Dr. David Grayson: Everyone knows how hard it is to quit smoking. There are countless and myriad ways that people have tried to end their smoking habit.
One such way that many people are successfully able to quit smoking is with hypnosis.

When you think about hypnosis you may imagine objects waving before your eyes, or a tuxedo-clad man slowly swinging a watch in front of your face, or getting very sleepy. This is a Hollywood-made myth, and certainly not the method that is used by hypno-therapists, especially those who have achieved certification in hypnosis. Hypno-therapists are professionals who have had education, training and experience in using hypnosis so as to improve their patients’ health, and have a proven track record of success in helping people to stop smoking by means of the power of the patient’s own mind.

In order for you to stop smoking, you must truly want to become a non-smoker. This is the single most important step. One cannot change this habit to please a spouse or parent or other loved one. If an individual is trying to please another person, their efforts are doomed to failure. If, on the other hand, the person is truly motivated to become a non-smoker, it is a major step to achieving that goal. So, how do we take that motivation and use it to end the smoking habit?

The use of patches or gums is not a solution; they are merely masking the problem. Nicotine is still in their system so that the physical component of smoking is still present. Even if they taper off using these products, the psychological aspect of the habit still remains. This psychological factor of smoking is something that the drugs and products on the market cannot address. Yet this aspect of the habit is what gets people to go back to smoking – even after the physical desire for nicotine is long gone.

Smoking is a habit. It is learned behavior that the individual has been repeating day after day, year after year. Nicotine, although a powerful drug, leaves the system within twelve to twenty-four hours. It makes temporary changes in the brain, which are repeated through repeated exposures. Remove the nicotine, and you remove the changes. It is thus not an addiction, merely a habit that has been repeated time and time again.
And habits, even long lasting habits, can be changed.

This is where the use of hypnosis is so powerful. Instead of just focusing on the physical aspect of smoking, that is, the temporary brain effects of nicotine which dissipates in a relatively short time; hypnosis focuses on the habituation aspect of smoking, which, in some cases, never leaves the individual who smokes. There have been cases where people have quit smoking for years, only to return to the habit. In fact, many people who used to smoke still state that they sometimes have the urge to light up a cigarette.

By treating smoking as a habit, the hypno-therapist can teach the individual to change this learned, repeated behavior. By first educating the patient as to the true dangers of smoking, we reframe the way they look at smoking. Then, using hypnosis, we introduce they unconscious (also called the sub-conscious) mind to the same facts that the individual learned in a normal state of awareness. Once the conscious mind and the unconscious mind are “on the same page” so to speak, it makes ending the smoking habit much easier to accomplish. And, should someone err and smoke a cigarette, the hypno-therapist can explain that this is neither a relapse nor a failure, but merely a mistake. And mistakes can be undone. After all, undoing mistakes is why pencils have erasers!

A great deal of the compulsion to smoke cigarettes — as well as all habits for that matter — is psychological. While many methods to treat these habits focus on the physical aspect of the problem, unless the psychological factor is addressed, this is often a waste of time and money. Smoking is a serious, harmful, life and health-threatening, and costly, habit, but one that can be broken and ended. And as is the case of any harmful behavior, all factors that figure into it must be addressed in order to be successful. Smoking cessation by hypnosis works by helping the unconscious mind realize the dangers of smoking, and support the efforts of the individual to become and to remain a non-smoker.

PatientFYI

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