The term New Year’s Resolution has come to mean ‘a promise that you break a few days into the New Year’! But there is a way to make commitments to yourself that you can really stick with.
First, if you haven’t already downloaded my free action guide, ‘The 5 Steps to Breaking Bad Habits‘, please do so right now.
Print it out and work through the steps in writing. The act of writing down your thoughts and feelings by hand engages the different parts of your brain – particularly the emotional centres – much more strongly than just thinking about your responses to each of the 5 steps.
When you write, you’ll find that your feelings about the behaviour that you want to change come up to the surface far more readily, and you’re also far more likely to gain insight into why you’ve struggled to change this behaviour in the past.
Digging up these emotions is crucial, because it’s your emotions – usually ones like fear, anger, resentment, self-doubt, guilt, shame and regret – that keep you stuck, repeating a behaviour that you don’t want to engage in, over and over again; and it’s also your emotions – ones like joy, happiness, excitement, anticipation and contentment – that will pull you toward your goal.
You’ll notice as you work through the 5 Steps that I recommend using EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) to neutralise the emotional barriers to change. That’s because it’s the most effective tool for facilitating change that I’ve ever encountered, in over 20 years of practice.
EFT is easy to learn and use, and most people get great results on many issues when using it by themselves. However, sometimes we all need the input of an objective outsider, to help us get to the heart of an issue. Here’s what happened when one of my clients, whom I’ll call Ruben, asked me for help with his compulsive eating.
Ruben is generally a very healthy eater, but found himself unable to say ‘no’ to the free white bread that his workplace supplied him with. He found the bagels particularly hard to resist. He was also battling cravings for a particular type of jam-filled donut, traditionally eaten during a Jewish festival he was currently celebrating. His problem with all of these foods was that once he started eating, he just couldn’t stop. Ruben is not overweight, but he knew this compulsive eating was not good for him, physically or mentally.
I began the EFT session by tapping on his cravings for the jam donut, focusing on the sensory aspects of it that enticed him: the sweetness, the chewy texture, the gooey jam inside… After a few rounds of EFT, having him say out loud, in a really exaggerated fashion, how delicious and irresistable it was, he found that his craving had dropped to zero, and in fact when he imagined the donut now, what stood out to him most was how greasy it was, which turned him right off!
We moved on to the bagel cravings. Again, I asked him what appealed to him most about bagels, and we tapped on the sensory aspects of his craving. Sensing that something else was going on, I asked him what bagels meant to him, or what they reminded him of.
Instantly he found himself transported back, in his memory, to the age of 11 or 12. He was very unhappy and lonely, his parents were constantly arguing, and he had no emotional or spiritual anchor in his life. To console himself, he watched TV for hours each day, eating junk food. He could see himself with perfect clarity, sitting in front of the TV, stuffing himself to stuff his feelings down.
We tapped on feelings that came up for him as he recalled this time in his life: intense sadness, loneliness, desperation and fear that his life would never get better. He could clearly see now that he had learned to overeat to ‘stuff’ his feelings.
We ended the session with some tapping on forgiving his younger self for coping by overeating junk food, because he really didn’t have any other way of handling it all; and letting go of these old patterns as there was simply no need for them anymore.
Ruben emailed me a few days later:
“Since the EFT session I have had this strange reprogrammed feel. As if I am a different person. I really no longer feel interested in those foods! I was [at work] this morning and of course there was the bread. But I didn’t even notice it. I feel a bit weird though as if I am supposed to want it, and my mind tells me, hey Ruben you’re supposed to want that so why don’t you? And I am telling myself that it looks gross. Really really weird. I really don’t want it.”
I am no longer surprised by results like this, as EFT routinely achieves them. But it’s still wonderfully exciting to help my clients experience these dramatic shifts, so quickly and relatively painlessly!
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