Behavioral patterns, everyone has them, but not everyone suffers from them. If you suffer from a certain behavior that keeps recurring and causes you to fail to achieve your goals, then you are suffering from a behavioral pattern.
But you can also benefit from a behavioral pattern. In that case, you have automatic behaviors that help you achieve personal goals and live a nice life.
Why is it that an awkward pattern of behavior can occur? How do you recognize or see through a pattern of behavior and what can you do to break it?
In this blog, I explore that in more detail.
What are behavioral patterns?
Behavioral patterns are fixed patterns you have in certain situations. Maybe you often take the same steps when you argue or have a conflict, maybe you are very assertive or just compliant. Research shows, for example, that compliant is often the last possible step among business students, only when all other options to resolve the conflict have already been tried[1].
But not only in conflicts do you have behavioral patterns. You also have them in your relationships, in how you are at work and how you respond to criticism or a compliment.
In itself this is not bad at all, because yes how irritating is it when you have to rethink how you behave in a certain situation every time. Then having a pattern that fits a certain context is more convenient, because it just takes much less effort.
Habits are actually also behavioral patterns.
What is interesting is that your hormones also affect what you do. For example, this can be seen in dog owners' interactions with their dogs when you measure the effect of cortisol (stress hormone) and oxytocin (cuddle hormone).
And for women, PMS can also be a very clear example of how hormones affect your behavior.
Seeing through behavioral patterns
So how do you know what behavioral patterns you have and whether they are helping you or not? If so, it is important to see through behavioral patterns.
So you can have behavior patterns with anything, such as with eating, exercise, work, dealing with family and all sorts of things.
If there is a place or a context in your life that you are actually unhappy with, such as how much energy you have after work or how birthdays with the family go, take a moment to observe how that actually goes.
For example, it is important to take a moment in your memory to go back to patterns that recur every time. Maybe you have the same emotions or the same conversations every time.
What's helpful is to figure out what is the trigger of those emotions or conversations, for example. Because if you know that, then the pattern then becomes a conscious choice rather than an unconscious one. Once you recognize the pattern, you can think about how to respond to it as well.
You may even be thinking about this ahead of time.
Examples of behavioral patterns
So you have all kinds of behavioral patterns.
Perhaps not a fun example, but useful to know as an example is the pattern in people who have attempted suicide. This is that before the attempt they were already talking about committing suicide, had an intense mental state somewhat different from depression, could no longer function socially or at work, and used more substances such as alcohol or drugs[2].
Then you can also look more at everyday examples, such as the pattern when you get up.
You get up, brush your teeth and wash, have breakfast and then go to work.
In conversations, you can also have patterns. The most familiar one is when you meet with someone to ask if they are doing well and always respond well to that, regardless of how you are really doing. If people really want to know, they should ask a second time, preferably with the clarification "but really" or "seriously for a moment."
Another pattern may be that every time you feel emotional that you start arguing, eat right or use an illegal substance.
Changing patterns of behavior
As mentioned, not all behavior patterns are good or bad. If you have behavior patterns that work for you you may just be happy. But if you have behavior patterns that get you into trouble, then it is important to change the patterns and then put a new pattern in its place.
This is something you can do with hypnotherapy. This helps you gain more self-control and discipline in stressful situations and when you feel social pressure to do something you don't really want to do. For example, this can reduce your craving for unhealthy foods and promote personal growth[3].
There are multiple hypnosis techniques you can use to change behavioral patterns. For example, if you want a small change, like snacking less or something similar, you can perform the SWISH technique.
SWISH technique for changing behavioral patterns
In this technique, you alternate in your mind the desired behavior with the undesired behavior. You visualize what you don't want with negative emotions and what you do want with positive emotions. A hypnotherapist helps you do this.
This makes it very easy for your unconscious to choose the healthy habit. I once helped a woman who, for example, wanted to grab a cookie or candy every time she came into the kitchen. Then we contrasted that habit in the SWISH technique with sweeping the floor for a moment. A few weeks later I spoke to her again and the snacking had indeed stopped and her floor had never been so clean 😊.
Regression to break behavioral patterns
Sometimes you have a pattern of behavior that is a little harder to break than that. For example, you find it difficult to stand up for yourself in certain social situations, but you've realized it's time to do so.
In this case, you can use regression to find out when you first suffered from the idea that you were better off not standing up for yourself. This is often an event from your childhood, but if all goes well, you are a bit older and wiser now than you were then. So you can reinterpret that moment with your knowledge now, changing the belief that causes you to remain silent or say yes when you want to say no. This can make it easier to stand up for yourself.
Then - to enhance this effect - you can still apply the SWISH technique. This can then act as a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion about your behavior in the future.
So in this form of behavior change therapy, you yourself play an active role while under hypnosis. The hypnotherapist helps you use thoughts to change your behavior, so this can be done by changing your memories, so to speak, and even linking emotions to certain things[4]. Ultimately, it is still the thoughts that precede certain patterns of behavior.
Recognizing triggering situations or triggered thoughts or emotions can be very helpful in changing the behavior that normally follows. That recognition allows you to mentally step back and demonstrate the new desired behavior, for example.
If hypnotherapy has been very successful, you probably don't even notice that you are doing things differently, but are automatically already doing what you actually wanted to do.
The problem is gone and you may even wonder why it was ever a problem.
Ericksonian hypnosis for behavior change
At the HIN, we don't think anything "should" be useful at all. That's why we teach our students mostly techniques from NLP, EMDR therapy and Ericksonian hypnosis. This form of hypnosis empowers you as a patient much more and allows you to heal yourself with the help of the hypnotherapist instead of having to do all sorts of things from the therapist that seem to help.
This makes it feel much freer to solve your problems and also much easier and more relaxed. In the process, you then also more easily go along with the therapist's ideas that can help you change your thinking and behaviors.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis works? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.
Or enroll directly in one of our training courses. Training is delivered online from a professional studio with plenty of professional assistance for one-on-one attention.
Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:
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