When investigating using Hypnosis to stop smoking it is first important to think about exactly what hypnosis is, and how it may be able to help you. When you enter into hypnosis then you are essentially opening your mind up in to a more suggestible state, where because your mind is more relaxed it is opened up to positive suggestions that are not filtered out or censored as they normally would be by your conscious mind.
The suggestions that you are given by the Hypnotist would naturally take the form of reasons why smoking is bad for you, and also points of leverage such as family reasons why you may want to quit, which is essentially what makes stop smoking hypnosis particularly effective.
Entering down into the calm, hypnotic state allows these suggestions to be effective by using both visualizations and breathing techniques to get those ideas across to the patient’s mind in an effective way. In effect the patterns of behaviour that the patient has been exhibiting which has led them to smoke in the first place is interrupted, and the hypnotist is then attempting to replace them with new, positive suggestions not to smoke.
In many respects stop smoking hypnosis has dual benefits, because not only does it help to dissuade someone from smoking, but it also taps into the patient’s feelings of being centred and calm and so they are also able to experience being more in control when the craving to have a cigarette strikes them.
In terms of the number of sessions that it will take to see results with hypnosis, this varies depending on the particular client and their circumstances, and whilst some patients may quit in just one session, others may need several.
Regardless, however, quitting smoking through hypnosis is considerably easier than simply trying to quit on your own without help, because smoking is both physically addictive because of the nicotine and other chemicals, and also psychologically addictive. Some people get anchored for example to smoking when they have a drink, or in order to calm their nerves after a hard day at work and so when these scenarios repeat themselves it is very common to feel a strong urge to smoke.
One of the key ways that stop smoking hypnosis can help to combat the psychological dependence that many people feel about smoking is through creating mental images that break the association between smoking and certain key moments in your day to day life. So, for example, if you always smoke when you have a drink, then the hypnotist will act to replace that association by creating another association that creates the same sense of calm, but without the urge to smoke. In that way you get the double benefit of both ridding yourself of an urge to smoke, and creating a new positive anchor (like exercise or eating better food for example) that better serves you.
The end effect of the work that the hypnotist does with you to stop smoking will be to not only give you a new powerful urge to stop smoking, but re-enforce all kinds of positive habits so that you exercise more, eat less bad food, eat more healthy food and stay away from the smoking for good!
