Self-Hypnosis: Turn Yourself Around When You Get Off Course

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Jim Katsoulis shares on self-hypnosis to turn yourself around when you’ve gotten off course.

Renegade Water Secrets with Jim Katsoulis, a certified master hypnotist, a NLP practitioner, a yoga instructor and great motivator.

Kevin: Can you talk about that, if you were driving the car and you took the left and you knew it was the wrong way, how do you deal with that situation? You do mess up, you’re eating a whole raw diet and someone brings you a chocolate cake and you eat the whole thing.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. That’s perfect. So let me get the specifics here. This is where I came up with self-hypnotic programming. I believe that people program themselves constantly, for example, whatever day tomorrow is for you, you think about what you’re going to do tomorrow, and you already have a pretty clear idea of it. This happens with a lot of...You know when I was saying, some people have three to four patterns, and I say patterns because when people give in to...Say that they’re raw. They’re raw and then all of a sudden they end up eating a whole cake. What I’ve found is that it becomes this whole different emotional pattern in that situation. They can go for, maybe I’ll last raw for a week or two. Then I find out something happened. Well what ends up happening, a lot of times, is that they run out of emotion. Emotions are associated to food. So sometimes people can feel, they’ll sit on the sofa and eat and they’ll feel a sense of relaxation. They grew up that way and they would always eat at night, they feel relaxed. Well what ends up happening is they say, “Okay, I’ve got to stop eating this way.” They get rid of the food but what they simultaneously do is get rid of the emotion that they were getting from that as well. So now it creates a vacuum. They don’t have don’t have the food, but more importantly, they’re not experiencing the sense of relaxation. And eventually it throws them off kilter and their mind says, “You know what? This is horrible. I feel like I’m ready to kill someone. I’d rather be a little more calm and be overweight then be in a body that feels crazy.”

So this is what happens a lot of times when people get off track with their eating. A lot of times they get emotionally unbalanced. The thing I find over and over again is when people kind of fall off the wagon, is that they were in a stressful state or they were depressed. What happens is in their lives they haven’t learned other ways to experience the emotions that they need to have. And they’ve learned to do it through eating. The classic one was companionship. I’ve heard this more than once where people when they were growing up would go out for ice cream with their family; a genuine sense of connection, companionship, warmth, love and all the rest of it. Well fast forward 30 years later, it’s Friday night, they’re all alone, they feel crappy and they start eating ice cream. And again, this doesn’t make logical sense but on an unconscious level they start to begin to sense and feel those emotions of love and everything else. Obviously they’re not as strong as when they genuinely felt them but people get used to accepting this level of emotion through these behaviors. I came up with this term I call emotional malnutrition. They’re not experiencing emotions that they truly want at the level they want.

So what I would suggest is this, begin to look at the patterns of behavior you have. And you’re going to notice patterns, you’ll notice...The classic one, someone gets depressed, “I got all worked up, someone pissed me off and said the wrong thing, screw it, I’m eating whatever I want.” This becomes a pattern. So what self-hypnotic programming is all about is teaching yourself a new behavior beforehand. So that’s the first step. You need to figure out what’s going on, when you...Because that person maybe the first week or the first couple of days when they were eating raw they could’ve gone into a bakery and they wouldn’t have cared less. It’s not the external world that’s changing, it’s them.

It’s the way they feel, the way they’re perceiving things and what they’re connecting to. So it’s so important to focus on the inside. Where are you at emotionally? That’s the game right there. What was the difference between when they could go into a bakery and they were fine and when their friend would offer them something they said they ate the whole thing. I’d suggest that something emotionally was a little different. And what you begin to ask is...I’m just going to make up a situation here, so you can follow along with this, say they were mad and their friend came over and said, “Well how about a cake.” And they said, “Okay, fine. Screw it.” So when someone gets mad what I would suggest is that they need a new way to kind of release the steam. Now you come up with it beforehand.

