Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States; smoking can cause cancer almost anywhere in your body and harms nearly every one of your organs. Hypnosis can help you quit cigarettes by addressing the psychological aspects of your addiction and looking into your underlying motivations for smoking. While this may seem like a shockingly large number—and it is—, the amount of people smoking is actually decreasing worldwide - with 29 million fewer smokers today than in Smoking is incredibly harmful.
This means that smoking causes more deaths than HIV, illegal drug use, alcohol use, car accidents, and firearm-related incidents combined. Smoking has been linked to cancer in almost every part of the body, including:.
Additionally, smoking has been shown to increase your risk of many diseases, such as:. Nearly half of all smokers die prematurely due to smoking-related diseases, and the average life expectancy of a smoker is ten years younger than a non-smoker. A study in BMJ Open showed that even experts can underestimate how difficult it is to quit smoking.
Helpful resources, like Cancer. Smoking cessation can be challenging due to the physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. An animal study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal suggests that this is because smoking more or less tricks the brain into continuing to smoke.
If you continue to smoke, your brain experiences signaling process changes in the brain reward system. As nicotine releases dopamine the feel-good chemical each time you smoke, it effectively teaches the brain to repeat the same behavior. By this stage, you are no longer repulsed by cigarettes and begin to crave them instead. When your body doesn't get nicotine, you may feel uncomfortable make that very uncomfortable and crave cigarettes. Withdrawal symptoms can begin in as little as a few hours from your last cigarette.
Some people suffer from severe physical symptoms of nicotine withdrawal once they stop smoking. These include:. Nicotine withdrawal may also cause psychological and sleep problems such as:. If you're looking to quit and want to ward off some of the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal, then hypnotherapy may be helpful.
Hypnotherapy has been shown to both help people quit smoking and overcome the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. Whatever your age, your health will benefit from quitting smoking. However, the sooner you quit, the faster your body can recover and your risk of serious health conditions will reduce. Hypnotherapy combines hypnosis with suggestions and psychological therapy to allow you to gain greater control over your mind and body.
Hypnosis is often described as entering a focused and absorbed state of attention, where you become more receptive to new ideas. Clinical hypnosis has been used to treat a range of medical conditions such as:. Hypnosis is a well-established practice in medicine that has been shown as an effective solution for people wanting to quit smoking.
While many smokers use nicotine replacement therapy products, like patches, gum, or inhalers, to manage the physical withdrawal symptoms associated with cigarette addiction, hypnotherapy works by breaking the addiction from within the mind. Instead of replacing and slowly reducing the amount of addictive chemicals in your system, hypnotherapy works by breaking the negative behaviors and thought patterns associated with smoking—such as smoking to relieve stress.
Hypnosis treatment may also target the unconscious motivations for smoking. These may include the need to reduce boredom, stress, loneliness, or the desire to be accepted by others. It may also target some of the unconscious smoking triggers, such as driving, pouring a drink, or finishing a meal, and help break these associations.
During the hypnotherapy session, therapists may repeat suggestions that offer alternative behaviors to smoking. Patients may also be asked to imagine unpleasant outcomes of smoking. For example, the hypnotherapist may suggest that cigarette smoke smells foul or that smoking will lead to trouble breathing. A popular method of smoking hypnosis called the Spiegel method focuses on three main ideas:. Other research has suggested that the success of quitting smoking is caused by the relaxation effects of hypnosis, which may help with nicotine withdrawal.
Several studies have shown the effectiveness of hypnosis for treating smoking addiction. That being said, several studies within the last ten years have supported the use of hypnotherapy to help people quit smoking. These include: A randomized controlled trial of smokers with serious lung illnesses. This study compared the effectiveness of hypnotherapy, nicotine therapy or a combination of both treatments, and found that those receiving hypnotherapy were more likely to be non-smokers 3 months and 6 months after being hospitalized.
Those are both big misconceptions, Hall explained while prepping his crowd for the descent into a state of enhanced relaxation.
But conflating hypnosis with sleep the word is derived from the Greek for sleep , is inaccurate, according to the hypnotist and author Charles Tebbetts, as relayed by his student C. Hunter writes that it's more accurate to say that all hypnosis is actually self-hypnosis. The hypnotherapist, much like a physical trainer then, is merely helping the subject convince themselves to do something they were already capable of doing, nudging them in the right direction.
While there are a wide variety of approaches and styles of hypnotism employed today—something that further confounds our ability to understand it objectively, or to study it scientifically—one thing that they tend to have in common i s an emphasis on relaxation, focus , harnessing a desire to change within the individual, and building linguistic and visual relationships between emotions.
It is a natural state. In fact, each of us enters such a state—sometimes called a trance state— at least twice a day: once when we are falling asleep, and once when we are waking up. Hypnotherapists say they facilitate this process , just without the sleep part. More or less. Again, for every positive study you read about hypnosis, there are be numerous, often conflicting other accounts. Green and Steven Jay Lynn reviewed 56 studies on the results of hypnosis on smoking cessation. While it was shown to generally be a better option than no treatment at all, many of the studies combined hypnosis with other therapeutic methods, making it difficult to isolate its effects.
Likely few people try to quit smoking through hypnosis alone, and no two practices are exactly the same, which is part of what makes it so difficult to know if it works. Moshe Torem, a professor of psychiatry at Northeast Ohio Medical University and the president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, one of many such professional groups around the country, explained to me the components of typical hypnotherapist's process.
Second is disassociating oneself from the immediate physical environment. The third element is suggestibility. The person becomes more responsive to suggestions given to him or her. You may recognize that you're being told to lift you arm, for example, but you feel as if it is being lifted by some external force.
The end result, ideally, finds the concepts suggested by the hypnotist—either positive reinforcement for resisting smoking or negative associations with cigarettes—taking root in the subconscious as a sort of bulwark against the impulse to smoke. This might be a pretty good time to pause and call bullshit, particularly since, during the demonstration in the library, that's exactly what I was thinking myself. Hall himself tried a little of both techniques, telling us that we were ready to stop smoking, that this was something we wanted, but also told us horror stories about smoking.
Not of cancer, which can be easy to ignore until it's too late, but of his trips to tobacco farms, where he'd seen all manner of disgusting things—rats and tree frogs and pesticides and pigeon shit falling into a tobacco shredder and so on.
You're smoking tree frogs and pesticide, he said. To be honest, that didn't sound much worse than what I always sort of assumed I was smoking. No way any of this is going to work on me , I thought, as I prepped myself to lilt off into my own special place on the beach, my compatriots drifting away into their own safe places.
Ask someone not to think about a rhinoceros, and what's the first thing he thinks of? And yet, every day, posters, commercials, and cigarette labels tell people not to smoke. I tell myself not to smoke. It doesn't seem to be working fast enough. Although the number of smoking adults in the U.
I think it has helped me cut down. Hypnosis seems to have made me calmer, or at least more aware that I have choices. I found my hypnotherapist through my chemical dependency counselor. I would say that hypnosis is not for everyone, but it is certainly worth a try. I know that it cannot hurt, and could really help, so why not? I feel the same way about other holistic therapies: I experienced acupuncture and massage therapy when I was in Asia, and both helped me with various health problems from asthma to anxiety.
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