You stopped for January, so why can't you stop for good?
I often have people come to me with issues around alcohol.
They tell me that they’ve stopped before, they’ve done Dry January no problem, but they’ve just gone back to drinking too much very soon afterwards.
Why, if someone can stop for a month, can’t they stop for good? How come they are so quickly back in the habit of drinking too much too regularly?
There’s a few things going on.
1 - Dry January, it’s not forever.
They are focussed on that chilled bottle of white waiting for them in the fridge or that night out with the lads on 2nd February. ‘It’s not forever,’ they tell themselves, and they focus on that reward and how good it is going to taste or feel.
So to succeed they need to get to a place where the reward is freedom, where the reward is how good and well and energised and in control they will feel once they are free of any compulsion to drink.
2 - Habits are hard to break. (Using willpower alone.)
If your response to stress is alcohol, if your end-of-the-day habit is a drink whilst you cook the evening meal, if your treat, your reward, your ritual, your social life all involve alcohol, it may be difficult to quit for good using willpower alone.
This is because around 97% of our lives are lived on autopilot, so much of what we do is just done on automatic - it’s an automatic response to a feeling or an event or a time of day.
When you’re operating on autopilot it is hard to have any control because it’s your subconscious at the wheel.
So to break free you need to get rid of those rituals, habits, automatic responses.
Hypnotherapy can help you focus on all the reasons you want to be free, it can help you imagine how good that freedom will feel and how it will affect your life in so many positive ways.
It will help you break the rituals, the routines and automatic responses associated with drinking.
