Tuesday 24 July 2007

Why Hypnotherapy is the Most Successful Way to Stop Smoking

Many people feel that smoking is such an addictive habit that there is no easy way to quit. Many simply don’t even try. Others make half hearted attempts but are back on the weed within a day or so. Some are determined to stop smoking and seek out the best methods for doing so. A few people succeed with sheer will power. Some use nicotine patches or gum to relieve the craving and break the habit that way. Others turn to alternative treatments and therapies. In an extensive study at the end of the last century, of all the stop smoking methods tried, hypnotherapy came out as the most successful method to quit smoking. Here is an overview of how and why hypnotherapy works so well in helping people to stop smoking.

A good hypnotherapist will know that when a smoker comes to visit their practice, that person is absolutely desperate to stop smoking. It takes an enormous amount of courage to venture into the unknown and this gives the practitioner of hypnotherapy a great advantage over those other methods used to quit smoking. In most cases, this is the client’s last resort and they are prepared to give it their best shot.

Armed with this knowledge, the hypnotherapist is ready for the smoker. He or she will unleash a barrage of reasons why smoking is so bad for their client and follow up with a whole host of reasons why they should stop smoking, here and now. While still reeling from the information overload of why they absolutely should quit smoking, the smoker is then gently placed into hypnosis by a relaxation method known as progressive relaxation. This is where the skilled hypnotherapist uses verbal imagery hypnotherapy techniques to relax the entire body of the client in such a way as to make them feel at ease and not threatened in any way.

Hypnotherapy uses a person’s relaxed state to deliver suggestions directly to the subconscious part of their mind, where they will take root and become a part of the person’s normal mind-set. Once the client is hypnotised deeply enough, the hypnotherapist then goes about delivering the specific suggestions that will bring about the change in the client’s thought process that will make it feel natural to be a non-smoker. This small detail is, in fact, very important. It is easier to stop smoking when a person is in the frame of mind that they are a non-smoker rather than someone who is giving up, or who has quit smoking. These imply the person was a smoker, which will remain at the back of their minds and could lead to them reverting back to the way they were if subjected to temptation. The person who has the mindset of a non-smoker, interestingly, is not so vulnerable to the temptation to restart their habit, as that habit has been effectively forgotten. In its simplest terms, someone who has quit smoking, was once a smoker. Someone who is a non-smoker is a person who doesn’t smoke. There is a world of difference in those two statements and the good hypnotherapist knows this.

Together with a heap of information on the dangers of smoking, all the reasons why it is desirable to quit smoking combined with powerful hypnotic suggestions designed to alter the mindset of the ex-smoker to that of a non-smoker, the skilled hypnotherapist will engineer the change that will enable their client to walk out of their practice as a non-smoker. It is for this reason hypnotherapy has been cited the most successful way to stop smoking.

Hypnotherapist Terry Didcott has over 12 years of solid practical experience behind him. If you smoke and you really want to quit, he can help. Check out the high spec “Stop Smoking Today!” CD at his website http://www.hypnosic.com - and find out more.

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