Introducing guest blogger Joshua Syna, from The Houston Hypnosis Center, addressing yet another addiction…cigarette smoking.
How To Stop Smoking (Without Patches, Pills, or Anchovy Paste)
Most often when people attempt to stop smoking, they forget to change their subconscious mind.
It is made worse by the majority of stop smoking approaches which just focus on interfering with the withdrawal symptoms rather than changing the way a person thinks about smoking. Nor do these methods address how you deal with stress, or eliminate the habit subconsciously. I have hypnotized over 15,000 people in the last 24 years. I have helped thousands to stop smoking without using nicotine replacements or medications, and enabling the vast majority of people to stop smoking with just one session of hypnosis.
Kicking the Can Down the Road
Let’s face it:
Nicotine replacements, medications and vapor won’t change the way you think about smoking, you are just kicking the can down the road. No matter how long you use these methods or how strategically you wean yourself off the nicotine, you will still have a smoker’s mindset.
If you are a smoker, you developed a relationship to cigarettes and smoking. It developed as a result of experiences you went through when you were growing up. Perhaps one or both of your parents smoked. Or an older sibling or peers was a smoker. This starts to shape your orientation to smoking often without you even realizing it is occurring. You may have started smoking in your teens (most people start between the ages of 13-17). You carried this way of thinking about smoking into your adulthood along with the habit, and in order to get rid of the habit you must change your mind set about smoking.
Electric Shock, Rubber Bands, and Anchovy Paste
I’m not going to lie to you: In helping thousands of people to get rid of the smoking habit, I never once used a negative suggestion or attempted to develop an aversive response to smoking and cigarettes. It doesn’t work and it’s far more effective to give positive suggestions which reinforce your own reasons for wanting to get rid of the smoking habit. These types of suggestions make sense to your subconscious mind. A woman came to me to stop smoking who had gone to another hypnotherapist, and after I had explained what hypnosis is and identified her reasons for wanting to stop smoking, she looked at me and said “Now you aren’t going to tell me that cigarettes taste like anchovy paste are you?” My response was “Why on earth would I do that?” She proceeded to tell me that a hypnotherapist whom she had went to before gave her suggestions attempting to develop a negative response and it didn’t work. It obviously doesn’t work mainly because the subconscious mind couldn’t make sense of that. The mind goes “they don’t taste like anchovies, they taste like cigarettes.”
So instead I gave her suggestions that enabled her to stay more calm and relaxed in her life, and strengthen her own commitment to protecting her body and taking good care of herself. I also gave her suggestions that changed her mindset, and strengthened her own feeling of satisfaction in knowing that she was getting rid of the smoking habit.
Change Your Mind, and Keep the Change!
By changing your subconscious mind and your relationship to smoking, learning to be more relaxed and changing the way you deal with stress, you can easily get rid of the smoking habit. When you are hypnotized your subconscious is much more receptive to suggestion, and your mind accepts helpful suggestions that enable you to get rid of the smoking habit regardless of how long you have smoked or how much you have smoked.
Mr. Syna is a clinical hypnotherapist and founder of the Houston Hypnosis Center℠. He is licensed by the State of Texas as a Chemical Dependency Counselor and specializes in using
hypnosis to help people overcome many different kinds of problems, as well as treating substance abuse and addictions. Since 1993, Mr. Syna has hypnotized over 15,000 people over the last 23 years in individual hypnosis sessions in Houston, Texas.