How Self Hypnosis Can Help You to Quit Smoking

How Self Hypnosis Can Help You to Quit Smoking

Smoking is one of the hardest and most intractable habits to break. The nicotine in cigarettes is highly addictive. So, whatever your motivations, quitting your nicotine fix is fraught, and it may even be the most difficult problem you ever have to overcome.

Many smokers see a cigarette as their key stress management crutch. Many smokers perhaps the majority of them would be delirious if they could quit smoking for good. However, many continue struggling to give up smoking and fall short of overcoming those powerful cravings.

Quit smoking hypnosis has proven to be a solution for many in overcoming their nicotine scourge. Its helps to break the status quo and put them on the path to a cigarette-free future.

The Perils of Smoking

Smoking is the cause of many commonly occurring health issues. It can lead to chronic bronchitis, pulmonary and cardiac disease, emphysema and bronchopulmonary cancer, but also to ischemic heart disease. Chronic smokers may also find their immune system compromised.

If that is not bad enough, the World Health Organization has pointed to smoking as the cause of seven million deaths each year around the globe. In fact, on average, it kills have its users.

Why You Struggle To Quit Smoking

Nicotine is the underlying trigger behind your entrenched smoking addiction. The human brain is wired with nicotine receptors. Nicotine is a key ingredient in tobacco. So, every time you light up, your brain receives the nicotine fix it craves.

Your brain creates the urge to smoke and your incessant craving for more nicotine. If you hope to give up smoking, you need to turn off those same nicotine receptors that have been stimulated by tobacco all those years.

Quieting Your Nicotine Craving

Person cutting up cigarettes

Your subconscious mind is the engine room for your nicotine addiction. In addition to those problematic nicotine receptors, you are prompted to light up first thing in the morning, immediately after a meal, whenever you are stressed or when you get behind the wheel of your car by your subconscious.

Tricky thing the subconscious!

While conventional nicotine replacement therapies can help eradicate those physical craving aspects to smoking, those mental itches triggered deep in your subconscious continue ticking away, constantly nagging at you.

Hence, you’ll only win your battle with your nicotine addiction once you take control and recognize the need to deal decisively with your subconscious cravings.

Overcoming Mental Barriers To Giving Up Smoking

Before you dive into self-hypnosis to overcome your smoking habit, you should understand how top-down processing works, and how its effects can set the scene for forging an unbreakable path to your non-smoking future.

Top-down processing treats the mental aspect of quitting as part of a holistic approach in which the stimuli your mind receives as signals such as stress is translated into a response designed to condition your subconscious to interpret these signals differently and respond to them in a non-smoking way.

This holistic process makes quitting smoking possible. Without control over your subconscious processes, you are only treating half your nicotine problem. Dealing with how our minds react to stimuli is often the missing link to successfully giving up smoking.

Self-Hypnosis As A Tool For Successfully Quitting Smoking

Most hypnotherapy is conducted in a professional therapist’s premises. The therapist typically guides their patient through the duration of the treatment process. In contrast, self-hypnosis involves the patient doing all the heavy lifting solo.

With self-hypnosis, you have to use relaxation techniques to achieve a receptive frame of mind before planting suggestions using tools such as watching a video or listening to a pre-recorded audio.

While there a professional hypnotherapist is not a part of your self-hypnosis sessions, you have formal scripts you use to engage with your subconscious helping you plant the seeds of change you are after.

Why Try Self-Hypnosis?

Woman on session with a professional hypnotherapist

Self-hypnosis is one of the most effective ways of influencing your subconsciousness. This is often the aspect of your mind you are least aware of.

As attested by the world-famous Mayo Clinic, using hypnotherapy in a therapeutic setting has proven helpful in assisting patients to quit smoking.

Hypnosis techniques are designed to trigger a trance-like state, where the subconscious takes control. Hypnosis has been defined by the Moyo Clinic as “an altered state of awareness during which the individual undergoing hypnosis appears to be in a trance.”

Hypnosis is a sound technique for breaking nicotine addictions as it allows patients to deal with their addiction on both a conscious and a subconscious basis.

Smokers experience waves of craving stimuli which the brain interprets as stress. You respond to these stressors by smoking as a means of dealing with that stress. Hypnosis counters these stimuli and returns control to the patient as while the conscious mind is in a trancelike state and disconnected, the subconscious is active and open to suggestion.

Detaching your conscious mind during self-hypnosis sessions means in your mind isn’t looking for conscious reasons for you to continue smoking.

Accessing Your Subconscious

With the process of self-hypnosis, the patient uses guided hypnosis video or audio resources to present positive prompts that will adhere in your subconscious, rerouting the default responses of your nicotine receptors over time.

By accessing your subconscious, you are putting in place roadblocks to suppress those subconscious urges to smoke.

Following several self-hypnosis sessions, encountering a smoking stimulus will not automatically lead to backsliding into smoking. Rather, your brain’s instinctive response is to allow the new wiring in your subconscious to channel your response into different, healthier paths.

Final Observation

Person with closed eyes

If you are have tried unsuccessfully time and time again, to give up smoking, then quit smoking hypnosis may be an option you should consider, given it addresses the mental struggle that an attempt to quitting smoking inevitably encounters. A self-hypnosis session involves you following a process that begins with you entering a trance state, before absorbing suggestions from a script designed to assist you to quit smoking to help you finally quit smoking.