Resolving Habits & Behaviours
Smoking, Gambling, Over-Eating, Alcohol and others...
No matter what your unhelpful habit or behaviour may be, please know that it is not a damning judgement of you as a person. Habits are built from behaviours that work, or behaviours that seemed to work for us initially. Every day, you are generally trying to cope with whatever life is throwing at you. As pattern-making creatures, we look for solutions, and we then build our patterns from the ones that seem to work.
However, behaviours that seem to work once, or even several times, often do not serve us well in the long run. Over-eating for comfort, smoking to relax or fit in, gambling to relieve boredom or loneliness, binge drinking to forget our troubles – these all seem like good ideas at the time.
After all, what harm are you doing to anyone else…? But, what harm are you really doing to you…?
What if the key to changing your behaviour lies within yourself, with the guidance and support of an experienced partner at your side? It’s not about will-power, it’s about re-learning patterns, resetting behavioural triggers, and imagining the full picture of a different and better future.
Understanding Behaviours
You may be dealing with unhelpful behaviours yourself, or you may be someone who cares. You may have already tried different approaches, trying one treatment after another.
Why are behaviours so hard to change?
We quickly establish neural pathways in the brain, making it easier to repeat our behaviours. We call this learning.
Sometimes we can learn things that just don’t serve us well in the longer term.
But we can learn new things, and we can overwrite previous patterns, associations and learnings. We can take back conscious control and stop driving on auto-pilot.
If resolving behaviours is about new learning, then it's easy, right? We're all practised at learning from school, yes?
But how many really believe we can easily learn throughout our entire lives? No matter how old, and no matter how long we’ve practised the behaviour we want to change?
The honest answer usually is that we believe ‘old dogs can’t learn new tricks’. The truth (for dogs, as well as people) is that we’re interested in change, we can always make great progress.
Sometimes we need a teacher, sometimes we need additional support and envouragement. Sometimes we need a reward for making the change. Maybe we need to see the consequences of not making the change.
You can be the change you want to see in your own world. We can help you.