Analytical & Clinical Hypnotherapy

Is this you?

“You’ve been smoking for a while now, and are still wondering why you do it. You can remember just how awful those first cigarettes were - you had to try really hard to master the taste and the technique and teach yourself to inhale. The first cigarettes were offered to you by friends who smoked. You first smoked either out of curiosity, feeling that you were missing out on something, or because you were under pressure from your peers, and yourself, and movies, and advertising, to be mature, sophisticated or grown up.

With those first few cigarettes you just knew that you could never get addicted to something that tasted so horrible. After a short while your smoking friends that started you off smoking stopped supplying you with free cigarettes and insisted that you bought your own. Already, at this time you were hooked, so you bought the cigarettes but still you told yourself that you were choosing to smoke, that it was your decision to do this...

Later on, you might have met some non-smokers and felt a bit disadvantaged, because you were smoking and they didn’t smoke; you felt somehow inferior. So you offered them some cigarettes so that they could experience the smoking sensation... After all, if they started smoking it would provide some confirmation that smoking was worth doing. You’ve now tried to stop smoking several times, and failed each time.

You are now one of the estimated 60% of smokers at any one time who want to stop smoking, but can’t.”

There are many smokers who would recognise something of themselves in the above description. Maybe you’ve been to a hypnotherapist in the past, to try to stop. And the first thing you did when you left his consulting room was to light up; just to see if those cigarettes now tasted of burning black rubber, as the hypnotist had said. And you’ve been smoking ever since...

You are one hard case. A committed smoker - who would like to stop - but just can’t. No matter how hard you try.

Do your reasons for stopping smoking include the following?

Surrey Hypnotherapist Peter Back, at Surrey Hypnotherapy - Woking, has discovered that, in order of priority, smokers tend to cite the following reasons for wanting to give up:

1. Financial reasons (more women than men state this, but still over 50% of men view the money cigarettes costs as the major factor in wanting to stop). Even an average smoker, on just 20 cigarettes a day will spend £1569.50 each year on cigarettes (based on 20 cigarettes cost £4.30).

2. For health reasons (for women pregnancy is a major factor).

3. For the sake of your family (to reduce the effect on your family of your family passively smoking your cigarette smoke and to reduce the chances of your own premature death impacting your spouse and children).

4. Your clothes, breath and hair smell. Your skin is beginning to show the effects of smoking. Your fingers mouth and teeth are yellowed by nicotine stains. There can be no denying that cigarettes are making you unattractive.

So why can’t you stop?

If smoking is costing you, say, £1600 a year it should be easy for you to stop. After all, for our average smoker £1600 is probably equivalent to you volunteering for a pay cut of approximately £2k a year !

But you still can’t stop!

The medical profession believe that most smokers use tobacco regularly because they are addicted to nicotine. Addiction is characterised by compulsive drug seeking use and dependence, even in the face of negative health consequences.

Nicotine is recognised as being the most addictive drug available for recreational use, being more addictive than: heroin, Cocaine, Alcohol, Caffeine and Marijuana. Smoking just one packet of 20 cigarettes can be enough to establish the addiction.

Hypnosis can help you to quit smoking!

A few years ago a huge study was conducted in the USA, looking at all the available methods of stopping smoking, and checking the success rates. To find the most effective method of giving up smoking, researchers Franch Schmidt and Chockalingham Viswesvaran of the University of Iowa carried out a meta analysis, statistically combining the results of more than 600 studies covering almost 72,000 people from America, Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe.

They looked at everything – nicotine chewing gum, nicotine patches, acupuncture, aversion therapy, will power alone – and hypnotherapy. The results were published in the Journal of Applied Psychology; being subsequently reported in ‘New Scientist’ magazine as follows:

SUCCESS RATES FOR DIFFERENT METHODS OF STOPPING SMOKING

60% - Single session Hypnosis
30% - Cassette tapes with Hypnotic suggestion
29% - Exercise and breathing therapy
25% - Aversion therapy
24% - Acupuncture
10% - Nicotine Replacement Therapy
6% - Willpower alone

The report went on to say:

“Hypnosis is the most effective way of giving up smoking, according to the largest ever scientific comparison of ways of breaking the habit”.

Source: New Scientist, volume 136, issue 1845, 31 Oct 92

Why doesn’t Hypnosis always work?

