Smoking & Vaping Cessation

Is Your Smoking Habit Jeopardizing Your Health, Relationships, Or Career?

Are you worried about your health? You may have noticed troubling symptoms such as a smoker’s cough or shortness of breath appearing. If you hike, play sports, or do other physical activities, your performance may be in decline. Even if you haven’t noticed any major problems yet, you probably want to avoid them down the road. And with the cost of health insurance significantly higher for smokers, you may recognize that your physical health plays a significant role in your financial wellbeing.

Are you tired of being judged for being a smoker? In social situations, your need to smoke may inconvenience not only you, but others, as well. To avoid such difficulties and embarrassments, you may try to hide your habit, but that has left you feeling isolated from people close to you. Your smoking patterns may also be compromising your productivity or holding you back professionally, especially if you take frequent work breaks and/or your boss or colleagues don’t approve.

Whether you’re thinking about your next smoke or trying to quit, cigarettes may feel like all you ever think about. You may be growing increasingly frustrated by nicotine’s control over you—especially if loved ones are pressuring you to stop smoking.

Although it may sometimes feel like quitting is impossible, it’s not too late to turn things around. With the right quitting strategy, you can reduce or eliminate your nicotine use and take back control of your health, career, and relationships.

Once You Start, It’s Never Easy to Stop Smoking

In the United States, 14 out of every 100 people smoke¹. Thanks to dishonest advertising, many people started smoking without fully understanding the risks. Even though cigarette manufacturers are now required to disclose their ingredients, e-cigarette manufacturers are exempt from this requirement. So while 99% of e-cigarettes contain nicotine and other harmful chemicals, most vapers think their e-cigarettes contain “only flavoring.”^2,3

By the time many people realize the dangers of smoking, they are already too addicted to stop without experiencing uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms. Making quitting even more difficult is the fact that smoking is psychologically addictive. Anyone who has used smoking as a respite from stressful situations or as a way of bonding with friends will understand how difficult it is to give that up.

Given cigarettes’ highly addictive nature, very few people who attempt to quit succeed on their first try. According to the National Institutes of Health, 80 percent of attempts to quit end in relapse within the first month⁴. Fortunately, though, most people who persist in their tobacco cessation efforts eventually succeed⁵. And there are natural ways to quit smoking that can both increase the chances of success and minimize discomfort—all without the need for nicotine replacement gum or patches.

If You’ve Been Struggling To Quit Smoking, Hypnosis Can Make All The Difference

Hypnosis for smoking cessation is the easiest way to quit smoking. It works by tapping into the part of your brain that controls habit formation: your subconscious. This is the same part of your mind that allows you to perform simple actions—like knowing which side of the bed to get out of or how to put your pants on—without consciously thinking about it.

Just as your subconscious guides you through your morning routine, it controls many other elements of your day. Thanks to your subconscious, you know exactly what to do after you pour a cup of coffee, go on break, or encounter stress: light up a cigarette. Hypnosis works by tapping into and rewiring that part of your mind, creating a mental foundation upon which to build new habits.

Each of my clients has unique challenges and triggers, so the purpose of our first session together will be for me to learn about your situation. I will ask about your background, including how long you’ve been smoking, who you smoke with, when you smoke, and how it makes you feel. We will also discuss the details of your past quit attempts.

Once I understand your motivations, triggers, and preferences, I will suggest practical tips to help you quit smoking, including ways to distract your mind and reduce cravings. For example, having a bottle of water or a bag of hard candy nearby can help some people. For others, it is more effective to build a negative association by thinking of something distasteful every time they smoke. And for some, they don’t experience cravings at all after hypnosis; it feels like they never smoked in the first place. I have many tools at my disposal, and I will customize my approach to suit you.

Without the aid of hypnosis, it could take months to build the new habits you’ll need to quit. Building the foundation of these new habits when you are in an extremely relaxed state (during hypnosis) will allow them to sink into your subconscious much more quickly. As they become engrained, you may find yourself mindlessly reaching for a healthy alternative almost as effortlessly as you used to reach for a cigarette.

The more control you gain over how much you smoke the more confident you will become, further motivating you. As you start to see the positive impacts of not smoking, you’ll be delighted by the impact on your health, relationships, and every other aspect of your life.

As you consider whether to quit smoking with hypnosis, you may wonder. . .

How long will this take?

You probably didn’t get addicted to smoking overnight, so you may not be able to quit overnight (although some of my past clients have!). Even though hypnosis is the quickest and best way to quit smoking, you may need six or more sessions to see results, depending on the progress of the individual. Compared to other methods, though, hypnosis is the fastest way to quit. It is also the most effective; one study that compared using hypnosis vs. nicotine replacement to quit smoking found hypnosis to be more than three times as effective⁶.

I’m not sure I can deal with stress without smoking.

You weren’t always a smoker—it is a learned behavior. Just as you learned to smoke to cope with life’s challenges, you can learn how to handle those difficulties in another way. By listening to your needs and working with you to identify the best quitting strategies, I can help you forge a healthier path. Once your new habits are fully engrained, you will turn to them automatically and without thinking.

What if I gain weight?

There are many benefits of quitting smoking. Arguably the most important is the preservation of your physical health, which most people agree is worth any cost. While some people do put on a pound or two during nicotine withdrawal, that isn’t true for everyone. Even if you do put on a few pounds, I can help you lose the weight after you are off the cigarettes. Fortunately, hypnosis works just as well for weight loss as it does for smoking cessation! And because your physical health will be improving, you may find it easier to start and maintain an exercise regimen.

If You Can Imagine It, You Can Do It

There is no such thing as an easy way to stop smoking, but quitting with hypnosis is the closest thing. The fact that you’re researching your options means you already have the motivation needed to quit. If you’re feeling ready to make this investment in yourself, I’m confident that hypnosis can help you succeed. As a Certified Hypnotherapist, I can help you take back control of your life, health, and relationships. Contact me at (847) 254-8393 for a free consultation.

1 https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm

2 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28323467

3 https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/infographics/teens-e-cigarettes

4 https://www.drugabuse.gov/startnow/nida-white-paper.html

5 https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/quitting-smoking-vaping/what-you-need-know-quit-smoking

6 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24559809