5 Strategies to Break a Negative Pattern Recognize your Patterns

We all have a few negative habits, whether it’s due to some childhood issues or simply the lack of willpower to resist temptations. Not all negative habits are the same, though, as some can influence your life more than others. This depends on how much they actually cost to maintain in terms of time, money, and energy. However, once they start affecting your life in a noticeable way and turning into frequent patterns instead of occasional slips, that’s when you have a problem. The sooner you address this problem, the sooner you can fix it – and here are five steps that should help you do exactly that.

Recognize your patterns

First things first, to change those negative patterns, you need to recognize them. Take a look at your daily habits and think about things that you’d like to change. Is there something that you keep doing and feeling guilty about afterwards? Is there anything in your life that you keep complaining about? To change your patterns, you need to know exactly which patterns you want to change. And you need to be honest with yourself. People with harmful habits tend to make themselves look like victims by making up different excuses for their behaviour. So, admit to yourself that you have a problem, and you’ll make the first step toward fixing it.

Know why you should change

Once you recognize the negative patterns in your life, you need to fully understand why you need to break free of them. You need to be aware of how those bad habits affect your lifestyle. Therefore, think about how you feel after you spend hours drinking, playing video games, gambling, or similar. Do you know what addiction definition is, and how much you’re missing out on by wasting your time on habits that don’t benefit you in any way? Sure, you can always say that those things make you happy, but the happiness you feel from alcohol, smoking, and similar addictions are very short-term, while the negative consequences can last for much longer. So, again, stop making excuses, accept the reality of your problem, and choose to change.

Imagine your life in the future

Imagining who you will never be if you don’t allow yourself to reach your full potential can be a scary thought. However, it might be just the thought you need to snap out of your illusions. We all have those “if only” moments, but when it comes to addictions, those moments can turn into lifetime regrets. Therefore, don’t let yourself reach old age only to think about what your life could have looked like if you had changed some things sooner. Instead, think about your future now – think about what it can be if you start making the necessary changes today. Do you like the person you could be? After all, there are no permanent labels in life, and who you are today does not have to be you tomorrow.

Stuck Thinking

If you are making the same mistakes over and over, it may be because you are thinking about it in the same way. And because you are thinking about it in the same way, you treat it the same way. This, of course, leads to the same results.

Possible solution: Think of someone you know who would deal with your issue easily. What would they do differently? This is a great way of accessing your creative mind. Something which seems impossible can suddenly seem easier when you think about it as if you were someone else.

Secondary Gains

For many people, secondary gains are an important mechanism in why they stay stuck. Secondary gain is usually not something people are consciously aware of e.g. generally the person is not being consciously manipulative or faking (the distress/impairment is still real).

Sometimes there are benefits to a problem that you are not consciously aware of and these can keep you stuck and frustrated.

Using a variety of therapeutic techniques CBT, NLP and EFT with the integrative of hypnotherapy render it a highly successful way to identify and understand behavioural traits that might be causing and maintaining the client's depression. Cognitive Hypnotherapy gets to the root cause of the depression problem and changes the perception patterns. EFT empowers the client to feel calm in control and manage negative emotions.