How to stop smoking with hypnotherapy

If you smoke, you know all the reasons you should stop smoking. Other than it’s not pleasant for everyone around you, you put yourself at a higher risk of health issues, the smell might linger in your house and car, even if you do not smoke in them, and it might influence how you feel about your appearance, too. The problem is, you know all that and you love it, or you hate it and desperately want to stop but find it too dam difficult.

When I tell people I work as a hypnotherapist, most assume my days revolve around stop-smoking hypnosis or helping people overcome fears and phobias.

What usually surprises them is that the work goes far deeper than any single habit or symptom. Whether someone comes to me for addiction, anxiety, fears, trauma, or anything else that feels overwhelming, so much of it boils down to the same thing. A nervous system nudging them to act, protect, or cope and somewhere along the way, you missed the message.

My work isn’t about forcing change from the outside; it’s about helping someone hear what their nervous system is trying to say, and supporting them to respond in a way that makes sense for their life.

Hypnotherapy and smoking

In many ways, the state people imagine as “hypnosis”, that automatic, absorbed, reactive mode, is something we all slip into every day. When you feel caught in a habit or addiction, it is this. In reality, it’s your nervous system running a well-rehearsed pattern outside of conscious choice. You want to stop, yet your body keeps pulling you back into the familiar response.

The work of hypnotherapy isn’t about making someone lose control or handing their mind over to a practitioner. It’s almost the opposite. It’s about helping someone out of those automatic states. Bringing awareness back online, settling the nervous system, and restoring the ability to choose where choice once felt impossible. In that sense, a big part of the process is de-hypnotising: bringing awareness back online, helping the nervous system settle, and giving someone the ability to choose differently where they couldn’t before.

The standard protocol for a hypnotherapist to use in a quit smoking session is to try and weaken the desire to smoke or strengthen the will to quit through hypnotic suggestion. People use suggestion all day, every day, and we all succumb to it. It’s the reason advertising is such big business.

One trial compared hypnotherapy for smoking cessation with no treatment and found there to be no quitters in the no treatment group compared to the hypnotherapy group, in which nine out of 20 participants maintained a non-smoker status for at least 48 weeks. This shows the benefits of hypnotherapy for smoking.

In my smoking cessation sessions, I choose to enhance the standard protocol. We explore the reasons you like smoking. For example, do you like the regular break it gives you? Does it give you something to do with your hands at times you might otherwise find them a bit awkward? Is it your identity? This awareness helps you to find another way to achieve the same benefit in a healthier way.

One client decided to do a five-minute workout every hour, for example. Another person made sure they took a five-minute walk around the block at the same intervals they would previously smoke.

I find incorporating mindfulness exercises into a quit smoking programme helps too. Mindfulness allows you to accept your feelings. Rather than labelling feelings (thoughts, emotions, and physical feelings) as positive or negative, they become like colours, all different but without hierarchy. You will find that you start to feel in control of any cravings. You can allow these feelings to exist and observe them with curiosity. What is your body actually telling you? Rather than react impulsively, you’ll take time to stop and consider. To understand yourself a little better.

In conjunction with hypnosis tools, habit-changing processes and hypnotic suggestions, you will become the non-smoker you so wish to be. The constant voice in your mind that works out when to take your next cigarette break will disappear, and you will no longer look at non-smokers with envy.