Close Your Eyes and Eat Less

One of the teachings of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) is that thoughts are composed of seeing, hearing, taste, smell, and feeling sensations. And, when someone seems stuck in an undesirable behavior or response, it can be simply because they have not used all of their senses in the situations where those undesirable behaviors occur. Or, maybe they left out the resources of one of the senses that would be particularly useful in that situation.

One way of thinking about it is that we have different resources associated with each of the senses. That may seem rather abstract, but maybe a simple example will bring it down to earth and make the idea clear.

A great many of those who are overweight decide when it's time to stop eating by using visual cues. They will stop when the plate's empty, for example. They are not using the body's feelings of fullness as a signal to stop when they are full, so they tend to overeat regularly.

A simple way to test this idea is to simply eat a meal with the eyes closed. Pay attention to the feelings of fullness or satisfaction in the stomach, and stop when there is a feeling of fullness. Typically, there is a substantial amount of food left on the plates of overweight people who try this little experiment.

Simply shifting from visual cues to feelings of fullness to determine when to stop eating can make a dramatic difference in the amounts of food eaten. Of course, it takes a little practice to shift into using the feelings as the stop eating signal, but it's actually quite easy to do.

Craving Red Velvet Cake

I met a man at a public event who told me that he always craved red velvet cake. So I got a bit curious about it, and asked the usual NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) question, "How do you do that?" And, I got the standard answer, "I don't know".

So I asked him a few more questions, and found out that the way he generated the craving was to make a mental picture of red velvet cake at eye level about five or six inches from his face. Mental pictures, internal sounds and dialog along with sensations like warmth, texture, and taste comprise the structure of our thoughts.

It's been discovered that the locations, brightness, size etc. of mental pictures affect the intensity of the feelings associated with thoughts. For example, if one brightens up a mental picture of movies of a happy experience the good feelings may well get stronger. The qualities, like brightness and size that intensify the emotions of a thought vary from one person to another. Bringing a picture closer may intensify the feelings for one person, and not for another, for example.

So, I asked the man with the cravings for red velvet cake what would happen if he pushed the image out one hundred miles in front of him, and locked it in place. Of course, to answer that question he had to actually send the picture out a hundred miles in his mind, and when he did that, he turned and looked at me and said, "I don't crave red velvet cake anymore". He seemed quite surprised.

A few minutes later, I saw the man standing off by himself staring off into space. He was stock still, and beads of sweat were dripping down his face. I got curious again, and went over to him and commented on his watch, to interrupt whatever thought that he was sweating over. Then I asked him what was going on, and he said that he wasn't craving red velvet cake any more, and that he missed it. He'd simply been craving it for so long that he missed the craving when it disappeared. He then said that he was trying to get the craving back, but he couldn't. I suspect it was his intense efforts to regain the craving that caused him to work up the sweat.

Sometimes it can be that swift and easy to eliminate a craving. Sometimes, of course, it may be a bit more involved.

Slim Down by Feeling Heavier?

Using hypnosis to amplify feelings of heaviness when they go into a hypnotic state can actually help a person slim down. The technique has proven to be effective for those who are extremely heavy. For someone who wants to drop just a few pounds or thirty, it is not so useful.

Andy Austin, an English NLP practitioner discovered the technique. Apparently, very heavy people do not feel the same sensations of heaviness while sitting that they feel when standing or moving around. Austin used a hypnotic induction that includes lots of suggestions of feeling relaxed and heavy, and noticed that his obese clients started slimming down just from those simple experiences and suggestions.

Although it seems contradictory that feeling heavy would help someone slim down, the psychology of it is quite interesting. People tend to eat sitting down, and having clients feel heavier while sitting in hypnosis builds a bridge to a different kind bodily awareness while the person is eating, which is a crucial time for someone who wants to slim down. The simple shift in awareness allows them to make different eating decisions.

Most of the time people are acting out of habit. For example, we do not have to think through the whole process when someone we meet the first time offers us their hand. The hand shaking routine is automated. When an automated pattern, or habit, is interrupted or altered significantly it is possible to deliberately build a new habit or pattern for that situation, or for a new, more adaptive pattern to emerge spontaneously. Which is why simply feeling heavy while sitting, a posture that is unconsciously associated with eating, can cause food choices and amounts of food eaten to change for the better.

Martian Anthropologist

On of my teachers used to say that if a Martian anthropologist were to observe a hypnotherapy session, that he/she would report something like "Two humans had a conversation. One talked more than the other one, who looked sleepy for a while."

The communication style called hypnosis is familiar to everyone, although we don't call it that most of the time. For example, when a child begins to believe a parent who repeatedly says, "You'll always be messy and have a hard time finding things", some not so good hypnosis has happened.

When the founders of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) studied the communication style of one the great hypnotists, Milton Erickson, M.D., they noticed how he used his language in specifically vague ways. For example, Erickson might say something like, "As you're reading this now, you may not have even begun to notice how much you're learning about hypnosis."

The vague phrasing allows the reader to easily accept the proposition that he/she is learning something about hypnosis. That idea is considered a "suggestion" by hypnotherapists, which, if accepted, is starting to build a belief. And, that new belief is, of course, that the reader is learning "something about hypnosis".

During a session a skilled hypnotherapist will conversationally start to assist a client to challenge their unresourceful beliefs, and then begin to build new empowering beliefs in their place. For example, the hypnotherapist might ask a client something like, "Have you noticed that you already believe at some level that it's possible for you to feel comfortable while giving public presentations? If you didn't, you would have never come to see me today." It's really difficult for someone who has made an appointment for hypnosis to overcome fear of public speaking to deny that! And, consciously realizing that they really do believe that their goal is possible is a solid step in the right direction.

Using artfully vague language to directly and indirectly suggest resourcefulness, and success is simply one of the dimensions communication of a professional hypnosis session, which can also be though of as just a particularly fruitful conversation.