports the new behavior you want to establish. This happens by repeating (over and over and over again) the new thought pattern and desired behavior while simultaneously being in an elevated emotional state until, eventually, the old neural superhighway deteriorates and those neurons stop firing together while the new neural superhighway strengthens and replaces the old.
This transformation can happen slowly over time or very quickly, even instantaneously. Has anyone ever revealed information to you that shocked you so completely, you were never able to perceive that person or situation the same ever again and a new association had been formed in your mind permanently?
Or do you know of someone who was traumatized by a dog incident as a child and because of that one intense experience, has a debilitating fear of dogs? How is that kind of overnight change possible?
Change = Emotion x Repetition
The ability to change is a direct function of the magnitude of the emotions you are experiencing while performing the behavior or having the experience and the number of repetitions of the behavior or experience you engage in.
So, a neural pathway can be formed over time, a little bit at a time, by a person repeating a behavior over and over and over again while in a relatively neutral emotional state or, alternatively, a neural pathway can be formed instantaneously by a person doing something once but in such a heightened, amplified emotional state that the behavior becomes part of their identity immediately.
The chart below shows the hypothetical correlation between number of repetitions and emotional state. The higher and more amplified the emotional state, the fewer number of repetitions needed to create a new neural pathway. The neutral the emotional state, the more repetitions needed to create a permanent change in behavior.
What does this mean for you?
So, if you are someone who has been struggling with eliminating a bad habit, one of two things may be happening:
Problem: Every time you have the opportunity to perform the new behavior instead of the old one, the emotions driving the old behavior are more powerful than the emotions surrounding the desired replacement behavior. So you keep falling into the same old behavior patterns.
Solution: Identify two powerful reasons that you must change and describe them vividly to yourself in writing. One of these powerful reasons should be positive and describe a future benefit to you of changing and one of these powerful reasons should be negative and describe a future loss of devastating proportions that would result from not changing.
The reason you are describing these two powerful reasons in writing is because you need as much clarity as possible on why these reasons matter to you in order for them to work in your favor.
Further, just to be clear, you are not making a list of benefits and drawbacks and you are imagining and describing each future moment independently (not at the same time). You are taking moments in the future that you can imagine vividly and then describing them as if you were trying to convey the details of those moments to an artist who was going to realistically paint them on a canvas for you.
For example, you want to describe what you’re wearing in those future moments, who you are with, what you are doing, where you are doing it, and how you are feeling. You want to imagine and describe these future moments in such detail that you can practically feel the ground under your feet in your imagination and sense the breeze against your skin or the smell of something sweet.
And you want to write down every single little detail that you see, hear, feel, smell, etc. for each of these future moments. Create a vibrant and vivid word picture that moves you and captivates you as you write it and as you read it back to yourself.
Your goal with this exercise is to awaken your desire to change and experience that amazing future benefit to yourself and compel yourself to avoid that awful, painful future negative consequence of not changing.
Pain versus Pleasure
Absolutely everything we do in life is to avoid pain and experience pleasure. Period. Dot. Everything from how hard we work to how little we exercise is the result of our innate human compulsion to pursue pleasure and prevent pain. Even the bad habits that are literally killing us such as smoking, overeating until we throw up, etc. are actually attempts to experience pleasure and avoid pain.
What has happened over the course of our lifetimes is that the bad habits have become inextricably linked with pleasure and the idea of letting go of these habits have become synonymous with pain and loss. Meanwhile, the replacement habits that we know are good for us have not been connected with pleasure in a believable way in our minds and instead, actually represent a loss to us of the supposed benefits and pleasure associated with the bad habits currently in place.
The way to change our habits permanently is to reverse the association of the bad habits with pleasure by creating an association of pain with those bad habits and an association of extreme pleasure with the good habits we desire. This process of reassociating bad habits with negative consequences and good habits with positive outcomes is the process of re-education in action, and by extension, the process of neuroplasticity.
How hypnosis accelerates the re-education process
As many psychotherapists will point out, hypnosis is a modality, just like cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, etc. that can be used to help people see things differently. However, when it comes to behavior change, hypnosis edges out other modalities because of its ability to heighten the emotional state experienced during each repetition of the new behavior desired. The heightened emotional state that can be experienced in hypnosis but is less likely to be experienced during cognitive behavior, etc. serves to shorten the time it takes for new neural superhighways to form and for behavior change to take place.
Hypnosis can be described as a state of heightened mental focus with increased receptivity to suggestions. This heightened mental focus during hypnosis offers the client the ability to create vivid mental images in their imagination and then associate into those images in a powerful way as though they are actually living in that moment first-hand rather than seeing the moment from a disconnected place.
