Hypnotic Principles: The Law of Reversed Effect
This principle relies on the phenomena that the harder you TRY the more likely you are to fail. This happens when you access the wrong part of your brain for achieving something. Most people have enough of a conscious/unconscious split to experience this. An example could be to stop smoking. After a couple of days not smoking you keep saying to yourself: “I don’t want to smoke… I don’t want to smoke.” The more you think of not smoking, the more you want to. Instead of just letting your unconscious do the work, by seeing yourself as a happy non-smoker.
Remember when there is a conflict between will and imagination, the will always wins.
To understand how this works it is important to know what mind actually do. Think of a simple process like reading a book. While our conscious mind gets the Meaning of every word we read, the unconscious mind actually deciphers the message. We don’t have to look at every letter in a word, we look at it in chunks while the unconscious mind adds the feelings and emotions to the words. The conscious mind only handle simple tasks containing 5-9 bits of information. The unconscious mind handles all the complex task that are connecting all the dots, for the conscious mind to understand the “meaning”.
So the law of reversed effect is when you TRY to do something consciously that should be handed over to the unconscious.
