Breaking Bad Habits

Why do bad habits like teeth grinding start?

Bad habits like, Teeth grinding, often starts when you are feeling anxious, restless, tired, stressed at work hungry, bored, nervous, too busy, fed up, or when you are trying to concentrate on something important.

You use bad habits to distract yourself, to take a moment out, to think about fewer than six things at once – to make yourself feel better. Grinding your teeth can make you feel determined, competitive and strong. Although it’s usually very hard to remember exactly when and how your bad habit started, chances are that at the time it started, you did get something out of it; it did make you feel better.

Comfort eating is a good example of this – you’ve had a bad day, and you want something to cheer you up – and chocolate or chips (or whatever your own personal weakness is!) do the trick. You enjoy them and do feel better for a bit.

The first time you bite your nails, or pull your hair, it succeeds in distracting you from whatever it was which was made you stressed or anxious. Grinding your teeth probably made you feel stronger, in control, more determined to beat whatever problem was bothering you.

But as you repeat the habit which made you feel better when you first tried it, it brings its own problems. Teeth grinding gives you headache, jaw pain or earache, makes tinnitus worse, damages your teeth and or stops you from sleeping properly. 

Comfort eating makes you put weight on; you’re embarrassed and ashamed that you bite your nails; your family worry about your health because you smoke; if you pull your hair, your head hurts and you are ashamed that patches of hair are missing.

And as the habit becomes more and more of a subconscious action and you don’t even notice you’re doing it, it stops having any affect at all – it doesn’t make you feel one bit better. In fact you feel worse.

Out with the old bad habits, in with the new

Are your bad habits ruining even the simple things in life? Are you frustrated by the one thing you just can’t stop doing?

No matter how small or insignificant your habit, it’s probably causing you a lot of stress and anxiety. Whether you’re unable to stop biting your nails or you tend to consume a glass of wine too many with dinner, your bad habits are the result of repeated behaviour over a sustained amount of time.

Bad habits are difficult to break because they are associated with thoughts and emotions at a very unconscious level. If they were easy to break, people would quit smoking, stop binge drinking, pulling their hair or stop comfort eating, without external help.

Unfortunately, many people still believe that all it takes to break a bad habit is some willpower – as soon as they decide not to do that anymore, they’ll stop. This can cause immense disappointment when reality hits and this feeling of failure is quite often the catalyst for relapse.

Hypnosis Replacing bad habits with good habits

Hypnotherapy is an extremely effective way to re-program your mind to replace bad habits with good ones. At a very unconscious level where your automatic thought patterns are developed, small adjustments can be made using hypnosis and new behaviours established – so that you start to react a way that’s healthier and more rewarding. 

@ Oneness Hypnotherapy we can support you to break bad habits that include the following:

• Stop nail biting 

• Alcohol consumption

• Break free from cigarettes

• Binge Eating & Drinking

• Bruxism & Teeth Grinding

• Hairpulling

• Skin Picking

What kind of bad habit can hypnosis stop?

You can stop this cycle. You CAN control your actions, stop nail biting, stop hair pulling, – you can break your bad habits. This is where hypnosis is so effective.

Any type of habit can be stopped. Most commonly treated are teeth grinding (bruxism), nail biting, hair pulling, smoking, over eating, skin picking, fidgeting, drinking too much caffeine, binge eating (usually eating too much of one type of food such as chocolate, cake or biscuits), binge drinking, and swearing – but the hypnosis techniques used are the same hypnosis techniques that work to break all bad habits.

If you have got to the stage where you really want to break your bad habit, then hypnosis will help you to stop it for good. Hypnosis helps you to break the cycle of stress and anxiety which often cause bad habits to form, so that not only will you finish your treatment habit free, you will also feel generally calmer and more relaxed.

How does hypnosis break bad habits?

Hypnosis can be described as focused concentration and deep relaxation. Rather than subconciously – unthinkingly – indulging your bad habit, hypnosis makes you become very mindful of what you are doing.

This means you notice your jaw beginning to clench and your teeth grinding, or your hand reaching towards your mouth so you can bite your nails, smoke, overeat, or pull your hair – rather than just automatically doing it.

Your bad habit is subconscious so you don’t even think about it or make a choice when you do it – no wonder it is hard to control it!

Hypnosis makes you aware of what you are doing. One of the hypnosis techniques used to stop teeth grinding is a suggestion that whenever you begin to clench your jaw or grind your teeth, you will become immediately aware of it. Even when this happens during sleep, you’ll be aware of it, wake up, and then just fall back into a peaceful sleep again.

It is much easier to stop something when you become fully aware that you are doing it

You can stop this cycle. You CAN control your actions.

Hypnosis reduces stress and anxiety to break bad habits

As well as the specific suggestions which you will be given whilst in hypnosis to help you break your habit, the very deep state of relaxation which hypnosis gives you means that you are far less likely to develop the state of anxiety which leads to your carrying our your bad habit, too.

Hypnosis helps you feel calmer and more relaxed, enables you to manage stress, to feel more in control of your actions and much more aware of them, and to replace your bad habits with a more positive response.

How quickly does hypnosis break bad habits?

You may notice the change very quickly – after just one session of hypnosis. Not everyone can break their habit so quickly, however – it will depend on the reasons you started in the first place, whether or not you are anxious generally, how much you really want to stop.

Because everyone makes progress at a different speed, you should be wary of any hypnotherapist who promises instant success – hypnosis is not one size fits all; what works for one person might not work for another.

Self hypnosis to stop bad habits

Ultimately, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis – the thoughts which you repeat to yourself. The most important part of learning self hypnosis for many people who want to break bad habits is learning to relax, quickly and easily.

Most bad habits like bruxism develop when you are feeling stressed. Bad habits bring the immediate reward of focusing your mind away from the stressful situation, of distracting you, of making you feel a bit better, or more in control. But these habits have a downside – grinding your teeth stops you sleeping properly and is painful; chocolate makes you put weight on, the bitten nails are embarrassing and ugly – you feel down just because you have the bad habit.

The habit isn’t really working any more. The deep state of relaxation which you experience whilst in hypnosis lets you feel better, less stressed and more in control without grinding your teeth.

There are no guarantees that you can be cured in one session.

@ Oneness Hypnotherapy we offer a free virtual or telephone consulation, in order to get to know you and the background to your problem, and to make sure that you feel comfortable we will agree together the approach and number of sessions it is likely to take. Use the contact form below to get in touch.