What is addiction? Are you addicted to drink, nicotine, chocolate, food, drugs or even sex? You will not be alone as there are many thousands, if not millions of people who are addicted to some form of behaviour. Often it is behaviour that starts out as a result of cultural norms, expectations, peer pressure, advertising, socialisation or ideologies and where ‘occasional use/behaviour’ becomes ‘destructive use/behaviour’ that leads to an addictive and self perpetuating pattern, which is dysfunctional to our day to day lives, physical or mental well being.
People have sought to define, conceptualise and understand addictive behaviour in terms of either; impulse control disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders and affective disorders. However, many experts will agree that addictive behaviour will in some way or another involve elements that can be understood as being wholly or partly concerned with;
1. An intense desire to satisfy needs
2. Repetitive thoughts that result in a psychological ritual
3. A failure to resist urges or cravings
4. Motivation that takes an abnormal direction.
In order to gain a fuller understanding of addiction and how NLP techniques can assist in addressing addictive behaviour it may be useful to explore two simple perspective; psychoanalytical understandings of addiction and biological & behavioural understandings.
Psychoanalytical understandings of addiction
Psychoanalysts (pioneered by Simund Freud) argue that human behaviour is mediated and guided by three divisions of our psyche (mind)
1. The ‘Id’ - insatiable demands that are pleasure seeking and guide behaviour to avoid pain.
2. The ‘Ego’ - based on our external environment and mediates between the Id and our Superego.
3. The ‘Superego’ - our conscience or moral judgement, which presses our Ego to abandon realistic goals in favour of moral goals.
By exploring the interplay between the Id, ego and our superego it is possible to see how they direct our behaviour and are pertinent to understanding the roots of addictive behaviour.
Our ‘Id’ is our primitive driver that guides our behaviour and is based on the ‘pleasure principle’ as its aim is to avoid physical and mental pain or discomfort by seeking pleasure and satisfaction, whether or not it is moral or immoral.
The ego mediates between the ‘Id’, our ‘Superego’ and the external world and works on the ‘reality principal’, testing reality in order to find a balance between the pleasure that our ‘Id’ is seeking and the moral conscience of our ‘Superego’
Our ‘Superego’ is our conscience, which is based on our moral values of what is right or wrong. This develops as a result of our individual socialisation and acts to prevent our ‘Id’ from pursuing pleasure seeking behaviour that is taboo by persuading it to abandon realistic goals (as influenced by our ego) in favour of moral ones.
In essence they could be simplified as;
Id = pleasure seeking drivers that seek to protect us from pain
Ego = realistic mediation based on our external environment
Superego = moral conscience mediation based on our socialisation and values
By now I imagine that you are beginning to see how behaviour that is driven by our ‘Id’ can become a ‘battle of wills’ between our ‘ego’, that in reality is telling our ‘Id’ it is ‘OK’ and our ‘Superego’ is saying, ‘whilst it might be OK in reality, morally it is wrong and perhaps you might be better doing x, y or z’
We can begin to see how these interactions fuel addictive behaviour as the ‘Id’ guides our behaviour in order to elevate the frustration and discomfort of cravings due to being deprived the original pleasure seeking behaviour; and providing the persuasion of our ego prevails over our superego then our desires are met. Khantzian (1980) and Warmser (1974) explained that substance misuse or addictive behaviour becomes a defence mechanism driven by the ‘Id’ to prevent pain and discomfort.
It might be easier to understand how the relationship between these three parts of our psyche that drives addictive behaviour by looking at a common example. A drug user is experiencing a painful episode of craving and decides he needs to steal in order to get the money to buy some more drugs to alleviate his discomfort. There Id is driving them to steal in order to finance his next fix in order to alleviate his craving. His superego is saying to them that it is wrong to steal and yet his ego is telling him that whilst it might be wrong to steal, the chances are that you will not get caught. If his superego (morals) prevails he may avoid acting out his plan to steal and yet if his ego wins then he may carry out his plans to satisfy his Id.
When addicts stop pursuing pleasure seeking behaviour (whether it is alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling or chocolate) they experience physical and mental discomfort and anxiety. The Id experiences an intense desire to satisfy the need to alleviate this and the superego gives way to the ego, which is concerned with an individuals safety and therefore allows some of the ‘Id’ to express it’s desire by pursuing the pleasure seeking behaviour. As a result the ‘Id’ becomes the source of repetitive thoughts that results in a psychological ritual to ensure that our behaviour ensures we avoid any future discomfort of pain. Consequently, if our ‘Superego’ is not strong or powerful enough to resist the repetitive thoughts and psychological ritual of our ‘Id’ and ‘Ego’ then the behaviour becomes addictive.
