The Law Of Reversed Effect

There are many physical laws that we live by. For example, jump off a chair and you'll experience the physical law of gravitation.

In the same way, there are mental laws; just as real that we can use for our benefit or detriment.

The law of reversed effect states; "The greater the conscious effort, the less the subconscious response." or "Whenever the will and imagination are in conflict, the imagination always wins."

Conscious effort or willpower resides in your conscious mind. It's what you consciously do. Whereas imagination or what you imagine 'to be true', resides in your subconscious mind.

Insomniacs show the law of reversed effect perfectly. The more effort and willpower they use to go to sleep, the more sleep evades them. Dropping off to sleep is an automatic or subconscious process, the more you grit your teeth and use effort to go to sleep the more awake you become.

Forgetting a name is another example. The more you try to remember, the more you can't. It's only after you have stopped all conscious effort that the name magically pops into your head.

When I was young and learning to ride a bike, I consciously used all my willpower to not hit a tree that was looming up towards me. To no avail, as my imagination of hitting the tree was stronger than my conscious effort to avoid it. Inevitably, I hit the tree.

You could put a plank of wood two feet wide on the floor and use all your willpower to walk along it, with no problems. Now put the same plank between two skyscrapers and use the same willpower to walk along it. Now your imagination contains the idea of falling to your death. Now it's a lot harder to walk along the plank. (I for one would not do it!)

If in regards to your weight you imagine yourself to be a 'fatty', no amount of willpower will keep you on a diet. Sooner or later the belief that you are fat will override any conscious effort to diet. Out come the Tim Tams again.

If you imagine yourself as having any type of fear or anxiety (and there are thousands of them) no amount of conscious effort in facing this fear will overcome what you imagine to be true.

If you truly believe you are a smoker, no amount of conscious effort of going 'cold turkey' can shift this belief.

The good news is that hypnotherapy isn't about the hard slog of 'willpower' or 'conscious effort', because as shown above this rarely works. And you may be nodding your head in agreement, having tried to find solutions to your problem in the past that relied on 'conscious effort'.

The good news is that hypnotherapy is about changing what you imagine to be true. It's about changing any negative beliefs and replacing them with positive beneficial beliefs. And then automatically you'll respond accordingly to those beliefs.

It's about helping you to imagine that you're slim, healthy and in control and automatically you respond accordingly. The diet becomes easy because that's how slim, healthy people perceive diets.

It's about helping you to imagine you're a non-smoker for life and no situation could therefore tempt you into smoking again.

It's about helping you to imagine you're OK with whatever was fearful to you in the past.

Hypnotherapy is about doing it the easy way, the automatic way. Not the hard slog, 'conscious effort' way.