 NLP Article 2 - Our Lifestyle Choices
What
is it that causes us to make the same less-than-wonderful choices in
our lives, over and over again? Are we actually making such
decisions from our own free will? Do we sabotage ourselves
deliberately? What is going on!?
All of us engage in repetitive habits that have built up over a
lifetime, and anyone who’s ever tried to deliberately change
a habit will know what a hard job that is to try to do it by
willpower. Talk about frustrating!
However when we understand some simple facts of neurology, we can
breathe a sigh of relief to know that it was not about willpower
– it was about unconscious conditioning!
What do I mean by “unconscious
conditioning”? Remember Pavlov and his
dogs? Pavlov was a behavioural scientist very interested in
how animals (including humans) learned to behave in automatic
ways. He ran a famous experiment on dogs where every time the
dogs were fed, a tuning tine would be rung. He soon
discovered that if the tuning tine were rung, even with no food, the
dogs would increase their salivation rates. They had learned
to associate the sound with food, and their brains had linked a
stimulus (the sound) with the response (salivation).
We humans have many, many stimulus-response associations.
When we hear a special song, we feel a special way. When we
see someone’s hand reaching toward us in handshake, we find
our own hand rising by itself. When we smell onions sizzling
on a barbecue, our mouths water even though we’re not
hungry. When we attempt to leave a half-full plate on the
table, we get the same guilty feeling we got as a kid with the old
“kids starving in Africa” routine from Mum or
Dad. When we think about picking up the phone and making that
call, we get that familiar tightness in our stomach or chest that we
just can’t seem to switch off, no matter how hard we
try. Certain sights, sounds, touches, smells and tastes,
cause us to feel or behave in very predictable ways.
Now you might be thinking, “I can be aware of that and stop
it.” The trouble with that theory is that
there’s too much to be aware of. Your unconscious
mind is running several million responses at any given time.
Your conscious mind can track only about 7 of them over the same
period. That’s a pretty big gap!
The trouble with that theory is also that the unconscious mind has
responded before we even consciously become aware of it. How
do we “stop” something that’s already
happened!?
No, we are not making lifestyle choices from our willpower.
Some things we might be able to control temporarily, but most things
are out of our conscious control altogether.
Now that might sound pretty depressing, but in fact it’s
quite the opposite! Now that we properly appreciate and
understand the true nature of the problem, we can stop wasting our time
trying to apply willpower and actually do something
different. “If you want a different result, use a
different strategy!”
Clearly, we need a strategy that eliminates that unconscious processing
so that it matches what we actually want in life. Many new
strategies are available thanks to advances in Neuro-linguistic
Programming (NLP) and more recently in neurophysiology, such as BMSA
(Brief Multi Sensory Activation).
NLP is a vast field which is related to behavioural science and
encompasses language, perception and performance. We can use
tools from NLP to easily and naturally alter our perception, which
alters our attitudes, which alters our behaviours, which alters our
destiny!
BMSA is a new field having huge impact on the medical sciences,
especially including psychiatry, with its sound theoretical basis in
neurophysiology.
About
the
Author: Christine
Sutherland is the
founder of The Lifeworks Group Pty Ltd.
She is a behavioural therapist, clinical
researcher, and
internationally-published author of a range of reference texts for
health
professionals, corporate managers, and the general public.
You
can contact Christine on christine@lifeworks-group.com.au.
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