“I cannot do another year like last year!”
That’s the thought people don’t always say out loud, but you can feel it in the background at this time of year. The calendar flips, everyone posts their resolutions, the ads start again, and a part of you quietly wonders whether anything will actually be different this time, or whether you’re about to repeat the same patterns with a slightly new soundtrack.
New year change is everywhere right now. Hypnotherapists, diet clubs, weight loss programmes, stop smoking clinics, dry January messages, fitness offers, all promising a better version of you. And sometimes, that’s helpful. Sometimes the energy of January gives people a genuine push.
But it’s worth slowing down for a moment and asking a slightly uncomfortable question. Is the problem really the behaviour, or is it the feeling underneath it.
You can also return to our main problems we help with page if you want to see the full range of issues we work with.
On this page
A Time Of Change, Or A Time Of Pressure
A lot of people say they want to stop eating, stop smoking, stop drinking, stop procrastinating, stop scrolling, stop losing their temper. And sure, those are the things they can see.
But most people don’t wake up desperate to give up the thing they enjoy. They wake up wanting relief. They want steadiness. They want to feel like they’re in charge again, rather than being dragged around by cravings, habits, impulses, or that low level sense of dread that sits in the chest.
That’s why new year change can become complicated. If the habit is doing something for you, comfort, escape, stimulation, a switch off, a small moment of control, then trying to remove it without replacing what it provides can feel like you’re being asked to walk around with no skin on.
And then you’re told to just be disciplined. It’s not that discipline never works. It does. People make conscious changes all the time. But if the behaviour has become a coping strategy, discipline on its own often turns into a fight, and the fight itself becomes exhausting.
Why Don’t Do It Makes You Want It More
One of the most common mistakes with new year change is turning it into a forbidden fruit situation. The plan becomes I must not do this, and then the mind starts obsessing about it.
The more you tell yourself you must not eat the thing, drink the thing, smoke the thing, the more that thing becomes charged. It starts to feel bigger than it really is. Your attention narrows. Your stress rises. And then the urge lands harder, because the brain is treating the habit like a reward that’s being taken away.
When people then slip, because humans do, it often triggers the second part of the loop, shame. Shame turns into stress. Stress makes the old habit more appealing. Then you’re back at the start, feeling annoyed with yourself and wondering why you cannot just stick to the plan like everyone else seems to.
That is not a moral failure. It’s not you being stupid or weak. It’s the brain learning a pattern, then running it automatically.
A Different Kind Of New Year Change
At The Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy, we approach new year change differently. Not because we believe in magic fixes, we don’t, but because we see what actually keeps people stuck.
Most habits and addictive behaviours are not random. They are linked to triggers, emotions, expectations, and environments. They run on autopilot because at some point they helped. They solved a problem, even if it was only for a moment.
So rather than starting with stop, we start with why. What does the behaviour do for you in that moment. What does it help you avoid. What does it soothe. What does it give you that you’re not getting elsewhere.
If you never answer those questions, new year change often becomes a surface level attempt to control the symptom while the engine is still running underneath it.
Hypnotherapy And Behaviour Change
Hypnotherapy is not about forcing you to do anything. It’s not about controlling you. It’s not about making you behave, or making you obey someone else’s will. Clinical hypnotherapy is about helping your brain and body learn something new, in a way that feels believable and sustainable.
A lot of our behaviours and desires sit at a subconscious level, or if you prefer less hypnosis language, they sit at the level of automatic learning. That’s why you can consciously know something is a bad idea, and still feel pulled towards it. The pull isn’t logical, it’s learned.
New year change becomes much easier when the pull changes. Because if you no longer desire the behaviour in the same way, it starts to feel like you’ve been given that magic pill people secretly wish for. Not a pill that forces you, but a shift where the urge simply stops owning so much space.
A Simple Example
Let’s take a very ordinary example. Imagine you’ve decided you eat too many crisps each day, say three packets. You’ve noticed it affects your weight, your energy, your mood, maybe your digestion. You make a decision that this is a new year change you want.
If your plan is simply I will not eat crisps, you are relying on daily resistance. That might work for a few days, or a few weeks. But if the crisps are linked to stress relief, boredom, comfort, or that little pause you get in the day, then you’re not just removing crisps. You’re removing the thing your system has been using to regulate itself.
That’s when cravings tend to bite back. A hypnotherapy approach would look more like this. We identify what triggers the crisp habit, time of day, place, fatigue, stress, certain emotions, certain rooms, even certain people. Then we work on changing the association.
For some people, that might include linking crisps to something genuinely unappealing, something they have no desire for, like lard or greasy fat. The point is not to shame you or disgust you as a person. The point is to weaken the automatic reward link. If your brain stops coding crisps as rewarding, the urge softens.
But that’s only one tool, and it’s not right for everyone. People have different triggers, different dislikes, different emotional needs. One size does not fit all. Sometimes the more important work is installing a calmer, more grounded alternative response so your system doesn’t need the habit in the first place.
The Belief Layer That Makes Or Breaks New Year Change
There’s another reason new year change fails, and it’s not talked about enough. Beliefs. Not the public ones you say out loud, the private ones you carry around.
I always mess up. I cannot cope without this. I will fail anyway. This is just who I am. I do not have willpower.
Those beliefs do something sneaky. They make the habit feel inevitable, and when something feels inevitable, the brain stops trying properly. Or it tries in a frantic, all or nothing way, which collapses at the first wobble.
Part of real new year change is separating you from the behaviour. You are not bad. You are not greedy. You are not stupid. You have learned a pattern that made sense at some point, and now it has become inappropriate for the life you want. That’s a very different starting point.
If You Want This Year To Be Different
If last year is something you want to forget, or at least something you do not want to repeat, the goal is not to punish yourself into improvement. The goal is to change what your system expects, and change what it reaches for when life feels hard. New year change works best when it’s not a fight.
So here’s a small shift you can try. Instead of asking how do I stop, ask what am I trying to feel. If the answer is relief, calm, comfort, safety, confidence, or even just a break from your own thoughts, then the work is not only about removing a behaviour. It’s about retraining the patterns underneath it, so you no longer need to cope in ways that make you feel worse later.
If you’re stuck in a loop, whether it’s smoking, drinking, overeating, compulsive habits, or any other pattern that feels like it has its claws in you, hypnotherapy can help by targeting the automatic learning that drives urges and repetition.
If you want to explore related support, you can start with our problems we help with page and follow the links that fit what you’re dealing with.
And if you’re reading this and thinking, I cannot do another year like last year, you don’t need a harsher plan. You need a smarter new year change.