Breaking Bad Habits and Sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions with Ericksonian Hypnosis

Reach your goals with Hypnosis!

For many of us, the new year is a time of reflection and resetting. We use the opportunity of a brand new year to cultivate ideas and dreams for a brand new us. Whether we hope to eat healthier, exercise more, drink less, reduce stress, change our spending habits, whatever the case may be, the new year is a great time to set new goals and intentions and to go after what we want. But for many of us, New Year’s resolutions only last for a few weeks, maybe a month or two, and then old habits tend to creep back in, leaving us feeling the same as we did the year before. So how can we effectively break bad habits and actually accomplish our New Year’s resolutions beyond January and February? How can we shake our old mental programming and create new healthier habits and reach our goals for the upcoming year, into March, April, May, and beyond?

What is Ericksonian Hypnosis?

One method to break bad habits is through the use of hypnotherapy and in particular Ericksonian Hypnosis. Milton Erickson was a psychiatrist and psychologist who developed a very unique form of hypnotherapy, working with the unconscious layers of the mind to change habits and patterns of behavior. Dr. Erickson believed the language of the unconscious mind was imagination and metaphor and so he would use stories, metaphors, riddles, even jokes that the conscious mind might not make sense of but the unconscious mind would absorb and understand. By reaching this deeper layer of the mind, Dr. Erickson was able to change behavioral patterns and habits of his patients. 

How Ericksonian Hypnosis Can Help Break Bad Habits 

The Ericksonian method uses subtle suggestions rather than direct commands, allowing for the receiver of the therapy to relax and for their unconscious mind to take over. Using this subtle and less direct approach, Ericksonian hypnotherapy can help people to change their sleep habits, work through addictions, reduce stress responses, lower anxieties and fears, work through trauma and grief, and more. Because many of our daily behaviors are rooted in past events and traumas that have impacted our automatic responses to events and situations, it is our unconscious mind that we must access in order to address these responses and effectively change them. 

Whereas other forms of hypnotherapy are direct and authoritative, which can create a state of resistance in the mind, Ericksonian hypnosis is permissive and accommodating, encouraging and allowing for a sense of self-realization and safety for the unconscious mind.

If you are struggling to make real changes in your life, and you wish to make your New Year’s resolution last beyond the end of February, Ericksonian hypnotherapy may be right for you. This subtle and respectful method has helped many people throughout the world and the Ericksonian