Itchy York article

Itchy self-hypnotises to stop swearing

When pissed we swear far too much, so we're using self-hypnosis to help kick the habit

Yet a-bloody-gain it’s Lent, and we sodding well need to give something up. We’re buggered if we’re quitting drinking, but Itchy’s swearing has reached Tourettes-esque levels. We’re pissing and f*cking all over the place, and that can only lead to damp and disease. Plus, more and more pubs are banning the use of profane language at the bar, and like we said, we don’t want to lose the booze, so we’re relegating the F-word to the Z-list, and using self-hypnosis to do it.

Why self-hypnosis? As our swearing seems subconscious, we thought hypnosis, which allegedly acts subliminally, could help. We don’t have the lolly to see a professional watch-dangler, so we opted to give self-hypnosis a whirl. But as we didn’t want to end up rodgering some poor bystander’s leg like a terrier every time someone said ‘bollocks’, we got some advice from a qualified hypnotist first.

‘You are feeling very (bleep)-y’ – what the hypno pro thought of our plans

Aaron Surtees of City Hypnosis has helped people get over such frankly freakish dilemmas as a fear of vegetables and a phobia about peeing in public. He wasn’t convinced that going under a trance to reduce our rants would be very effective a without using a professional to induce the hypnotic state: ‘Professionals are trained to read your body language and other subliminal skills you give out, and use their expertise to react accordingly and help you “go under” faster. To reach a deep state alone could take years of mental training, and then you have to be able to make useful suggestions to yourself while you’re hypnotised’, he said.

However, he didn’t think that giving self-hypnosis a shot would put Itchy at any risk either: ‘Hypnosis causes no known by-products, although using it to improve yourself can have positive side-effects on your confidence and happiness. For hypnosis to work, you have to want to achieve the suggested goal. Even those who allegedly are made to bark like dogs and suchlike as part of hypnotists’ stage shows tend to be extroverts, show-offs, or those with strong imaginations – on some level, they still want to perform the ludicrous act suggested to them, because they have a desire to entertain others.’

How we hypnotised our potty-mouthed selves

Confident that on no subliminal level did we secretly want to reproduce animal noises (or mime animal reproduction), Itchy recorded a self-induction script designed to help us ‘think our way down’ into hypnosis, tailoring it to our needs with anti-swearing ‘coaching phrases’. Aaron had advised us to think about triggers and reasons why swearing had become so automatic for us, and to train ourselves into believing that we could make a point over a pint using less offensive emphatic words. We listened to our cuss-ette tape in a quiet room every night for seven days, tried to meditate, and let ourselves slip into a trance…

So, did it work? Are we crude or cured?

As a gauge of our progress, before starting our training we measured the ratio of swear words to non-offensive terms in 10 minutes of heated Itchy conversation down the local boozer. Even after we decided that calling someone a ‘chafing bobble-hatted willy-warming todger toaster’ did not count as a profanity, our swearing levels were pretty damned high. We were turning the air blue until we were blue in the face. But after a week of using the tape, Itchy had changed our colours (‘Paul McKenna Kenna Kenna Kenna Kenna chameleon…’). Self-hypnosis appeared to have worked, and our cuss-ratio was much improved.

But were our cleaner conversations really due to hypnotic brain washing? Was Itchy’s new possession of a tongue you’d be happy to introduce to your mum (so to speak) subliminal, or the result of us paying more conscious attention to our cussing as we were acutely aware that it was being monitored? We suspect it may be the latter, as our most overused profane terms are ‘fucking’ and ‘shit’, and we spend a lot of time actively thinking about both of them. But we couldn’t swear to either.

Check out this quiet York pub in which to test out not swearing while drinking.

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