Central Hypnotherapy

Most smokers who have attempted to stop smoking before will have tried some form of Nicotine Replacement (NRT) – or several different forms of it – and after telling me this, my smoking clients will usually go on to say: “…and I’ve failed every time!”

Notice how they do not conclude: “…and it doesn’t work at all!” They nearly always say: “I’ve failed.”

Let me explain why they are wrong. The latest research from Harvard University in the USA published January 2012, concluded that:

“NRT is no more effective in helping people stop smoking cigarettes in the long-term than trying to quit on one’s own”.

This means that the products do nothing useful in the long run, they just waste your time. If smokers knew that, would they bother with them at all? Smokers are not “failing”, they have simply been misled. They were told that NRT would help, when in fact it does not. The manufacturer was also careful to put the words: “Requires Willpower” on the adverts and the packaging, so that the smoker is likely to assume, when it doesn’t work, that the fault was their own because they ‘lack willpower’. Smokers are more than ready to believe that about themselves, aren’t they? So you are set up to blame yourself for the failure of the method before you even try it! Sneaky, eh?

Hypnotherapy is the most effective method of the various ways of quitting tobacco available to smokers, according to the largest ever scientific study of the subject, carried out by the University of Iowa in 1992. All you have to do is book in, and turn up for the session – you can leave the rest to me. No weight-gain, and no willpower required! Call me (Chris) on Office: 0161-474 8120 (Office Hours) Mobile: 07748 838 644 (any time, including evenings & weekends)

Central Hypnotherapy (hypnotherapist Chris Holmes): Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy Training Services for Stockport, Manchester, Cheshire, Tameside.

Some smokers already ‘know’ this, because they have heard it said somewhere before.  Even so they may find themselves reaching for a cigarette when stress levels go up, and might be puzzled as to why that is when they already know consciously that tobacco isn’t relaxing.  I can explain exactly why this is: the Subconscious DOESN’T know… until the hypnotherapist explains it during the therapy session.  In fact, the Subconscious has been led to believe the exact opposite over many years of tobacco advertising.

The alarming reality is that nicotine actually causes heart-rate to increase and blood pressure to rise.  You might not notice that at the time though, especially if you are already distracted by some annoying stress factor, such as your husband for example.  Thanks to him, your heart rate and blood pressure are already rising!  The last thing you need is something which will actually drive them higher, but that is exactly what nicotine will do, which is why smoking triggers heart attacks and strokes that would never otherwise happen.

So why the impulse to reach for tobacco?  Let me explain what is actually happening.  Although a craving feels very much like a need or a desire, it is in fact only an irritating impulse prompting you to reach for a cigarette and light it.  If you do not respond you will get another impulse, and they can be pretty annoying so you usually respond quite quickly.  The moment you do that, the irritating prompting signal goes away.  Notice how you do not have to actually smoke the cigarette and get all the nicotine out of it for that to happen?  The signal disappears the moment you light up, which is a relief because it’s an irritating signal.   The immediate disappearance of that impulse is also the reason heavy smokers sometimes light up, put the cigarette down in the ashtray and forget all about it, because the impulse is only motivation to light it.  Smoking the rest of the cigarette has nothing to do with the craving signal.  It is simple habitual repetition and expectation, with no great motivation driving it.  The irresistible urge to light up (craving) has already gone by then!As every smoker who has ever tried to stop smoking with willpower alone will tell you, the impulse to reach for tobacco does not come from the conscious mind.  The decision to quit was a conscious decision, and willpower is a conscious effort to enforce that decision by bravely resisting the urge to smoke.  That urge comes from the Subconscious mind, which has no idea you made a conscious decision to quit.   All it knows is that you are apparently not responding to the first prompting impulse, so it sends another, stronger one.  And it will keep doing that until you DO respond!

Why is the Subconscious doing that?

