More and more of us use Facebook these days, and it is a convenient means of exchanging news on a fairly trivial level. However, recent experiences have reminded me that there's no such thing as privacy, once you go online. This especially applies to Facebook.
Hypnotherapy Blog
New Year Resolutions Part 3
In this week’s article I’m continuing my discussion of New Year’s Resolutions. Of course, all that I say here applies to any plans you make to change you behaviour, at whatever time of year.
Plans for self-improvement often fail because of what psychologists call the “abstinence violation effect”. A common example is when people are trying to stop smoking. They’re fine for a while, and then for whatever reason they have one cigarette. As soon as they’ve inhaled, they tell themselves- “right, that’s done it! I’ve failed and so I may as well continue smoking immediately as before”.
This is a very mistaken way of thinking, because in reality, self-improvement in most areas consists of gradual change, not “all or nothing”. There are usually lapses along the way. If you have brought up children, or remember being a child yourself, you know that growing up is not one continuous record of improvement. Children often slip back into more immature behaviour, even in their teenage years when they are almost adults. Likewise if you know anything of history, you’ll know how many setbacks occur before a war is won, or a great reform achieved. In World War Two, for instance, it was three years before things really started to go well for us. Some prominent people wanted to surrender, but Churchill’s government had made it illegal to “spread alarm and despondency” by expressing such opinions publicly.
The important thing is to treat each setback as a learning experience. You need to believe that you can make the change, therefore no setback should be taken as a sign that you should just stop trying. Instead, analyse each setback and discover how and why it happened. From this information you can plan how to avoid that situation, or prepare for it if it is unavoidable.
Unfortunately, you can’t expect everyone to support your self improvement efforts. In my next article I’ll discuss the role of other people in sabotaging your progress- why and how they do it, and what you can do to counter their unhelpful influence.