Hypnosis Alone Cannot Treat Smoking



man smoking black and white



Smoking is one of the toughest habits to break, and with good reason. For most people, knowing how to quit smoking proves to be a mystery and more often than not the attempts to get away from tobacco and smoking are futile and short lived. This isn’t to say that you can’t become a non-smoker but the usual routes of will power, nicotine patches and now even e-cigarettes can only partially help break the cycle of smoking long term.

So why is it so difficult to stop smoking by yourself? The reason is simple, you are not only addicted to the pattern of smoking and of course the chemical addiction goes without saying, but you are also locked into a pattern of feeling, which underpins every cigarette you smoke. For this reason no matter how much you try to resist that cigarette, your feelings or emotions will win over your decision every time and that is a very difficult bond to break. Think of a person, who tells themselves they will stop eating cup cakes. That decision to stop eating cup cakes may last for a while by ‘being good’ or choosing to eat a piece of fruit every time they let that temptation enter their minds, but ultimately that push and pull of that resisting the temptation will constantly plague the senses until finally they either give in and have a cup cake or more likely they will have three or four. We are constantly trapped by the feelings that drive us toward the behaviours we adopt, but at an unconscious level.

Nobody really believes that smoking is pleasant or that they actually like the taste of tobacco, but what they do ‘enjoy’ is the illusion of feeling more relaxed for some reason when they smoke. This illusion results not only from the psychoactive properties of nicotine itself but also through some forgotten association with a sense of being independent and free, probably originating in some childhood experience when those rebellious tendencies, which triggered the habit, would have originated. The action of inhaling is often misconstrued with a sense of relaxing, but of course this is a fallacy, and in fact, the action of inhaling poison pure and simple into the lungs is one of the stressful things you could actually do to your body.

So what can be done? Of course it would be nice to think that therapy like hypnosis has all the answers, but I am here to tell you that if that is the claim then it is simply untrue. Merely suggesting that a person can think differently about smoking is only part of the solution. Through my experience as a therapist, I have become increasingly more aware that strong addictions underpinned by chemical influences as well as strong patterns need an array of techniques to break down the addiction. In some sense the behaviour of smoking must be seen as a layered addiction, which requires not only psychological disassociation from the pattern but also the ability to not fight the behaviour but instead make the choice to release the patterns of feeling which compel the person to smoke in the first place. In my experience the most powerful changes are sustained once the person is in a position where it is as ok to smoke, as it is not to smoke. I know this may sound contradictory, but try to visualise a tug of war, which ultimately leads to a stale mate. Then see a situation when both sides are holding onto a rope, but instead of resisting either side has the choice to win with just a slight pull one way or the other. Once the fight is taken away then the habit can literally fall away because the patterns of feeling, which led to the behaviour are no longer present.

At Cumbria Hypnosis, we believe that our approach is unique and uses the most cutting edge strategies for permanently letting go of tobacco and smoking. At our stop smoking clinic, we use a triad of psychological techniques, including SCRT and NLP as well as exclusive emotion release strategies to help the smoker effectively outgrow their habit. Sustainable change requires a real shift from within to really address the problem, and with our system we show you how to empower yourself to do just that. If you would like to find out more then simply
Click Here and make your request for a completely free phone consultation or call 0797 4319510 directly to discuss how you can outgrow your need to smoke starting today.

Wishing you the very best,


David Faratian (NLP Practitioner and Clinical Hypnotherapist) BA(Hons) Dchp AEPT