I’m glad you asked me that.  Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is: tobacco advertising.  Yes, I know – it has been banned. So it has gone.  Or has it?  “Happiness is a cigar called…”  “Relax, with a fuller flavour!”  Sound familiar?  That’s because they didn’t spend millions of pounds every year drilling that into everybody’s Subconscious minds for nothing.   So yes, your conscious mind may have been told already that tobacco isn’t really relaxing at all, but if no-one has told your Subconscious mind, it has exactly the opposite idea.   Therefore when you become agitated, the Subconscious decides: “We need one of those things that’s going to calm us down!” and sends the signal go and get a cigarette, go and get a cigarette!  In fact it isn’t really stress that makes you feel like doing that, it is your Subconscious reaction to stress.  And once I explain to your Subconscious mind that actually the tobacco companies were lying to us all along: at stressful moments nicotine is even more likely to cause a heart attack than it normally is, so can we please have those annoying craving signals switched off?  …your Subconscious mind will be quite happy to shut them down.

Of course, there are a number of other things I have to explain to the Subconscious as well, but you don’t have to do anything.  You spend the whole time lazing about in a comfy chair.  You’re not asleep – in fact you feel quite normal really, a bit like when you wake up in the morning but you don’t have to get up.  After the session the cravings are gone.  No bad moods, no weight gain, no overeating.

If you like the sound of that, read on.  Or just call:

Office: 0161-474-8120 Monday-Friday 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., or call/text Chris directly on 07748 838 644 any day, any time.

Consultant Hypnotherapist Chris Holmes BA(Hons) HPD DipCAH MNCH is a Senior Registered Hypnotherapy Practitioner (General Hypnotherapy Register) and has been providing effective and confidential hypnosis and hypnotherapy services at Central Hypnotherapy for Stockport, Manchester, Tameside and Cheshire since August 2000.

My usual advice to clients who are coming along to ditch their smoking habit is that they don’t need to prepare in any way, smoke as usual in the days before the session and earlier on that day.  I explain that most smokers will have a cigarette before they come in, and I believe that is the best way to approach it, they can leave the rest to me.

Occasionally though someone will do things a bit differently out of choice, and a recent example was a chap who decided – having read quite a lot of this website – to demonstrate to himself that he could adjust a particular part of his smoking routine without any difficulty well before the smoking session. So he invented the Non-Smoking Smoke Break.

Now, I’m not suggesting that if you try this yourself you will surely find it as easy as he did.  In fact, if you attempt to impose this restriction on yourself using willpower (a conscious effort to just ignore cravings) I would expect you to find that pretty damn difficult.  But that is not what my client did.

Doing Subconscious Deals with Yourself

What he did was not actually unique, because smokers commonly do a little deal with themselves over when and where smoking is okay, and sometimes they change it.  Like the smoker who buys a new car, and decides they’re not going to turn this baby into a mobile ashtray!  So they don’t – and that’s the end of them smoking in cars.  Or the smoking parent with a new baby who decides that no-one is allowed to smoke in the house any more, except in the kitchen.  Some will extend that to standing at the back door.

In truth, these are normal smoking self-restrictions, and as long as it was your idea and you would genuinely prefer it that way, it is remarkably easy to do.  The Subconscious picks up on the new routine within a week, and all impulses to reach for tobacco will quickly disappear in the self-restricted areas.  From that point onwards the smoker will feel very much inclined to head for the back door whenever some other trigger trips the smoking signal.

Smokers Don’t Like Being Told What to Do!

Naturally, smokers’ responses to new restrictions are a bit different when the restriction was someone else’s idea!  Many smokers originally started smoking partly because they were told not to.  In fact anyone who first tried a cigarette before they were sixteen (eighteen now! Who’s daft idea was that?) knew that they were breaking the law, the school rules perhaps, and going against the wishes of parents and authority figures.  Of course – that was largely the appeal of it!  So by extending the period of those restrictions by another two years the government have also extended that rebellious Subconscious motivation to get involved in the whole smoking pantomime by another 24 months.  Stupid!

