Are you tired of feeling stuck in the same old bad habits? Do you want to live a happier, healthier, and more fulfilling life? You're not alone. We all have habits that we know are holding us back from reaching our full potential, but breaking those habits can be incredibly challenging.

The good news is that changing your bad habits is possible. It just takes effort, commitment, and the right mindset. This blog post will explore practical strategies to help you overcome your bad habits and live your best life.

Recognize Your Bad Habits

The first step in changing your bad habits is to recognize them. You can't change what you don't acknowledge, so take time to reflect on your habits and identify the ones holding you back.

Make a List

Be honest with yourself, and don't hold back. Grab a pen and paper, and list all your bad habits. It might be painful to face your shortcomings, but it's the first step towards making positive changes.

Prioritize

Once you've made your list, prioritize your bad habits. Which ones are the most detrimental to your well-being? Which ones are holding you back the most? Focus on those habits first.

Set Goals

Now that you've identified your bad habits, it's time to set some goals. Goals are essential because they give you something to work towards and help you stay motivated. But it's important to set realistic and achievable goals.

SMART Goals

When setting your goals, use the SMART framework. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, instead of saying, "I want to exercise more," a SMART goal would be ", I will go for a 30-minute walk every day after work for the next month."

Create a Plan

Setting goals is just the beginning. It would be best to create a plan of action to achieve those goals. Here are some tips for creating a plan:

Start Small

Breaking bad habits can be overwhelming, so start small. Don't try to change everything at once. Instead, focus on one habit at a time.

Take Baby Steps

Break your goals down into smaller, more manageable steps. This will make them less intimidating and more achievable.

Be Consistent

Consistency is key when it comes to changing your bad habits. Make a plan and stick to it, even when you don't like it.

Find Support

Changing bad habits is challenging, but you don't have to do it alone. Having someone to hold you accountable can make all the difference. Find support from friends, family, or a support group.

Accountability Partner

Consider finding an accountability partner. This could be a friend, family member, or even a coach who can check in with you regularly and help you stay on track.

Celebrate Your Successes

Changing your bad habits is a journey, and it's essential to celebrate your successes along the way. Take the time to acknowledge your progress, no matter how small.

Reward Yourself

When you reach a milestone, reward yourself. It doesn't have to be anything big or expensive, just something that makes you feel good.

Keep a Journal

Keep a journal of your progress. Write down your successes and your struggles. This will help you see how far you've come and motivate you to keep going.

Understand the Root Cause

You must first understand the root cause to change a bad habit successfully. For example, if you have a habit of procrastinating, ask yourself why you do it. Is it because you feel overwhelmed or anxious? Understanding the reason behind your habit can help you find a solution.

Self-Reflection

Take some time for self-reflection. Consider keeping a journal where you can reflect on your feelings and behaviours. This can help you identify patterns and gain insight into your habits.

Seek Professional Help

If your bad habits are causing significant problems, consider seeking professional help. A therapist or counsellor can provide guidance and support as you work to change your habits.

Replace Bad Habits with Good Ones

One effective strategy for changing bad habits is to replace them with good ones. For example, if you habitually snack on unhealthy foods, try replacing them with healthier options like fruits or vegetables.

Identify Triggers

To replace bad habits with good ones, you must first identify the triggers that cause your bad habits. For example, if you have a habit of smoking when you're stressed, find healthier ways to cope with stress, such as exercise or meditation.

Set a Routine

Creating a routine can help you develop good habits. For example, if you want to exercise more, set a routine for a specific time and day each week. This will make it easier to stick to your new habit.

Hold Yourself Accountable

Holding yourself accountable is crucial for changing bad habits. One way to do this is to track your progress. Record your successes and failures, and reflect on what worked and didn't.

Get a Buddy

Having a buddy can help you stay accountable. Find someone who shares your goals and can provide support and encouragement as you work to change your habits.

Practice Mindfulness

Practising mindfulness can help you break bad habits by increasing your self-awareness. Mindfulness involves being present at the moment and observing your thoughts and feelings without judgment.

Practice Meditation

Meditation is a form of mindfulness that can help you reduce stress and increase self-awareness. It can also help you cultivate a more positive mindset, which can be beneficial when changing bad habits.

