Swap a Craving Into a Turn-Off: The Submodality Swap

Your mind doesn’t store “I love hot chips” and “I can’t stand olives” as words. It stores them as pictures — and those pictures have a structure. One is probably big, bright, close, in colour. The other is small, dim, far away, maybe black and white. Those structural qualities are called submodalities, and here’s the useful part: your feeling about a thing is carried by its structure, not its content. Change the structure and the feeling follows.

This is a thing you can do to yourself in a couple of minutes. Use it on a food you wish you didn’t crave.

The swap

1. Bring up the thing you like but wish you didn’t. Picture it. Notice how you see it — is the image in colour or black and white? Big or small? Close or far? Bright or dim?
2. Clear the screen. Look away, blink, think of something neutral.
3. Bring up something of the same type that you genuinely find disgusting. Another food you can’t stand. Notice its structure the same way — colour, size, distance, brightness.
4. Now take the picture of the thing you like and force it into the exact same structure as the thing you hate. Same size, same dimness, same distance, same everything. Watch it change as you do.
5. Lock it there. Break state — stand up, shake it off.
6. Test. Bring the thing you used to like back to mind. Notice how you feel about it now.

The same move on a belief

This works on limiting beliefs too. Take a belief you wish you didn’t hold (“I’m not good with money”), notice its image structure. Then bring up a belief that’s simply no longer true — like “I am a seven-year-old child” — and notice its structure. Move the limiting belief into the structure of the no-longer-true one. Lock it. Break state. Then check what you believe now.

It feels too simple to work. Do it anyway, and pay attention to what shifts.