Hypnosis to quit smoking: does it work or is it a scam?

If you search the internet for "how to quit smoking", you will find a multitude of pages and forums recommending all kinds of miraculous methods, including hypnosis.

Although there are no serious scientific studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of hypnosis for smoking cessation, the gurus who try to sell it to you come out from under the rocks.

In this article I will briefly comment why quitting with hypnosis alone is a myth (and a scam).

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Can you quit smoking with a single hypnosis session?

If you visit any hypnotist website, you will quickly see that they all promise to almost magically quit after a session of a couple of hours.

They assure you that through their unique method, their voice, their neurolinguistic programming skills or whatever, they will "reset" your brain and eliminate your addiction to tobacco instantly.

Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that's a lie. Addiction to tobacco (and any other drug) is a complex problem, and most people who try to quit smoking have suffered from that addiction for years (or decades)

. No guru can whisper magic words in your ear that will change your brain in a few minutes.

Doctors and psychologists who have studied addictive behaviors thoroughly know that Overcoming tobacco addiction is a process that requires effort and awareness to change day-to-day habits, apply relapse prevention strategies ...

That is why the messages of hypnotherapists who promise us to solve our addiction problem without effort on our part sound so sweet (just take out the credit card).

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The power of group suggestion

Many hypnotherapists facilitate their hypnosis groups in hotel conference rooms. They take advantage of social biases to convince you that their method works.

An example: imagine that 100 people attend one of those hypnosis sessions to quit smoking. By mere Placebo effect And a matter of statistics, probably 10 or 20 people will “quit” that same day (but not forever).

Other people (most) will not feel "the magic of hypnosis", but they will be afraid or ashamed to admit out loud that it has not worked for them. This is what usually happens in such groups: if it doesn't work for me, I think it's my fault.

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The survivor bias

As you can imagine, most people who do not work hypnosis (pure placebo effect), will keep it a secret. And the few people who did allow themselves to be suggested by the hypnotherapist, "jumped on the bandwagon" of motivation and stopped smoking for a few hours or a few days. they'll tell everyone that hypnosis is great.

That is what in psychology we call "the survivor bias”, When a minority that has had apparent positive results is the only one that speaks of the results, while those who did not achieve it did not share the information (out of shame or feeling failure).

Then it gives us the false impression that "everyone stops smoking with hypnosis."

Unfortunately, they end up facing reality in the end. Many of the people who come out of a hypnosis session without smoking end up relapsing after a few days or weeks. I know this because that is the case of many of the people who ask me for help to quit smoking, have gone through several sessions of hypnosis and still do not advance.

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Can anyone quit smoking for a couple of days with hypnosis?

Anyone can get motivated by watching videos or attending a personal development event and quit for a few hours or a few days.

The difficult thing is to maintain that in time. Among addiction professionals, it is considered that the threshold to consider that a person has overcome an addiction is one year without relapses (As minimum).

Those who profit from the hypnosis myth take advantage of these biases in scientific research. They will say that many people came out of the session "without smoking", but they will not follow up, and will conveniently ignore cases of relapse within a few days or weeks of hypnosis (most).

Wanting to solve our problems effortlessly Quitting smoking is not easy, even if the famous book by Allen Carr says so.

Most people need to understand how their addiction works, how are their consumption habits, when they smoke, with whom, where, how they feel before, during and after smoking, the role that tobacco plays in their daily lives, etc.

It requires a lot of self-awareness, and above all, changes in habits and adaptation to a new context. Nobody can give you that with 2 hours in a hotel.

Hypnotherapists often take advantage of an almost mystical narrative to make people think that they have "special powers" or that they have access to the subconscious (which for decades We know that it does not exist, despite the lies and scams of Sigmund Freud, who falsified his own cases to support his theories).

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Science shows us that hypnosis doesn't work

If we ask the scientific community, this is what the evidence says. Hypnosis is a technique (a technique, not a therapy) that can be interesting in very specific cases, if combined with other techniques.

That is, a psychotherapist might consider using some hypnosis occasionally as part of the psychotherapy process, but never like 100% of the intervention, because that has neither feet nor head.

The cognitive behavioral therapy (and other variants) continues to be the method with the most scientific evidence to successfully quit smoking (and without relapses).

Psychological therapy to quit smoking

I am Luis Miguel Real, I am a psychologist and I have been working as an addiction specialist for years. I can help you quit smoking with scientifically proven methods, no magic tricks. With time and effort on your part, and the guidance of someone truly trained, you will succeed.

If you want me to help you finish your story with tobacco, contact me.