Embrace Failure

Changing bad habits is a process, and it's normal to experience setbacks and failures. Embrace these failures as learning opportunities and use them to adjust your plan. Remember, it's not about perfection; it's about progress.

Stay Motivated

Staying motivated can be challenging when trying to change bad habits. To stay motivated, remind yourself of your why. Why do you want to change this habit? What are the benefits of breaking this habit? Keep these things in mind to help you stay motivated.

Visualize Success

Visualizing success can also help you stay motivated. Imagine yourself successfully breaking your bad habit and experiencing all the benefits that come with it. This can help you stay focused on your goal and push through challenging times.

Changing bad habits can be challenging, but it's possible with the right mindset, effort, and commitment. By understanding the root cause, replacing bad habits with good ones, holding yourself accountable, practising mindfulness, and staying motivated, you can successfully break your bad habits and live a happier, healthier, and more fulfilling life. Remember to be patient with yourself, embrace failure, and celebrate your successes.

Breaking bad habits can be challenging, but it's possible with the right mindset, effort, commitment, and action plan. Remember to start small, take baby steps, and be consistent. Prioritize your bad habits, set SMART goals, and find support from an accountability partner or a support group.

Celebrate your successes and reward yourself along the way. Keep a journal of your progress, and be patient with yourself. Changing your bad habits takes time, but it's ultimately worth it.

Don't let your bad habits hold you back any longer. Start today and take the first step towards a better tomorrow. By taking control of your habits, you can live a happier, healthier, and more fulfilling life.

© Zoe Clews & Associates

In cinema, hypnosis is often depicted as some sort of control tool. People fall in love against their will, commit crimes, get brainwashed. Hypnotists are shown as mesmerists who put people on stage and make them quack like chickens or perform other nonsensical tricks. Even though hypnosis is shown in rather ridiculous ways, making it seem like something simply used for fun, there is in fact a useful therapeutic element to it. Hypnotherapy can be used to benefit you either as a standalone treatment or as a supplemental one when paired with other treatments.

• Insomnia and Sleepwalking

Hypnosis may be a helpful tool if you are sleepwalking or having trouble falling asleep. If you are suffering from insomnia, then hypnosis may be the best way to relax and get you in the mood to hit the pillow. Hypnosis may be a very helpful tool if you’re having issues with sleepwalking, staying asleep or falling from your bed. If you have insomnia issues, the treatment can also help you enter a relaxed state so you can sleep more soundly.

If you happen to be a sleepwalker, then you should know that hypnosis can train you to wake up as soon as you’re out of bed, making you avoid the dangers of sleepwalking. You can be put in a trance-like state with verbal cues, something similar to the feeling of being so involved in a movie, a book or something else that you lose track of what happens around you. After hypnosis, you can easily fall asleep.

• Dealing with Anxiety

Relaxation techniques, such as hypnosis may sometimes ease anxiety. Hypnosis is often most effective with people whose anxiety comes from a chronic health condition. This is far more often the case than with people who suffer from a generalised anxiety disorder. Hypnosis may also be able to help with phobias, anxiety disorders where people have intense fears of something that doesn’t ordinarily pose a threat. Hypnosis works to help with anxiety by encouraging the body to activate the natural relaxation response, through the use of nonverbal cues, lowering of blood pressure, slower breathing and an overall sense of well-being. 

• Irritable Bowel Syndrome

The effectiveness of hypnotherapy on IBS is being supported by clinical studies. IBS is an abdominal pain experienced in your bowels, but hypnosis can help alleviate symptoms such as diarrhoea, bloating and constipation among other things. Hypnosis will work through progressive relaxation, providing you with sensations and imagery that soothes the symptoms you’re experiencing.

• Chronic Pain

Hypnosis can also help with pain, especially one that is experienced after surgery, migraines or tension headaches. It can help with chronic pain as well. Conditions like cancer, fibromyalgia, sickle cell disease, arthritis and more can experience relief through the use of hypnosis as well. The treatment can help you cope with pain, getting more self-control over how you deal with it. Studies have shown that hypnosis can help for long periods. 

