Can You Really Quit Smoking With Hypnosis?

Can You Really Quit Smoking With Hypnosis?
By Mark Tyrrell

Yes, you really can quit smoking with hypnosis, and it's fascinating to see how it works.

Successfully keeping up a smoking habit requires the smoker to really buy into some serious 'double think'. This allows the smoker to continue doing something which they know full well to be harmful, while kidding themselves that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Smoking: Justifying the unjustifiable?

You're bound to have heard some of the amazing justifications people trot out:

• I could die in a car crash tomorrow, so why not enjoy myself? (your chances of dying in a car crash are about 1 in 25,000, whereas 1 in 2 long term smokers will be killed by smoking)
• smoking calms me down
• my uncle smoked 200 a day and ran marathons and it never did him any harm
• it's cool (what??)
• it's addictive
• it relieves boredom
• it's a way to rebel against all the killjoys
• smokers are more interesting than non-smokers
• it's part of 'who I am'
• it gives me something to do with my hands
• smoking is my one reliable friend
• and so on...

Stopping smoking is not just about dealing with the smoking behavior itself, but also with these habits of mind that smokers deploy to protect their smoking. Smokers are ready to stop when they begin to see that they have been conned, and that they have been conning themselves. But they may find themselves struggling to conquer the habits that surround their smoking.

Hypnosis and quitting smoking - a natural partnership

This is where hypnosis comes into its own. A skilled hypnotist will not only know how to help a smoker unhook themselves from outdated habits, but will also know how to get even the most trenchant, infatuated of smokers to fall out of love with their nicotine abuser.

Curiously, smoking is itself a 'hypnotic' behavior. And smokers often find themselves lighting up and smoking in response to triggers - post-hypnotic cues - in the environment, like picking up a drink, or calming down after a row. It's often argued that this behavior is due to the addictive nature of smoking. But experience shows that even hardened smokers can go without if the context is one of 'not smoking'. For example, countless smokers have told me that they 'don't even think of it' on long haul flights where smoking is prohibited. Fifty a day smokers still sleep hours at a stretch without smoking. The fact is, if you do something enough times, it starts to feel natural.

Not as crazy as smoking...

Imagine you click your fingers a thousand times a day, for twenty years. Every time you have a drink, you click your fingers. Every time you have a break, finger clicking. Every time you finish a meal, or sex - you click. Pretty soon it feels natural to click your fingers in these times, and unnatural if you don't do it. You are not physically addicted to clicking, but your mind has a powerful learned association and has come to expect the clicking. After twenty years, having a drink without finger clicking is going to feel more than a little strange.

Smoking cessation and hypnosis

In my experience of helping hundreds of smokers to quit, even people who smoke sixty a day really only smoke a few. What do I mean? Well, only, say, the first one of the day, the one after lunch or at breaks, and the one after the evening meal are really enjoyed, savored - or even noticed. The others just 'con their way in' - a hurried smoke in the car or while walking for the bus, a quick one before the movie, a rushed one here and there. Now once you deal with the few really savored cigarettes then the others tend to drop away, like so many skin warts denied life blood.

Hypnosis is an excellent tool for getting inside the mindset that holds destructive patterns in place and getting the victim of such a mindset to stop being pushed around by old destructive patterns. At last they can stop 'protecting' what is undermining them. Hypnosis can be used to clean away ingrained smoking associations, getting the mind and body onside, working together to lose the smoking and create a viable and natural sense of a better, healthier and freer future without the smoking.

source : http://ezinearticles.com/?Can-You-Really-Quit-Smoking-With-Hypnosis?&id=1484113