How Hypnotherapy for Smoking Cessation Can Help You

Smoking is one of the most difficult habits to break. If you have tried to quit in the past, you may have used a number of approaches, including quitting cold turkey and using a patch, without success. Hypnosis has had a number of medicinal applications over the centuries, and it can also reduce the urge to smoke. Hypnotherapy for smoking can help you manage the cravings that make it so hard to stop and put you back in control.  

How Hypnosis Can Help With Anxiety and Smoking 

It is not uncommon to use smoking to manage your anxiety. After all, how many times have you thought or said after something stressful happened, “I need a cigarette”? The act of slowing down, stepping away from the world for a moment and even the change in your breathing that comes with smoking, despite the fact that it is ultimately not good for your lungs, can all be calming. Hypnosis can teach you to achieve this same state of stillness and calm without the cigarette. This is healthier and more sustainable than smoking. 

Studies have found that hypnosis is effective against anxiety and stress in a wide variety of situations, including people who are dealing with test anxiety or worries about surgery. It is also effective in helping people with physical symptoms related to anxiety, such as headaches or irritable bowel syndrome. By relaxing you, the experience of quit smoking hypnosis might help you with the underlying reason for your cravings.  

How Hypnosis Affects the Brain 

Is hypnosis “all in your head”? Studies suggest it is not. In fact, when people are in the focused state of relaxation that hypnosis can induce, there are changes in the brain that can be detected.  

Researchers in China wondered why hypnotherapy for smoking cessation and other forms of addiction is successful. To answer this question, they designed an experiment in which participants experienced hypnotherapy for smoking and then had an MRI. The researchers found a change in brain activity associated with hypnosis and participants’ reduced cravings for cigarettes.  

If you want to give up smoking hypnosis is a legitimate, scientifically proven method that can help.  

Does Hypnosis Last? 

As a smoker, there is a pattern you are probably familiar with, either because you have experienced it yourself or you have seen friends or acquaintances who are smokers go through it. In this pattern, a smoker tries a new approach and is able to stop smoking for a few days or even a few weeks. It seems like the person has found success at last, but before much more time has passed, the person is smoking again. Can hypnotherapy for smoking cessation help a person quit smoking and avoid going back to it? The answer is yes. 

One study conducted in 2008 compared the results of people who experienced give up smoking hypnosis with those who had behavioral counseling. In both cases, these approaches were combined with the use of patches. The study found that at both six-month and twelve-month follow-ups, people in the quit smoking hypnosis group had higher rates of abstinence than those who received behavioral counseling. Hypnotherapy for smoking can give you the tools to quit smoking not just over the short term but for the rest of your life.  

If you want to give up smoking hypnosis can help even if your past efforts to quit have failed. To find out more about how hypnosis can help you, contact us today and find out more about our best hypnotherapy courses or individual counselling and hypnosis sessions.