Breaking automatic thoughts or thinking patterns- The SWISH technique

Hello readers! Today I will be writing about the Swish pattern. It's an Nlp thinking pattern that can actually remove triggers and anchors. That translates to the possibility of removing phobias, stopping smoking and more.

Let's try it.

Let us say that you have a fear of dogs. Whenever you see a dog, your fear acts up and you see yourself getting bitten. In Nlp terms this would mean that the trigger is seeing a dog. And the anchor is feeling the state of fear. Now i'll give you a solution.

The trigger of seeing a dog works, so we wont change that. What we will change is the anchored state. Which in this case is fear. To do this we shall visualize a picture or a video of ourselves getting bitten( kinda scary, but stick with me). Now see the picture. is it big? Or is it small? If it's big your fear of dogs is quite noticeable.
Now. Keep seeing the picture, but now make another really small picture of the dog looking happy and ignoring you.(small steps.) and put it next to the biting one. Now you have the large one and small one.
Now imagine that the big picture makes a whoosh sound and is moved way back into the distance becoming smaller and at the same time the small good picture becomes as large as the previous one.

Do this at least 10 times then stop and start thinking about something else. It will set in at that time.

What this exercise will do is this. Whenever you will think of getting bitten you will have a hard time of keeping the visualization and it will be forced to become a peaceful image. Basically every response a person has to a trigger is learned, and if something is learned we can relearn it.
This technique has many uses. Let me count a few:

-Once you finish the dog techniques you can switch the picture of the dog ignoring you, to you going to the dog and petting him, but beware, not all dogs are friendly so think about what you do before you do it.

-Stopping smoking.
1.Imagine going in the store and buying a pack of cigarettes then replace the image with buying a pack of bubblegum.
2. Next imagine taking a cigarette and liting it, replace it with putting a bubblegum in your mouth. You'll chew a shitload of gums but it's better than smoking a ton. But these 2. swishes aren't enough to stop smoking. You have to recognise every trigger you have and switch the response. (Finishing eating, being nervous, end of class, drinking coffee.) to name a few.

Be original, think of what you want to achieve then do it. Standing still never got you anywhere so start running :)

This is it for today. If you have any questions leave them down below in the comments. If you don't want to talk about personal stuff and have them seen by everyone then add me on G+ and write me a private message, I'll respond when I see it.