One of the best and most effective ways of stopping smoking is with hypnosis. It’s also my favourite type of hypnotic therapy because it is so simple and it works for most people! It’s always gratifying for everyone – client and therapist included.
I get a lot of enquiries around smoking cessation by clients and medical professionals, like doctors, so I thought I would dedicate this weeks blog to how we can help clients stop smoking as hypnotherapists.
Stopping smoking is actually not too difficult. I know, you are probably thinking: “are you kidding me?!” but with the right application of hypnosis most people will stop and they find the process fairly straightforward and, dare I say, even pleasant.
Do you know smokers suffer a great deal? It’s easy to miss this aspect of the suffering of smokers because it is such a common habit but just like other “common” things, like divorce, it has huge impacts on the client’s life. Many clients hate themselves for smoking, they fear very real diseases like lung cancer, they don’t want to cut their lives short and not see their children grow up or leave a much loved spouse behind prematurely. They hate the impact on their bodies and the smell and the feeling of being a social pariah. So why don’t they all just give up if it’s that bad? Well, that’s the suffering involved. Smokers know all of the above and feel all of the above, but they can’t just stop. So then they keep lighting up and feeling very bad.
Why though do they do this? It’s because their habits are found in their subconscious mind and so while the client will hate themselves, that is their rational, conscious mind talking to them. Their subconscious mind can only be accessed via specific techniques such as hypnosis. Hypnotherapists get the subconscious to release the desire for this habit and replace it with healthier alternatives.
That is why it’s such a pleasure as a hypnotherapist to help clients to free themselves of a negative habit they don’t need.
How do we do it though? There are two components: first, we disrupt the habit of smoking. Smoking is a 99% habituated behaviour and as such it’s fairly easy to disrupt the habit. The way we do this is by giving the client different homework tasks that involve doing things differently. Examples include: don’t smoke in your favourite “smoking” place, change your brand, time, people, etc that you smoke with. This primes the brain and wakes it up from it’s habit groove and starts the mind thinking “oh this doesn’t taste so good” or “I felt really bad having a smoke in the morning, I usually smoke on Saturday nights with friends”. So these are very simple habit disrupters.
Then the hypnosis takes place over two sessions about ten days apart. The first session gets the client comfortable with hypnosis and we figure out if there is any major underlying emotional reasons for smoking. Most smoking is habit but we like to make sure. Then the second session is the Quit Session and it’s very straightforward. By then the client is usually in a mindset of “letting this go is freedom!” and so they are eager and ready to stop.
Are you wanting to stop today?