Suggestion therapy to stop smoking is usually very successful in cases where the smoker genuinely wants to stop smoking – if that sound like a strange statement, just consider for a moment that some smoker’s have no intention of quitting, and undergo the therapy at the request of their concerned family or partner effectively ‘going through the motions’ just to prove to their concerned family or partner that not even Hypnotherapy could stop them smoking.

Some other strong willed smokers, and let’s face it you have to be strong willed to persist with smoking that first cigarette, merely wish to be able to proclaim to all and sundry that “their mind was too powerful to be controlled by that hypnotherapist”. Never mind that their mind is constantly thinking about where their cigarettes are, and when their next smoking break will be …

Given that the smoker does actually want to stop smoking, and that the initial anxiety that started them smoking has disappeared, or is now at an acceptably low level, Suggestion Hypnotherapy can be very effective. Should a person subsequently relapse, and return to smoking, it is likely that the desire has been prompted by internal unconscious anxieties, and that Analytical Hypnotherapy would be required.

How Hypnosis can help you to quit smoking?

Smoking is clearly a totally irrational behaviour; there can be no logical reason for doing it. Because the act of smoking is initially so difficult (remember that first cigarette?), most smokers had to ‘teach’ themselves to smoke, and having done that and found themselves to be addicted, find that if they stop they feel irritable, insecure and upset; finding it impossible to quit smoking.

They justify this irrational behaviour to themselves, at an unconscious level, by creating a large number of conflicting erroneous beliefs about the activity. Suggestion Therapy is used to reverse these beliefs in such a way that the desire to smoke no longer exists and a new set of beliefs are created.

Peter offers suggestion therapy to stop smoking that takes just one 60-70 minute session, directed at improving the motivation to quit smoking, reversing those erroneous beliefs about smoking, and providing additional psychological benefits for quitting.

The hypnotic suggestion part of the session makes use of specially recorded background music that contains subliminal suggestions, repeated over and over again. The subliminal suggestions are specially worded to make smoking less attractive to you. They are are inaudible to the conscious part of your mind, but are designed to penetrate, and take root in, your unconscious mind; making the whole process more effective and easier for you.

Following just one stop smoking session you will be a non-smoker. It isn’t so much a matter of ‘controlling your mind’. It’s more a matter of reprogramming your mind so that you suddenly have the will power required to stop smoking, such that smoking is something that you feel completely indifferent to. You could smoke if you chose to, but you’ll believe that “smoking is something that I just don’t do, I’m a non-smoker”.

Is the therapy to stop smoking expensive?

No. Not really. Consider that, following just one 60-70 minute session with Peter, your life will be completely transformed, such that, as a non-smoker, your body will start the process of purging itself of the toxins associated with cigarette smoking, and start the process of recovery so that:

1. You start to become more attractive; your clothes, breath and hair no longer smell of cigarette smoke, and your skin looks younger and cleaner.

2. You no longer have to live with the daily guilt trip of worrying about what will happen to your family in the event of a premature death from smoking related diseases.

3. You live longer, and your whole, longer, life is healthier and happier.

4. Assuming that you are an average 20/day cigarette smoker, you will have more money to spend or save; approximately equivalent to enjoying a pay rise of £2000 a year on your annual salary!

Some Hypnotherapists use the associated cost savings to justify a fee of £250 or even £500 for a single smoking cessation session. And let’s face it, £500 for a session to stop smoking can seem quite a reasonable amount to pay when the smoker considers that they are likely to make cost savings worth nearly £2000 in their first year of being a non-smoker.

However, here at Surrey Hypnotherapy we believe that our single smoking cessation session fee of just £145 offers significantly better value to the smoker. For a 20 cigarettes a day smoker, at £4.20 for a packet of 20 cigarettes, the cost of the session represents just 35 days (5 weeks) of your usual smoking expenditure!

And for only £145, not only do you enjoy a significant financial gain from having stopped smoking, you also enjoy the benefits of improving health and increasing attractiveness from being a non-smoker; and you achieve all this easily, without stress, and without irritability, just by using your new found ‘can do’ will power!

If you would like to stop smoking using Hypnosis, the most effective way of giving up smoking, then please contact Surrey Hypnotherapist Peter Back, at Surrey Hypnotherapy - Woking, by either e-mail or telephone, as detailed in the Fees & Appointments section of this web site, and arrange an appointment for a session to stop smoking.