Category: Understanding Yourself

Humans have a strange ability to self sabotage. We all know how to eat better than we do. We all know how to drive better than we do. We all do things that we know are bad for us, will stop us achieving what we want, will make us feel unhappy. And yet we still do them. Why?
What is it about humans that makes us self sabotage? I'm not thinking about suicide, that is a different issue. I'm talking about buying chocolate when you have diabetes, smoking when you know it is going to kill you, not exercising when your cardiologist tells you you must.

How can people be so disconnected from their own behavior? Take a simple thing like eating fruit. We all know we should. There is not doubt about the health benefits. Fruit is delicious. And yet, we leave the fruit and take the pastry.
I see clients who tell me that they want to stop smoking. It costs them money, makes their clothes smell, makes them outsiders, will certainly make them ill, and most likely will kill them. And yet they keep on smoking. They sabotage themselves. They stop for a while and then start again. Part of their mind is screaming at them to stop, and part of their mind rejoices in taking the next puff.

It should be simple. Just don't buy any more smokes. That's it. But it is like exercising: we all know we should, and we don't. We all know we are putting on weight, and somehow we don't care. We should get on and finish the school assignment, clean the house, tidy the garden: we know how to do it, we know it needs done, and yet we don't.
Procrastination is the name for not doing something we should.
What is the right word for keeping on doing something we shouldn't be doing?

Is there a maddening tune going round in your head?

Most of us from time to time will find a song going through our head that stays there and you can't get rid of it. It is sometimes called an 'earworm'. I have always been curious as to the origin of the earworm and why we have them. I find that I get the same small set of songs popping into my head at random times. So I got to wondering if they really were random.
I am a hypnotist, and I have a deep interest in the unconscious. I believe that the unconscious mind determines conscious behavior. So to me, the origins of the 'earworms' must some from some process in the unconscious that from time to time leaks out into the conscious. My theory is that if you have a word, or a phrase or a song in your head, then that must be associated with some unconscious process going on.

Those repetitive tunes have meaning

So I monitored what songs they were, and what was happening when they appeared. I sometimes get the same song three times a day, but I can also get that song only after months have passed. To me, there is nothing obvious about the actual words used, or the chorus or anything else that would explain why it appears or what made it relevant.
But after thinking about two particular songs, I think I have managed to work out what is going on, for me at least.

One common song I get in my head is the old Simon and Garfunkel classic "Keep the customer satisfied" I used to worry about how some of the lyrics applied to me, such as 'I get slandered, libeled' or 'one step away from the county line', which made no sense at all in my life.

Find the key phrase

But then I realized that the song appears immediately after something unexpected and good happens to me. The key phrase is the first line "Gee but it's great to be back home". It has nothing to do with being back home - I never left. But I think what is happening is that as I am feeling "Gee it's great" in response to some event in my life, that unconscious feeling is triggering the onset of the song, and it continues playing over and over in my head until the feeling passes.
I get the same thing with 'Raindrops keep falling on my head'. The key to the onset of this song is when I thought that I had done something wrong, or things were going badly. But then I realise that it is actually turning out OK. The key phrase here is "Nothing's worrying me". That is exactly how I feel unconsciously, and that is the feeling that the song encapsulates.