This is when it becomes personal. This is why I don‘t like diets, because every person is their own unique person, their own unique history, body, own mindset, all the rest of it. So you can find out for yourself what works. Some people like exercise, some people like watching TV, some people like doing computer, whatever. You ask yourself and you come up with some alternatives. This is how you learn from your mistakes. And you say, “Okay, when I get mad I have a tendency to not care what I eat. I know that’s a pattern I’ve had in the past. What’s something different I can do in the future when I get mad?” This is another value, by the way, of not being 100 percent, accepting that you’re going to fail. Accepting that you’re going to make mistakes and saying, “When I feel that way in the future what am I going to do? Am I going to beat myself up about it or am I going to learn from it?” And you go into a situation, and again it’s emotional, I promise you it’s emotional. You get bored, you get lonely, you get depressed, you get mad, that’s what triggers the eating or the behaviors that are sabotaging what you want. So you come up with new alternatives. I’m not saying it works perfectly. I’m not saying that. But what it does is it gives you a system to create genuine change. Because all of a sudden you’re looking, I promise that a person in an emotional state is looking for a shift in how they feel and to prove they’ve learned how to do it, but once they learn new ways it changes everything.

Let me give you one quick example, then we’ll move along here but I think this is a great example. One of the classics people work all day, they come home they’re tired and they eat all night. Why? Because that’s how they learned how to relax, the food was just always part of it. I worked with a lady who had this problem and instead of just saying, “Well stop eating at night.” We took a step back and said, “Okay, when you get home, how do you feel?” “I’m exhausted, I’m really tired. I work hard and I’ve got a lot of responsibility. I’m tired.” Okay, so when you eat, what are you looking for? What are you looking to feel? “I’m looking to just relax, zone out and forget about it all.” I said, “Great, that’s what you’ve got to do. What would be ideal? If you could eat and feel exactly what you wanted, what would you feel?” She said, “I’d feel energized. I’d be able to eat, relax and then I’d get some energy and I could do some other more things.” I said, “Okay, what is another way...What’s something else you could do other than eating that may bring you closer to that feeling?” This blew my mind, she should’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize, she goes, “I could take a nap.” Look how obvious that is, right? She gets home, she’s tired, she’s exhausted. Well, what should you do? I didn’t tell her. She just said she knew this the whole time, she wanted to take a nap. I said, “Okay, would that be something you could see yourself doing in that situation?” And she goes, “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” “Go home and try it.” She comes back the next week and she goes, “Oh my god.” She said, “I did it and I found I would only sleep for half hour, forty-five minutes, and I would wake up and I would feel so relaxed and calm and I’d have a nice level of energy and my eating just got better on its own.”

Everyone on this call knows this, when you’re in certain emotional states you eat differently, automatically. And that’s the secret. You want to find...See most people find control how they’re eating no matter how they feel. They don’t pay attention to how they’re feeling so they get really upset and they just, “Oh, I can’t eat. But I don’t know any other way to let this upset go and calm myself down.” That’s the problem. So once you learn how to influence your feelings in a real way, in a genuine way, I’m not talking about fooling yourself. I’m talking about being more honest than you’ve ever been in your life. And when you can genuinely feel the things you want and you start to get upset and you can genuinely change that into letting it go or calm or ambition or energy or whatever, then you have some real control. Then the eating takes care of itself. You need to presuppose right from the beginning you need to create an image and an idea of what it would be like if your eating was naturally in control. If you were 100 percent raw automatically, how would you think? What would you feel? What would you do when you got upset? This is where modeling comes in.

So that’s what I would suggest for the person. First of all be calm with yourself, don’t get yourself all worked up, don’t get yourself upset about mistakes you make. Learn from them. Go back in your mind. There’s a great, great technique. Go back in your mind and say, “If I could do that over again, what would I do differently?” And play it in your mind. That’s how you reprogram your mind. Most time people make a mistake and they replay the mistake over and over and over again. What that does is program you to do it over again, exactly the same way. So you want to take a step back and say, “If I could do it over again, knowing everything I know now, what would I have done differently?” This creates new connections in your brain. It creates new alternatives, new options, new behaviors. And it does it automatically. So it’ll balance right out.