Written by: Emma Heywood Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Why it’s so hard to keep New Year's resolutions. Every year the same thing happens, right? You set out on your New Year's resolutions, and the first week of January comes and you do well at first. Then the second week of January comes and you start to slip a bit. Then by the third and fourth week of January, you ask yourself: “Wait, what even were my resolutions again?!”
This is because when you make your resolutions you are forcing and shaming yourself into change. Not only are you forcing this change, but you’re doing it by only using your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is your analytical, logical mind (that controls about 5% of you).
Logically, you know you want to eat better, exercise more, sleep better, or whatever your resolutions are. But your subconscious mind (that controls 95-98% of you), doesn’t care about that change.
Your subconscious mind is your feeling, emotional, and habitual mind. The patterns that are in your operating system, that are in your subconscious, have been living those patterns for years, often decades.
In your life, anything you have done with repetition, felt with repetition, or thought with repetition has created a habituated pattern in your subconscious mind.
To get your resolutions to stick, you have to create that new pattern of action, pattern of emotion, and pattern of thought/belief in your subconscious mind. Until you do that, your resolutions won’t stick.
Your subconscious mind will always go back to what it knows. To what is familiar to it. Even if that familiar thing is something you want to change, your subconscious mind doesn’t care.
The mistakes you’re making when setting resolutions
If you want your goals to stick, your self-talk matters. One of the biggest mistakes you make when creating New Year's resolutions is setting yourself up for failure. The words you say to yourself, and how you say them, matter. Your subconscious mind responds to the images and words you feed it.
Remove the word ‘never’ from your vocabulary. Hearing the word ‘never,’ your mind thinks: “Oh I feel restricted now. I want it but I can’t have it.”
If you say “I’ll never do this again,” and then you do, you will just feel like a failure.
For example, let’s say your resolution is to stop eating sugar. If you say you will never eat sugar again and then you do, not only will you feel like a failure, you will cave into that behaviour and maybe say: “Well, I’ve already started, might as well keep eating sugar.”
Instead, be kinder to yourself and to your resolutions. Your resolutions don’t have to be so rigid. You can perhaps eat sugar just once a week. The more easily and accessible your resolutions fit into your life, the longer they will last.
Another mistake you are making when setting New Year resolutions is focusing on what you’re giving up. You don’t want to focus on what you’re giving up because you’re focusing on what you’re losing. Loss is painful. Your subconscious mind hears “loss” and thinks, “Nope! I don’t want to lose anything!” This is why weight loss never works. Your subconscious doesn’t want to lose anything. Instead try using the words: releasing, letting go, or shedding.
Another example of a resolution mistake you’re making: If you say “I’m giving up alcohol, I’m
giving up going out and having late nights,” you’re focusing on what you’re giving up.
Instead, focus on what you are gaining. “I take myself to bed earlier because I care about my well-being.” Instead of taking things out of your diet, focus on the good stuff you’re putting in.
Try focusing on adding things in rather than taking them out, it will make you and your subconscious mind feel so much better.
How to make your New Year’s resolutions last
One of the things you can do to make your resolutions last is speak them into existence in the positive, present tense. Your subconscious mind doesn’t understand negatives.
If I say to you: “Don’t think about a pink elephant!” What did you just think of?
Write and speak your resolutions in the positive. As well as keeping them in the present tense. Your subconscious mind doesn’t understand time. Everything is now to the subconscious. So instead of saying: “I’m going to go to bed earlier,” say “I am going to bed earlier.”
But to truly make your New Year's resolutions last you need to work with your operating system that controls you: your subconscious mind. You can do this effectively by practicing hypnosis.
When you plant these new ways of being into your subconscious mind, then you will experience lasting change.
Hypnosis is the most gentle way to do this. In hypnosis, we are bypassing your conscious, analytical mind, and we are accessing your subconscious mind. Hypnosis is the most natural, relaxing state. When you’re in a hypnotic state, your subconscious mind is alert, open, and ready for new suggestions. That’s all hypnosis is about: being suggestible. And that is all your resolutions and goals are: a new suggestion you’re giving yourself.
In hypnosis, we take this new suggestion and plant it into your subconscious so it actually sticks. So these new behaviours you want to live by, the new emotions you want to move through your days with, the new uplifting thoughts you desire to have on repeat in your mind, they actually become your new normal.
So, this isn’t actually about resolutions. This is about a lifestyle change. A new way of operating in your mind, body, and life. Because you don’t want these resolutions to be a new year change, you want them to be a new life change.
Five tips to reach your goals
To create any change in your life, you need to work with your subconscious mind (that controls 95%--98% of who you are).
Pay attention to the words you say. Your subconscious is always listening. Remove the word ‘never’ from your vocabulary.
Rather than focusing on what you’re giving up, focus on what you are gaining. Whatever you focus on you get more of.
Speak in the positive, present tense. Your subconscious mind doesn’t understand negatives. All time is now to your subconscious mind.
Practice hypnosis everyday for 21-30 days to experience true changes in your life: changes in how you think, in how you feel, and in how you behave.
Want to experience what hypnosis feels like? Check out my Free Abundance Hypnosis Recording here.
Emma Heywood, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Emma Heywood is a Clinical Hypnotherapist, a practitioner of Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT), Performance Mindset Coach, and a classically trained actress, performing on stage from North America to Europe. She has been on her own mental health journey since she was 12 years old. She knows what it’s like to struggle with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. She transformed her life using RTT, hypnosis, and the power of her subconscious mind. She went from living a life of trauma and low self-esteem to one of inner freedom, self-worth, joy, abundance, and embodying her purpose. And now she helps others do the same. You too can live a life free from self-doubt, fear, low self-esteem, and anxiety. You too can become the most powerful, liberated, confident version of you yet. Emma will be your guide: see you on the other side.
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