Self Hypnosis Techniques for Quitting Cigarettes and Losing Weight

You could be forgiven for wondering why the scientific community remains - in large part - wilfully blind to the now fairly widely acknowledged successes and benefits of using hypnosis to stop smoking and similarly the successful use of hypnosis to lose weight.

One of the most readily recognisable features of accounts relating to the attempts made by people to quit smoking or lose weight using only the willpower only approach is the high incidence of failure, either very quickly or fairly soon after the attempt began. With regard to smoking in particular in some cases the person may hold out for a year or more before finally giving in and starting to smoke again, long after the physically addictive nicotine poison has left their body.

With this in mind, you'd think that Science would be more inclined to look into what is obviously the key factor here, that being that psychological addiction has its roots in, well, psychology, in other words the mind.

There is of course an extremely strong symbiosis or synergie between psychology and hypnosis/self hypnosis, simply because hypnosis, self hypnosis and NLP deal directly with the mind. All forms of psychological addiction are created in and by the mind, and can therefore only be overcome in and by the mind. Physical dependency on nicotine can be overcome in a matter of days, long term success or failure in quitting smoking depends on how the individual deals with the ongoing psychological aspects of the addiction.

Similarly, it's easy to diet for a week or two, but much harder to maintain it on a long term basis.

This is because the conscious mind on its own is not capable of getting to the deeply rooted psychological drivers of these addictions. You can consciously insist to yourself that you're never going to smoke again, but within a few days or so - even after the physical dependency on nicotine has gone - your resolve will be noticeably wearing down, and in many cases it will only be a matter of time before it crumbles altogether.

These drivers - habituated thought patterns which form urges - come from the subconscious, so it's obviously the subconscious which holds the key to successfully and permanently overcoming these urges.

Habits like smoking and overeating develop because they have come to be seen as a respite from some sort of negative emotion such as stress, and become deeply ingrained and habituated at a subconscious level through repetition, so that the subconscious eventually comes to "think" that it's necessary to maintain them in order to prevent those negative emotions from coming to the surface and interfering with your ability to function effectively.

This is why conscious efforts to stop smoking or lose weight often fail, because the subconscious has'nt been take
"on board" to back up the conscious effort.

Fundamentally, hypnosis is a tool which can be used to "reprogram" the subconscious. Deep relaxation subdues the constant clamour of the critical, left brain conscious mind, thereby allowing the subconscious to become open to and accepting of the benefits and effectiveness of positive suggestions and visualization related to stopping smoking or losing weight. When the subconscious has accepted and absorbed these suggestions the old negative thought patterns which previously stimulated the urges to smoke or overeat disappear, leaving you with no need or desire to smoke or to eat any more than the body actually needs.

Hypnotherapy/NLP is a proven method of successfully achieving this, but can be for some people prohibitively expensive, and also requires that the pace of your progress is dictated by the hypnotherapist's appointment book, and not necessarily by your personal preference.

Self hypnosis, on the other hand, has been shown to be just as effective, providing that the desire for change is strong and that you're able to maintain focus on the ultimate fulfilment of your goal. Of course success with hypnotherapy depends on these factors as well.

Regarding the technique of self hypnosis, it's true to say that a certain amount of self discipline is necessary, but then nothing worthwhile is ever gained with no effort. You first have to learn how to relax properly in order to open up the pathway to your powerful subconscious, through which positive suggestions and mental images will enter the subconscious and begin to influence it in ways which will change the way that you feel and think about smoking or food or any other aspect of your life or self that you wish to change or improve.

As for hypnotic suggestion itself, you can basically use either affirmations or audio hypnosis downloads to convey the suggestions to the subconscious, which will, in some instances almost immediately, begin to effect the desired change.

Using affirmations can be a little problematic in that it's necessary to maintain a certain balance between being sufficiently mentally and physically relaxed to allow the suggestion to penetrate the subconscious, and remaining "conscious" enough to keep up the verbal repetition and mental visualization of the affirmation itself. This is because the affirmation should be repeated to yourself, slowly and deliberately and in a low but clear voice, around 20-30 times each session.

However by using relevantly themed self hypnosis pc/mp3 downloads you're able to sidestep this because the suggestions are coming from "outside" and you can simply relax deeply and allow the suggestion to be absorbed by the subconscious which will soon begin to create the reality being suggested.