• You Can Quit Smoking

The use of hypnosis to quit smoking can work best with a one-on-one session with a hypnotherapist. They can help you organise the hypnosis sessions around your lifestyle, so you can address the issue. For hypnosis to work, you need to want to quit smoking. That works in two ways. The first step is to find a healthy, effective replacement for the act of smoking, then you can guide your subconscious into forming that habit and replacing smoking that way. This may be something as simple as chewing gum or any other activity. The second is to help train your mind to connect smoking to unpleasant feelings like a foul smell or bad taste in your mouth. 

© Zoe Clews & Associates

Hypnotherapy, also referred to as clinical hypnosis, is all about focusing on a person’s subconscious and conscious mind to foster behavioural and emotional change. It can be used to treat a variety of different conditions, like phobias, stress and anxiety, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One session of hypnotherapy lasts about 60-90 minutes, while an entire course of treatment can vary anywhere between two sessions for several weeks to months, depending on the severity of the condition and the success of the treatment. 

Main concepts of hypnotherapy 

The treatment revolves around the model of the mind that features a conscious part and a subconscious part. They function differently and work in unison to navigate a person in their daily life. 

• The conscious mind – is where focus resides. This part of the mind is responsible for attention at any time. This means it notes things like lights, sounds, activities and various tasks the person is engaged with. A person can only engage their conscious mind to pay attention to a few things at a time. 
  
  
• Subconscious mind – it contains all of the memories, beliefs, habits and learnings of the past. It is tasked with keeping knowledge on important matters, from very simple ones like tying one’s shoes, to knowing how to speak a foreign language they have learned. It also hides the aftermath of traumatic events and experiences, which, in the case of PTSD, it is within the subconscious mind that painful memories and experiences get stuck. When it comes to hypnosis, it is the subconscious mind that therapists work on. This state of mind is more easily accessible and the therapist can make useful suggestions to it, to help a person overcome their past traumatic experiences. 
  
  

Who is this treatment right for? 

Anyone suffering from past trauma and struggling with PTDS symptoms can easily benefit from hypnotherapy. The symptoms often range from mild to severe and can sometimes persist from mere months to years. That is not to say hypnotherapy alone should be utilised for people with severe symptoms, but it can be a great addition as a complementary treatment. When added to psychotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy, it can contribute a great deal in overcoming the negative symptoms and turning the impact of past trauma around. 

How does hypnotherapy help? 

• Pretty much everyone experiences a traumatic event in their life. That is when the brain’s ‘fight or flight response triggers and kicks the sympathetic nervous system into action. However, oftentimes with PTSD, a person hasn’t properly processed the stressful situation. When they are reminded of it, their fight or flight response triggers again, causing distress without actual need. This is what hypnotherapy aims to address. 
  
  
  • It introduces relaxation – the goal of hypnotherapy is to help the person enter a state of hypnotic trance through complete relaxation. This process acts as an antidote to many of the processes surrounding PTSD. 
    
    
  • Dealing with triggers – during hypnosis, the therapist will identify stress triggers. Sometimes these are non-threatening stimuli, which cause an overreaction. Knowing the triggers, the therapist can then start making suggestions to change the subconscious perception of these triggers and deem them in a non-threatening and non-stressful manner. 
    
    
  • Self-management tools – hypnotherapists often suggest a variety of self-management tools to help people with PTSD even further. This not only leads to effective treatment of the present issue but also recurring symptoms in the future. These tools can include self-hypnosis, deep breathing exercises and guided meditation. 
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© Zoe Clews & Associates

If a large part of your life has been defined as being a parent, you may find it difficult to adjust to life without your children at home. Once they leave the home, you can be left devastated and experience the empty nest syndrome. 

This refers to feelings of extreme sadness and grief over the fact that your last child has finally left your home and moved in to live somewhere else. This may not be a real diagnosis, but it is a real issue for many parents. If you feel like there is a huge void in your life, then you are likely struggling with it too. There are a few things you can do to help yourself feel better: 

• Identify your roles – in your life, you have undoubtedly been a lot of things – a child to your parents, a friend, an employee, a relative and now a parent. None of them is as important as being a parent. And that is a role you can continue following, even if it is not as forefront as before. During this phase of your life, you will have new roles and you will need to pay attention to them too. Perhaps you can be a volunteer, or a friend to your neighbours, or a community member. You can explore what those activities hold for you and find new meaning and purpose. Again, being a parent is still something you can be, just a little different than before. 
  