Therefore, it might seem useful to use an NLP technique that enables us to develop a stronger ‘Superego’ that is able to overpower the repetitive thoughts of our ‘Id’ and ‘Ego’ so we can resist any urges and cravings our ‘Id’ seeks to satisfy.
Biological and behavioural understandings of addiction
Addictive behaviour has a direct affect on our central nervous system and acts on parts that are involved in conventional motivational activities such as feeding and sex, which outlast the immediate mood altering affects that the behaviour has.
Repeated pursuit of pleasurable behaviour results in the secretion of particular neuro-transmitters that become ‘positive reinforces’ for our neural system and an absence of them can lead to withdrawal symptoms and cravings, which if we fail to resist the urges and cravings we become hypersensitive to their powerful pulling power. Consequently, addictive behaviour becomes self perpetuating and results in us becoming conditioned to significant environmental cues that act as a signal to trigger repetitive thoughts in order to prompt out ‘Id’ or motivational systems to pursue behaviour. Again, this seeks to alleviate the cravings against any moral judgements that our ‘superego’ might have.
The cause of these repetitive thoughts rest with a part of the brain called the ‘amygdala’, which is concerned with processing our conscious perceptions from our environment and determining the appropriate emotional and motivational response to guide our behaviour. Therefore, when we see something significant that we have formally associated with our addictive behaviour (ash tray, chocolate wrapper, sound of a wine cork popping or any other stimulus that we have previously paired with our addictive behaviour) our brain begins to trigger the emotional response (craving) and appropriate motivational behaviour (smoking, drinking etc) which is driven by our ‘Id’ to avoid discomfort and satisfy the craving.
This process of associating and pairing particular environmental cues to a particular pleasure seeking behaviour develops in to what is known as ‘classical conditioning’ and is a form of associative learning where a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a significant stimulus. This can be understood further by what is commonly referred to as ‘Pavlovs Dogs’. Pavlov discovered that by pairing the sound of a bell (neutral stimulus) to the presentation of food (significant stimulus) to a dog, it would result in the dog becoming conditioned to the neutral stimulus of the bell, and would salivate (crave) at the mere sound of it without any food needing to be present.
The exact same conditioning process occurs between the environmental cues that are present when we pursue pleasure seeking behaviour and other neutral stimulus present at the time. Consequently, what may have previously have been a neutral stimulus become a powerful stimulus that triggers our ‘Id’ (repetitive thoughts) to pursue pleasure seeking behaviour in order to avoid the discomfort of cravings. For example, the significant stimulus of cigarette smoke may be an environmental cue that triggers our craving for nicotine. However, if the person always drinks coffee when they smoke, then over time coffee becomes paired with smoking and the mere smell (an olfactory modality) of coffee may eventually be sufficient to trigger the same craving that the smell of cigarette smoke triggers.
The finer details of cues
Now that you are beginning to get a feel for how powerful cues might seem, it is important to understand that the environmental cues, which are associated and act as triggers for pleasure seeking behaviour, are representation of things we experience in our environment.
These are represented in our mind in five different ways called modalities;
1. Visually
2. Auditory
3. Kinaesthetically (touch/feel)
4. Olfactory (smell)
5. Gustatory (taste)
Each modality (visual, auditor, kinaesthetic, gustatory and olfactory) has sub-modalities, which are the finer descriptors of the principle modality or representations and have the affect of causing us to gain much stronger connection with whatever it is the modality is representing. An example of a sub-modality for the kinaesthetic modality would be things like texture, shape, viscosity, weight etc…….
It is difficult to resist the pulling power that any environmental cues might have when experienced in the first modality and even harder to resist when experienced as sub-modalities. The more a person thinks of the cues in terms of their sub-modalities, the more it will cause them to crave what it is they are triggering and acting as cues for.
How tempting is it for ‘chocoholics’ to think of what their favourite bar of chocolate looks like (visual modality). Now notice how you crave the same thing much more when you think about it in other representations and sub-modalities such as noticing the waxy sheen of the chocolate, the texture as it melts in your mouth, the crackling sound of the paper as you un-wrap it and the sweet coco smell as it passes under your nose. This leads to a craving for the activity in order to satisfy the discomfort caused by the lack of neurotransmitters. You ‘superego’ battles with your ‘ego’ and gives way to enable your ‘Id’ to pursue the addictive behaviour of eating the chocolate in order to alleviate the discomfort created by the mouth watering cravings.
