30 Days of Hypnosis

Well there is a 2-week gap between my last post and this one.

Did I happen to mention 1 of the things I’m using self-hypnosis for is procrastination? Odd… you look like you already knew.

The last 2-3 weeks have been heavy-heavy weeks. Long hours getting things done, late nights and early mornings. One improvement I absolutely had was not rewarding myself so heavily with food.

6 months ago, going through this grind would have netted me pizza ever night and some form of fast-food each day at lunch time at least. This time though I think I had pizza twice during that 3 week push at work and no fast food at all for lunch.

NOTE: OMFG I want pizza now that I’ve posted this pic…

Pretty significant improvement if you ask me. I don’t know if it’s related to the self hypnosis or not, but there was more calm sense of “I don’t need that” making it easier to avoid. It’s not like I didn’t still think about it, I did, and am definitely doing so now that I’m talking about it — but I still didn’t leave the house and go get it.

To mix into the work load of the last few weeks, we also have the Chicago Marathon this weekend that we’ve been training for, for a year. There are the pressures there of “I know you’re tire, and over worked, but you have to keep running”.

The fear is that you get so wiped out RIGHT before the race, especially for a fear-of-failure/procrastination-sensitive person like myself, and just completely go cold turkey a few weeks out. There is a lot of ligament, bone and muscle conditioning that happens in your legs when you are running this much that would start to ease off a bit, and them WHAM, you hop yourself into a 26-mile run and good night sweet joints.

NOTE: For the runners out there, we’ve had excellent success using the Vibram FiveFinger Classics a few times a week to strengthen the micro-muscles in our feet and get rid of join and ligament pain just about everywhere. TechCrunch also loved them.

I’ve been aware of this propensity so I’ve been pushing hard to avoid it. Last week I got a few runs in, this weekend I got 1 in and so far this week I’ve gotten 2 in. I’m actually really happy with myself right now about the marathon training — it’s incredibly time consuming if you aren’t already a runner (which I’m not).

So even though there was a big gap in my last update, I did do the self hypnosis 1 time during that gap and for the most part been sticking to some pretty solid habits that aren’t a piece-of-cake easy, but easier than they were a few months ago.

If you think about what self-hypnosis is doing, the forcible creation of new neural pathways formed around new (assumed to be positive) thoughts and ideals… it seems like one of those “Duh, of course it works” types of things — but there is such a stigma around it being hocus-pocus and magic, that everyone just dismisses it.

I also think a core component that not a lot of hypnotists tell people is that you have to WANT the change. If you don’t want the change, the neural pathways won’t form. Your subconscious, from what I understand, will stop that from happening because there is no conviction in the process.

In my case, there is a shit-ton of conviction in the process because I really want these things – I’ve made some exciting changes in my life recently.