  
• Reconnect with your partner – shifting the focus on how your life will play out now that your last child is no longer living with you is something that happens. But you can think about the time when you didn’t have children when it was just the two of you with your partner. Now might be a good time to rekindle the flame and make some new memories. You can travel, without worrying about leaving the house to your children. You can have date nights without worrying about a thing. You have more time for yourselves now, so make the best use of it. 
  
  
• Rediscover yourself – when parenting took over your life, you have probably given up on a ton of hobbies and activities that you used to do. An empty nest presents an opportunity for you to reconnect with all of these things. You even have more space in your home for the things that you used to love. Maybe there is something you have always wanted to try but was never able to due to your duties as a parent. Even if you currently have no idea, you can always give something new a try and see how it works for you. It is a great opportunity to explore new interests. 
  
  
• Challenge yourself in new ways – one way to ease the feeling of loss of your child growing up is to find new challenges for yourself. Maybe you have always wanted to redesign a room in your home, and now is the best time to do it. You can even take on something bigger, like volunteering in a charity. Just don’t make any major life-altering decision in the first months after your child moves out. 
  
  
• Don’t check in with them too much – if you find yourself obsessing over your child’s social media accounts or you spend a lot of time worrying about them, you will have a tougher time moving on. You want your child to become an independent adult. You can check in on them from time to time, but remember to give them some privacy and all the space to make new mistakes. That is how they will learn better. 
  
  

© Zoe Clews & Associates

If you have tried dieting and many forms of exercise for your weight problem, but nothing seems to work, maybe it is time to consider another option – hypnotherapy. Many people are sceptical about this kind of weight loss solution because they mostly associate hypnosis with stage shows and cheap tricks. 

However, as it turns out, research points to the effectiveness of hypnosis for weight loss. According to some of the early studies on the matter, people who resorted to this solution lost double the amount of weight compared to those that went without such therapy. It pays to consider it as a viable method for weight loss, especially if you have exhausted other options or found them of little help. In this guide, we will cover a few important points regard hypnotherapy for weight loss. 

Who is such therapy best for? 

Without a doubt, the best candidates for this kind of therapy are the people who resort to unconscious and emotional eating. These are usually individuals who know well what they should be eating and what they should not; however, there is an underlying issue that is stopping them from putting that knowledge to practical use. Hypnotherapy for weight loss in a way is all about teaching a person to have more willpower and rewriting habits, which could be at the root of the problem. 

How does it work? 

A typical hypnotherapy session involves a conversation between the hypnotherapist and their client. Often this reveals some factors, which may contribute to the person struggling with weight. For example, ait may not be their eating habits that are to blame, but rather an emotional trauma, which they are poorly coping with by overeating. This is what lies in the subconscious mind, which the hypnotherapist accesses by putting the person in a state of hypnosis. Once that is achieved, the person being in a heightened sense of awareness, the therapist can make suggestions, to help their client shake some beliefs and emotions about food. This leads to positive change in a person’s mind. So the next time they experience cravings, for example, they won’t reach for the sweets, but will instead have a fruit. 

How long does it take for such a treatment to work? 

There is no straightforward answer to this question. It all depends on the progress you are making and the goals you have. It won’t be long before you start seeing some improvement, even after a few sessions. That is when you need to remember that you should show some perseverance and continue with the therapy. Only then can you reap the rewards of it. 

What guarantees do you have it will work? 

There is no way to 100% guarantee that hypnotherapy for weight loss will work for you. According to some studies, some people cannot even be hypnotized. Furthermore, like many other treatments, this one is only going to work if you are dedicated and truly wish to meet your goal. If there is resistance on your side, you will not be able to change the habits that are keeping you from losing weight. Hypnotherapy is not a form of mind control, unlike some myths depict it. It also requires a person with experience to lead the treatment session, as that is the best way to know it will work. What you can do to improve your chances of success is to find an experienced hypnotherapist and also get in the right mind for this sort of treatment. 

© Zoe Clews & Associates