One statistic reveals that on the planet Earth, there’s 1.3 billion people smoking cigarettes, and 80% of those people have said they are actively looking to quit smoking. There may be many methods out there to achieve this, and for sure one of them is hypnotherapy – invasive and very efficient for anyone looking to quit this habit.
When starting hypnotherapy for quitting smoking, the most important thing is to clarify to your client that they’re there because they want to quit smoking. Because many people come along and say, “I’m here because my wife wants me to quit smoking” or “my doctor says I’m dying and I have to quit smoking” or “my kids want me to quit smoking”. It’s not a good enough reason. The client itself has to come to the conclusion that they’re ready.
It’s what the great Mike Mandel calls threshold. When you’re at that point where you’ve just had enough and you’re ready to do anything to get over the problem, it doesn’t matter if it’s with smoking or any other kind of problem we have. We have to come to that point of threshold where we say to ourselves – “I’ve had enough” and then we have to commit.
It’s easy with Hypnosis to quit smoking. But the main thing is that the person has to commit and make the change. The clients get in touch with their own ability to make the changes.
Sometimes a client might ask “can’t you just make me quit?” At the moment, they’re here because they’re smoking 20 or 30 cigarettes a day and they don’t feel they have a choice. What we truly want for the client is to have more choice, not less choice. And because the client then takes that responsibility, the hypnotherapist makes it easy for them through the use of hypnosis. And it is because of the very fact that they make the choice, it’s not forced upon them or anything else, it lasts forever.
If you force someone to do hypnosis, sooner or later they’re going to get their own willpower back and they’re going to make the change back to where they were. You’ll see, in my presentation, I get people to understand that when they’re worth doing it for, because a lot of people think they don’t understand that.
One of the main things when treating a client who wants to quit smoking is getting them to understand their value to the people they love and their value to themselves, and to find that self love or unconditional self love. Because if you can’t get your clients to get an understanding of that, then why would they look after themselves? If you don’t love yourself, why would you look after yourself? And a lot of people think that maybe “well, it’s not cool to love yourself”
Another important idea is for them to actually accept that they’ve had their last cigarette. It’s not something you’re going to cut down to or try and give up. And you’re going to do this today and there’s no doubt in my mind you’re here because you want to quit smoking. We work together. We get into the same frame of mind. We’re working together for a common cause, which, in the case of smoking, is to quit smoking forever.
Three beliefs that hold you to quit smoking:
- The first one is “I can’t quit” because they’ve tried everything else. They’ve tried willpower, they’ve tried the patches and they’ve come to see you because they’ve tried all those things and they’re still smoking.
- The second belief is that they’re addicted to nicotine and this is a worldwide belief. But the fact of the matter is that what they have is a habit.
- And the third belief is that cigarettes are doing something for me, “they help me relax”, “they keep the weight off”. There can be a half a dozen reasons why they’re smoking. So those three beliefs, “I can’t quit, I’m addicted to nicotine and it’s doing something for me”.
If the client walks out of the room with any of those beliefs intact, they’re most probably going to start smoking again. The main goal in the session is to crack those three beliefs, break those beliefs down. We’re going to use different techniques. One of Freddy’s techniques is parts negotiation that undermines the underlying programming, the process, the habit or using the ‘Jacquin time machine’ to experience themselves having the first cigarette.
As Freddy puts it, after having seen over 25,000 people smoking, he could count on maybe two or three hands the amount of people that started smoking as an adult, in their 20s or 30s. The majority of people start smoking at 11, 12, 13 years old. And when you ask the question, it’s rare that anyone says, “yeah, I loved that first cigarette”. So a mix of techniques come into play.
But the major part of the quit smoking session is what we call a pretalk, the discussion we have before the hypnosis. For a hypnotherapist, this is an opportunity to be hypnotic in an empowering, encouraging and positive way, helping the client realize they are there for one reason only – because they want to quit – and that they’re going to quit. And of course, we are human beings and there are situations every now and again where someone is not going to quit, but as hypnotherapists we have to act as this is going to happen.
Smoking isn’t an addiction, like other substances are. You sleep for 8 hours. You don’t wake up every 35 minutes to have a cigarette do you? If this was a physical addiction and you’re smoking every 35 minutes because your body needs that chemical, you won’t be asleep for 7 hours. If someone’s taking heroin every 2 or 3 hours, they have to get up and I have to have it or they have the night sweats because their body needs the chemical to function. But smokers sleep.
The definition of an addictive substance is in order to continue to get any benefit from it, you have to do one of two things: increase the dose or shorten the time period between doses. And that’s what kills people on heroin. But ask anyone who smokes, ask them how many they smoke and how long they smoke. That amount for it will be 10, 20, 30, 50 years, but the same amount every day. You’ve not had to increase the dose or shorten the time period and you can sleep for 8 hours. Can you see a difference?
In therapy, the moment the client is in trance or in hypnosis, you’re no longer speaking to the client, you’re speaking to their unconscious mind. And it’s the part that’s running that smoking behaviour, even if they’ve tried to overcome it they can’t because it’s not a conscious thing they’re doing.
For instance, people that have been smoking 30 cigarettes a day for 30 years, that’s an incredible feat to try and remember to do something 30 times a day, every single day, for 30 years without failure. That’s incredible. You couldn’t do it consciously. At some point in their life, they went, “this is really important to me”. “Remind me to have 30 cigarettes a day”. And in that moment, they create that path that runs the smoking habit, so they don’t have to think about it.
And if you think about us as human beings, all the incredible things we can do: driving, walking, talking, reading, writing, riding a bicycle, swimming, typing, you name it, playing a musical instrument, incredible things that we learn to do. And then they become an unconscious ability, something we can do without thinking. That’s precisely the case with the smoking habit as well.
The ability to learn things like that and then allow them to become automatic enables us to function at the level we function as human beings. Where it works against us is when we learn a habit like smoking, because we have to learn to do it. No one picks up a cigarette at 13 and starts smoking 20 a day. You have to learn, you have to train your body. And in that period of time, the same process takes place as it does with learning a language or learning to walk or learning to drive.
The moment it becomes an unconscious ability, we no longer have conscious control over it. And that is why most people struggle with their behaviors, because they want to change consciously and they know what they should be doing. But the process is running underneath. Hypnosis gives us the operator access to the underlying programming.
During the hypnotic state, providing your creative mind comes up with new choices, we’re going to ask that part of you who smokes, pick one of those new choices and do that for you. During trance, the hypnotist may ask your unconscious mind to make it clear to you that one fact that when it occurs will be what we can call “Aha moment”, you’ll be sitting in that chair in a deep trance and you’ll go “that’s it for me, I’m out of here”.
You’ll let go of that habit and you’ll walk away from it and it will be easy, it will be painless. That part of you who smokes, it will communicate. Ask it to go and find something else to do. When that happens, you’ll be free of this habit forever. If we can also tap into that underlying feeling of self love and get them to understand their worth to the people around them, they’re going to look after themselves better and utilize it, emotion opens up or bypasses the critical faculty as well. This would amount to one complete and efficient way to give up the smoking habit forever.