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Are YOU One of the Smokers Hypnosis Can Help?
The whole question of hypnosis is one that many people feel a bit nervous about.
If you are a little nervous about hypnosis too, this is very understandable.
I remember how nervous I was the first time I visited a hypnotist. Of course, the reason I was visiting a hypnotist is that I felt very lacking in self-confidence! I was hoping to increase my confidence levels.
I can definitely report that my course of treatment was extremely successful! So much so that I now have enough confidence to begin many activities that I would never have felt I could cope with before my hypnosis sessions.
I haven't tried hypnosis as a method of stopping smoking, because I had already stopped before that, but I have a number of friends who have tried the method.
Their level of success has varied.
One of my friends succeeded in stopping smoking entirely after only three sessions and has never started again.
However, after three separate courses of hypnosis, another friend was still a smoker.
Mind you, the friend who had no success in quitting admits openly that she didn't really want to stop.
She simply felt that she ought to stop because smoking was bad for her health and was costing her a great deal of money that she couldn't afford and therefore it made sense to stop. But she didn't really want to stop. If she could have afforded to continue smoking, and if smoking hadn't been damaging to her health, and hadn't carried the social stigma which it does, then she would have preferred to continue smoking.
And the fact of the matter is that when a smoker says "Well, if it hadn't been for this or that, I would have preferred to continue smoking" then what that smoker is really saying is that he or she doesn't want to stop smoking.
What they really want is to find a way of rendering it acceptable to their conscious brain 'critic' self to go on smoking.
It is a well-known fact that hypnotism operates at the hidden levels of the brain, where are we motivated not by what we know we ought to do, but by what we really truly at core level actually want to do. So that's probably why my unsuccessful friend, who really wanted to continue smoking, did not succeed in stopping.
So there are two questions to ask yourself, when considering a course of hypnotherapy.
"Do I really want to stop, or do I just believe that I ought to stop?"
"Do I really believe that the money I'm spending on this course of hypnotherapy represents good value because it will enable me to stop smoking, or would I really prefer to spend the money on buying cigarettes?"
Unless you're sure that you do really want to stop smoking, and do feel that the hypnosis sessions represent good value for money, then it is unlikely that you will derive any lasting benefit from the hypnotherapy and therefore you would probably be better off thinking about a different method of quitting smoking.
Alternatives to Hypnotherapy as an aid to Quitting Smoking
There are lots and lots of different ways that you can try to stop smoking such as nicotine patches and chewing gum, bioresonance, support groups, wonder drugs and pills, a variety of self-help stratagems you can employ, and a number of cognitive therapy techniques.
For example, the idea that snapping a rubber band on your wrist when you reach for a cigarette will help you to stop smoking is part of a cognitive therapy technique called anchoring. If the whole anchoring technique isn't used, snapping a rubber band won't help, and may make things worse. So the statement "snapping a rubber band against your wrist when you start to reach for a cigarette will help you to stop" is an illustration of the folk wisdom that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!
If you are committed to making an effort to stop smoking but don't deep down really want to stop, one of those methods might work better for you than hypnotherapy could.
How Does Hypnotherapy Work?
When a hypnotherapist is trying to help someone quit smoking, they begin with an induction process.
Like many other medical and psychological procedures, hypnotherapy is less likely to work at all when the patient is very doubtful of the value of the therapy, and much more likely to work well when the patient has complete confidence in the therapist.
So the therapist begins by using calming techniques, body language, tone of voice, repetitive sentence structure, and other triggers to establish the necessary rapport with the subject. The theory is that whilst a hypnotic state, you are much more suggestible, and therefore much more likely to be able to "throw the mental switch" that all addicts must throw before they can relinquish whatever they're addicted to.
Let's not forget that tobacco has been conclusively shown to be an addictive drug, to which users very quickly become habituated.
Hypnotherapy isn't "an instant cure". Successful quitters report that after the hypnotherapy sessions they still want a cigarette, but the craving has vanished, and so it's much easier to say "no" to the inner voice which urges them to light up.
Doing It MY Way!Natural Ways to Stop Smoking Ok. This is it! You've made up your mind to quit smoking and you're going to stick to it. Good for ..... They also report that until they've had however many sessions they need in order to achieve permanent success - different people will need a different number, for many reasons - the craving gradually returns, so that after a few days they need a reinforcement session or the physiological symptoms of withdrawal will set in.
If you're quite certain that you would like to stop but just find withdrawal too hard to take, then almost certainly for you hypnosis is the easiest and least painful method of quitting. The reason for this is that it is astonishingly successful in reducing, or suppressing entirely, all the physical and mental agony of the withdrawal symptoms.
But Isn't Hypnotherapy Just a Fad?
Because we are talking about utilizing a quintessentially subjective technique, it's hard to get really convincing objective results. Some clinical studies say that the researchers think hypnotherapy is a bit of a fad. But they have no hard data to support their conclusions. Other studies say that hypnotherapy works.
What hard evidence there is suggests that hypnotherapy is an effective treatment for conditions like anxiety, insomnia, and lack of self-confidence.
There is even less hard evidence that cognitive therapy works, but cognitive therapy is respectable, it gets taught in universities, whereas 'hypnotism' reeks of the stage.
At the end of the day, it's your body, your decision that you want to quit smoking, your responsibility.
A lot of former smokers report that hynotherapy has helped them to stop.
If you feel reasonably confident that you might be one of those lucky ones, you might feel like having a 'trial' hypnotherapy session. Most of those for whom the technique didn't work, report that a few days later, when their craving began to return, they felt not a conviction that they must instantly get a 'top up' session but a sensation that the first session had been a waste of money.
So, contrasting the reports of those for whom hypnotherapy was a Gift from God, and those for whom it didn't work at all, you can probably feel reasonably sure that you'll be able to tell after only one session whether this technique is likely to help you or not.
It's your body. If you've got a chance to spare yourself the agony of withdrawal, you might feel that reaching out for that opportunity is worth risking the waste of the comparatively small amount of money one session costs.
But if you're on a tight budget, don't forget that you have many other options.
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