This ability to associate into an imagined event or situation facilitates heightened emotional states and accelerates the change process by decreasing the number of repetitions or exposures necessary for a new neural pathway to become established.
A skilled provider of hypnosis can then repeatedly guide the client’s focus to establish negative connections with an undesirable habit and then establish the opposite: positive associations with the desired replacement habit.
How to do this for yourself
Find a comfortable place to sit and relax. Do not lie down flat because you want to avoid falling asleep. Perhaps a couch, a recliner, or even a comfortable office chair, and then pull out the descriptions of the two powerful reasons you identified for change. Read them again in full.
Next, put them down and take a deep belly breath and hold it for 3 seconds. Breathe out all the way.
Take another deep belly breath and hold it again for 3 seconds.
Breathe out once more.
Do this breathing exercise three more times for a total of 5 deep belly breaths, closing your eyes on the third or fourth breath.
Now, imagine that a warm sensation, like a slow moving gel of relaxation, is flowing out from the crown of your head and spreading over your entire body, starting with your forehead, eyes, ears, back of the head, etc. As the gel of relaxation moves over your entire body, invite each body part to relax by silently repeating the words Relax
Now silently to yourself as you imagine the gel of relaxation spreading throughout your body. Repeat this until you reach the soles of your feet and notice how comfortable and relaxed you may feel.
Slowly bring up the mental image of the negative consequences of your bad habit. Visualize the moment in as much vivid detail as possible. Make the scene as bright and big and real as possible. Make it lifelike and see it through your own eyes. See it as though you are living it right now and feel the pain associated with this scene.
Allow yourself to feel the pain as deeply and viscerally as possible. It’s okay to cry. Crying is part of the re-education process you are experiencing in this moment now.
You are teaching yourself on a visceral, cellular level that by continuing to partake in this bad habit, you are essentially sentencing yourself to this painful fate.
If you can, make the scene even worse, make the consequences even more painful. Speak out loud to yourself and acknowledge that this habit has brought you to this most terrible outcome. Repeat yourself outloud until it feels like complete truth. Put some emotion into it and speak louder and louder so you feel this truth in your bones.
Keep going until you feel spent, like the message has been fully received.
Open your eyes and take a deep belly breath. Hold it for 3 seconds and then breathe out. Close your eyes down again and count down backwards, silently to yourself by 3s from 100 until the numbers fade away and you find yourself sitting quietly, aware of just your breath.
Now bring up the positive future scene you identified in your writing as your reward for changing your behavior. Again, imagine it vividly and vibrantly. Notice all the details and make the entire scene as bright and big as possible. Feel yourself in that moment and perceive everything through your own eyes.
Allow yourself to feel all of the positive feelings associated with this moment of success. You might even find yourself smiling and sitting up straighter, even breathing a little more fully than before. You might find yourself crying again, only this time tears of joy and relief that you made the change. This is all normal.
Make the scene as powerful and vivid and real as possible. Speak out loud to yourself and say something along the lines of, Now that I know better, this is my future. Now that I know better, this is my future.
Repeat yourself out loud over and over and over again until it feels like complete truth. Again, put emotion into it and speak your new truth louder and louder and louder until you feel it in your bones. Keep going until you feel spent and grateful, free and happy.
What to do to keep this feeling of conviction going
If you’re like most people and you’ve done this exercise once, you probably struggled with making the scene vivid, bright and real and, as a result, you probably struggled with feeling the positive and negative emotions necessary to associate powerfully into those moments.
That’s okay. Very few people get this right on the first try. Especially if you’re doing this exercise on your own without a guide such as a professional, board certified hypnotist.
Keep going. Repeat this process over and over again, each time striving to identify one more detail or facet of those scenes and eventually, you will create your own breakthrough and you will feel what you need to feel to make the changes you need to make. A feeling of clarity and certainty and conviction will fill you up and you will know that you have decided to change and you are not going back!
Now, once you’ve had the breakthrough and made the change, it’s important to identity a mindfulness technique that will help you stay the course and remain in a state of conviction about what you have just decided. Different things work for different people: mindfulness meditation, a daily journaling practice where you write down three things you’re grateful for, yoga, self-hypnosis, etc. With a little research and some patient experimentation, you will find what works best for you.
In the meantime, if you have any specific questions about this article or are curious about how to accelerate a specific behavior change process in your life, please feel free to send me a message. I would love to hear from you!