The Law of Reversed Effort - An Idea Gives Birth to An Idea


Emile Coue (1857-1926) proposed his Law of Reversed Effort which suggests, even if you want something to happen but fear/imagine it won’t then, with all probability, it won’t. The idea gives birth to the idea.

Our imagination is influenced by our subconscious and makes sure that the efforts of the conscious will are opposed.

Consider the frustration of trying to remember someone’s name. You want to remember it (conscious will) but when it doesn’t spring to mind straight away you fear you won’t be able to remember it (imagination) and sure enough you can’t remember it. If you then take your mind away from it, you remove the imagination, and it is likely to pop into your thoughts.


A lot of the difficulties people have motivating themselves in life could be explained by the Law of Reversed Effort.



  • The smoker who wants to stop smoking but imagines that they are going to find it difficult no doubt will; imagination winning over conscious desire. 


  • The learner driver who wants to feel calm and relaxed during their test and imagines the opposite is quite likely to feel anxious. 

We can go a step further and say that psychosomatic symptoms are the result of negative suggestion. It is possible that the negative suggestion (which led to the problem) was given to them by themselves: auto-suggested.

Wait… this does not mean they decide consciously that they would develop this problem, that would be ridiculous. An individual can use the power of suggestion unconsciously.

For example, a person fears that something might happen and following the Law of Reversed Effort, it does. The idea gives birth to the idea.

Let’s imagine the acrophobic (fear of heights) who looks at the ladder and fears that once they begin to climb, they will experience that familiar panic. It is possible that they consciously fight that thought and begin to climb slowly up each rung of the ladder, but this is where The law of reversed effort comes into effect.

They unconsciously fear that they are going to panic, this influences their imagination and they imagine it happening. The conscious will (to not feel fear) and what they imagine (they will panic) are conflicted and sure enough, the imagination wins and they panic just as they feared they would.

The Law of Reversed effort is hugely important if we are to understand why quite often people are frustrated at their lack of success when they attempt to change their behaviour. Even though they want to change, if deep down they fear that they are likely to fail then they are going to feel a huge amount of frustration and beat themselves up about their lack of will power. The unconscious conflict will be sublimated into conscious frustration.

What if the need to maintain an unhelpful behaviour was held at an unconscious level? What if the symptoms someone wanted to remove were the unconscious mind’s way of preventing them from thinking about something else? It’s all unconscious, so how would you know? Surely any conscious attempts to change that behaviour would be met with internal conflict? Thinking about The Law of Reversed Effort: Do you think the behaviour change will be successful?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting a Better Nights Sleep - The 3 Week Challenge: Principle One

Image
It all began a month or so before lockdown when I noticed how many sleep aids there were in the chemist.  That same week I had four people contact me for help with sleep problems.  This made me ask myself: “What does psychological research and Hypnotherapy tell us about getting a good nights sleep?” A positive psychological approach focuses on what makes people healthy rather than unhealthy. Instead of looking at the behaviour of someone who is struggling to get a good nights sleep, we should focus on the person who frequently sleeps well. How is the behaviour different? Can we copy it? I began teaching people to use these psychological techniques alongside Hypnosis to nudge their sleep pattern. I was pleased to see the differences that could be made…but more people are needed to really see how effective it could be. Fancy a challenge? You need to apply the principles for the next three weeks and review the changes to your to sleep.  Each princip...
Read more

Hypnosis Explained

Image
    If you are hoping to read that Hypnosis is a magical, mystical, controlling power that can make people behave in ways they choose not to, then you are certainly going to be disappointed. Any assumption that a person is asleep or unconscious is also not the case.  So have you ever experienced Hypnosis? Think back over the last 24 hours…. When you woke up this morning, do you remember that half-awake half-asleep feeling? On that commute to work, perhaps you drifted into auto-pilot and as you were driving along? Perhaps your mind drifted to the things you had to do.  You could be forgiven for thinking that you were daydreaming. Tonight, just as you drift off to sleep you are very likely to experience that same half-awake half-asleep feeling. Every one of those experiences could be given the name Hypnosis. Hypnosis is a natural state we all experience many times throughout the day. It is as much part of our lives as breathing. The idea of being under the control of ...
Read more

Imposter Syndrome: Do you sometimes feeling like a fraud?

Image
  One behaviour people experience from one time or another is being an imposter; the feeling that they might get ‘caught’ out for not being as good at what they do as people assume they are. Imposter syndrome is where an individual doubts their accomplishments and abilities and these are converted into a fear of being exposed as a fraud. Interestingly, this still happens when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.  What do you attribute your successes to? Unjustified feelings of being an imposter are an attribution bias. It is a tendency to attribute successes to luck or poor judgment on the part of others’. In a self-deprecating way, the assumption is that they are ‘just getting by’ and if others saw the real them then they would less than impressed. When we feel this kind of imposter syndrome, we failing to have any internal acknowledgment of our own achievements, something which is characteristic of those suffering from anxiety, and unsurprisingly, low self-estee...
Read more