The result is the secretion of mood altering neurotransmitters that become positive reinforces for your behaviour. You will develop an ‘Incentive Sensitization’ to the chemicals that the behaviour produces, which changes the motivational system to create greater pulls towards behaviour that creates the same positive reinforces that satisfy your cravings. However, you become hypersensitive to and develop a tolerance of these and so require greater and more frequent amounts to achieve the same satisfaction, thus a self-perpetuating spiral of addictive behaviour ensues.
NLP Techniques
NLP techniques work by using language to re-conceptualise (programme) the way in which we process (neural) the representation of our external environment.
Therefore, in light of the above understandings in might be useful to apply a very simple and powerful technique that enables us to increase the power of our ‘Superego’ so that it is able to resist the urges and cravings that our ‘Ego’ is seeking to persuade our ‘Id’ to pursue.
It may also be useful to look at a way in which we can dampen down some of the power you feel that the modalities and sub-modalities or representations of the environmental cues that trigger cravings for our ‘Id’ to act up have.
However, it should be remembered that such techniques often work well in conjunction to other approaches. So, you may wish to explore the benefits of this technique to loose weight whilst at the same time benefiting from attending a weight loss group or to quite smoking, whilst using ‘Nicotine Patches’.
SWISH technique
This is a really simple and yet powerful technique to address both the need for disempowering un-resourceful environmental cues and replacing an image of reality (ego) with a much more powerful composite image of our moral superego.
This works by developing a fast visualisation tool that; a) takes the energy and influence our of the representational cues that trigger craving and b) backs it up with the support of a more powerful moral image in preference to an image of us pursuing the addictive behaviour.
Here goes then.
Step 1
Building the Unwanted Image from All the External Cues
Remember those external cues that we talked about? Now you need to ask yourself what the external cues are that make you start thinking or imagining the unwanted behaviour. We are going to use the addictive behaviour of smoking in this example!
1.1 Building and re-living the unwanted image from all the external cues
Ask yourself the following questions and as you do so it is IMPORTANT to relive the memory as if you are experiencing all the cues that make you want to smoke as if it was happening right now.
How do you know when to think about smoking? Is it a gut feeling, a tremble, a biting of the lip or the noticed absence of a particular taste in your mouth or just a fidgety feeling? Remember to step back in to these experiences and relive the experience as if it were happening now.
What occurs just before you start to think about smoking and craving nicotine? Is it someone else lighting up, is it walking past the smokers room at work or the smell of coffee that you always have with a cigarette?
What do you see and feel at the time when you start to think about reaching for a cigarette? Who else is usually around you, are you alone, in a pub or other smokers at work?
What do you sense? How do you feel physically when you are on the verge of lighting up a cigarette?
What smells to you notice? Is there a particular smell to the places you smoke?
Use all of these questions to get yourself back in to the experience you have just before you know you want to smoke, so that it feels as real as possible. Take your time, close your eyes and think about it so you get the experience.
Step 2
Moving On
Now it is time to move on and put this image to one side and it is IMPORTANT that you do this in a physical way so that you are no longer re-living.
So, stand up and enjoy feeling really stupid for 10 seconds by marching on the spot to an old nursery rhyme. Keep marching, or do anything that will enable you to switch from your previous thoughts you have just relived.
OK, you can stop now and sit back down to relax.
Step 3
Your Healthier Superego Image of the Future You
First you need to develop a stronger, more resourceful and positive replacement image of how you would like to be, which might be you as a non smoker or as a slim person in your dream bikini. Whatever, image it is, you need to find one that is morally better for you and others and is aligned more with your conscience.
Let’s stick with smoking as an example.
3.1 The Future You
Visualise yourself from a distance as a non smoker and notice how much better this image is of you as a non smoker.
Look how much healthier you appear.
Notice how much healthier you feel.
Notice how you are wearing nicer clothes with the money you have saved from not buying cigarettes.
Notice how much positive and happier you sound.
What other improvements would your friends and family notice.
What sort of things would you be hearing yourself say?
How much energy do you see in yourself?
Notice how much more life you have in your eyes and your stride.
