🔵 HAYBS | Pattern Series, 7

Ways to break old patterns...

Author

Devin Ryback
June 12, 2025 • Read Time ~4 minutes

In the previous email I explained the power of your journaling practice for breaking patterns and creating positive change in your life. I also mentioned two approaches for breaking patterns: direct, and indirect.

In this email, I explain more about these two fundamental ways to change the patterns in your life.

Direct Pattern Breaking

Imagine a long, heavy train rolling along a track. This train has been moving for a long time, and it has a lot of momentum.

This train is a pattern in your life. It could be any pattern affecting any aspect of you and your life. It has momentum, which means that there is great force propelling the pattern to continue.

If you were to try to stop this pattern by stopping the train, it would require an even greater force. This is why in the case of addiction, for example, which is a pattern with extremely great force, people often fail to change the pattern. They attempt to apply brakes to the train, or block the train somehow. This only leads to burnout, or worse, a train wreck.

A much more skillful way to directly change a pattern, is to imagine a switch along the track. Get out ahead of the train, choose the new direction you would like the train to go, and pull the track switch in that direction. This allows the train, with all its momentum, to steer in the direction of the new, desired pattern.

Again, there is a lot of force behind the train (the pattern), so the change must be gradual enough to avoid the train tipping off the tracks and wrecking (your life).

If you want to directly change a pattern, skillfully use the existing momentum of that pattern and gradually guide it in the desired direction.

Devin Ryback

Indirect Pattern Breaking

Continuing the train metaphor, whereas directly changing the pattern is adjusting the track, indirectly changing the pattern is adjusting the landscape upon which the track runs.

Imagine the huge force of this train moving along a track laid on flat ground, or even a downhill decline (which is how it can often feel when in the grips of a powerful pattern in your life). There is nothing to decrease the speed and momentum of the train.

However, if you could build up the landscape and create new hills, even small ones, this would gradually slow the train and decrease the force of the pattern. This is exactly what your new journaling practice is doing for you.

By creating a new pattern in your life, even if unrelated to the pattern you want to change, you transform the landscape of yourself. By building yourself up, the old pattern slows down.

Devin Ryback

Your Next Step

  1. Continue your daily end-of-day journaling practice.

  2. Set a timer for 20 minutes.

  3. Reflect on a pattern in your life which you would like to change.

  4. In your journal, write about how you would use both: - a direct approach - an indirect approach

Your Hypnotherapist,
Devin Ryback

As always, I am available if you would like more guidance.

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