3.2 Your super superego
Now take this new resourceful image and make it more powerful, give it a stronger superego by telling the image in front of you;
How better it is to not smoke
How better is for others that you don’t smoke
What will you be able to do more of as a non smoker
What will you be able to move away from as a non smoker
How much more respect will you have for yourself as a non smoker
How much greater will others respect you as a non smoker.
3.3 Build the composite image
Now combine the image of the future you and your stronger superego together and notice how much more powerful this future image becomes.
Let the image in front of you absorb all the energy created by recognising or the moral benefits to stopping smoking.
Notice how the image in front of you changes as it takes on the stronger superego you have built.
3.4 Enhance the sub-modalities of this composite image
Focus on this composite image in front of you that is representative of the future you as a non smoker and with all the strength and power of a stronger superego and enhance the finer details of the image (its sub-modalities).
Tune in to how much clearer your breathing is.
Notice the fine detail of your skin and its pores and how much younger and fresher these look.
Notice how smoke free you smell
Recognise how broader and whiter your smile is
Notice how much life you have
Begin to realise how much more radiant your complexion is.
This is the future you that you are soon to become and so build this image right in front of you, the image of the person who has moved away from the compulsive behaviour and towards a much healthier and resourceful behaviour.
Step 4
Fixing the New Image
This part needs your full attention and is critical before the final part of making the change happen. Take this new image you have just created for yourself and project it on to an imaginary screen in front of you. Make it about the size of a garage door and follow the next steps meticulously;
a. Make the image come to life, add some colour to it and allow it to radiate a little bit of comforting warmth. Add some surround sound to it so you can hear everything happening in this new image.
b. Now shrink the image down to the size of a postage stamp so that it shrinks to the bottom corner of the screen. DON’T SHRINK IT
c. Make the postage size image sparkle so that you can’t forget that it is sat there reassuringly and ready to explode back to life and full size. Just let it sit in the corner sparkling away.
d. Now make the sparkling image explode from the corner back to its full size so that it fills all of the screen and as it does say to yourself, ‘It’s good to live a healthier life’
e. As it explodes to full size and your are saying these words make sure that it comes to life again, intensify the colour, the volume and the glowing heat it gives out.
Steps d & e should take no more than a second and the quicker you can do it the better. You need to be able to expand the postage stamp image, say the words, bring it to life and intensify it in the click of a finger.
f. Now clear the screen by blanking it and clear your mind before resetting the sparkling postage stamp size image back to the corner of the screen. IT IS IMPORTANT TO CLEAR THE SCREEN AND BLANK YOUR MIND MOMENTARILY.
g. Now repeat steps d & e again and again so you can to it all in the click of a finger, making sure you blank your mind and reset the image to the corner.
IMPORTANT – Do not shrink the image back to the corner, you must blank the screen and reset it in the corner on a fresh blank screen.
Step 5
The Final Step to Changing Your Behaviour
This is where we Swish away the old unwanted image you built in step one and replace it with the stronger Superego image created in step 3. Here goes;
1. Set the blank screen with the sparkling postage stamp size superego image in the bottom corner.
2. Project the unwanted image generate in step 1 on to the screen so that it fills the whole screen
3. Turn the unwanted image in to black and white, mute any sound and shrink it to a dot that recedes to the centre of the screen.
4. As it shrinks expand the sparkling superego image from the bottom corner by repeating steps d & e from above, making sure you bring the image to life, add surround sound, colour and warmth.
5. As you expand the superego image make sure it expands over the top of the unwanted image that you turned black and white and shrunk to a dot.
6. Repeat steps 1 to 5 bout six to eight times so that you can do them in a click of the finger.
REMEMBER TO NEVER SHRINK THE SUPEREGO IMAGE ONCE YOU HAVE EXPANDED IT. INSTEAD BLANK THE SCREEN AND RESET IT BACK TO THE CORNER AS A SPARKLING POSTAGE STAMP SIZE IMAGE.
Ta-dah, that’s it folks.
Hope you enjoyed the article and found the technique useful. Remember to keep rehearsing the technique and at first you may find yourself triggering the superego image several times an hour in order to dampen down and disempowering the unwanted image that presents itself when you have a craving.
You need to fire up the superego image and swish away the unwanted one as often as it enters your mind until you take control of the images associated with your cravings.
It can become mentally quite tiring and yet you will enjoy the benefits of sticking with it.