So all my client really did, in the run up to his smoking cessation session, was re-invent his smoke break at work so that it no longer included a cigarette.  Instead he had decided to have a cup of tea, and because he had decided to be entirely successful with this right away – thus proving to himself that he didn’t really ‘need’ that cigarette – and because it was entirely his own idea, and didn’t involve anyone else at all… he was immediately successful with it.

Of course we need a break.  We look forward to it and enjoy it, and because no-one can smoke when they’re working nowadays, the only time a smoker can fit in any smoking during work hours is to slot that in at breaks and at dinnertime.  We enjoy those free moments, so it is very easy for the smoker to believe that they are looking forward to, and enjoying those cigarettes.  My client decided to prove to himself that he could alter that by choice, and found that it was actually the break he was enjoying, the Subconscious quickly recognised the change and ceased to send the impulse to smoke at those times.  No real need or ‘addiction’ involved.

Actually, even when the changes are imposed by other people, most smokers will adjust quickly enough just for their own convenience.  Only the smokers that truly resent it will find that difficult, because – whether they realise this consciously or not – they chose to find it difficult!  Their reasons are understandable, but most smokers can’t be bothered to object for long.

If you would like to be free of tobacco, just pick up the phone!

Office: 0161-474-8120 Monday-Friday 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., or call/text 07748 838 644 any day, any time.

No-one likes to think that they are just smoking out of habit, but that is the reality. All habitual behaviour is just automatic repetition of the usual routine, or the usual response. This behaviour will have been under your conscious control to begin with – when you could easily take it or leave it – but was quickly taken over by the Subconscious mind and turned into automatic repetition (habit) once the pattern became predictable.  After that, the conscious mind may well be aware that it is happening, but no conscious thinking is required to repeat that sort of routine behaviour.

Conscious decisions that the Subconscious knows nothing about

So when a smoker makes a new conscious decision to cut down, or to quit, the Subconscious doesn’t know – that’s a different mental department. So it carries on trying to direct the usual habitual behaviour, whilst the conscious mind tries to resist it: conflict!

Which isn’t any fun. Also, smokers may believe that there is more to this than habit – that there are other reasons why they smoke, or believe they cannot stop.

The Addiction Myth

Smokers have been repeatedly told that they smoke because they are physically addicted to nicotine. I can prove that this is not true, and I explain it to every smoker who comes to Central Hypnotherapy to kick the habit. It is true that habitual smokers experience strong compulsive urges to light up at certain times, and it is also true that those urges become more insistent if you do not respond, but none of this has anything to do with nicotine.

My clients are astonished when those urges have disappeared after the session, because in all honesty they were not expecting that. Since they had always regarded those feelings as a ‘need’ or ‘desire’ to smoke, they thought they were stuck with them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Craving Signals

The urge to pick up tobacco is not really a need or a desire, it just feels like that! It is an impulse sent by the brain, but routed through the body, so you feel it as a physical ‘pang’ – very much like a hunger pang, also produced by the same system. Like with hunger, if you respond to it then the signal will vanish, but if you do not, you will likely get another, more insistent signal. These pangs will continue, and typically continue to become more insistent until you do respond.

Shutting the Cravings Down Forever

In hypnotherapy, the therapist explains to the Subconscious mind that the smoking behaviour is under review – and the reasons – and then asks for the signals to be shut down, along with the whole habitual smoking routine. It is very easy indeed for the Subconscious mind to do that, because what we are really asking it to do from that point onwards is nothing, instead of directing the daily repetition of a smoking habit.

A Return to Normal

So the impulse to buy, smoke or accept tobacco that is offered (or cannabis, this will work for any smoking habit) disappears, and the client is returned to normal. It does not matter how much smoking was going on previously, or for how long. The only thing that matters is how the client feels about being rid of the problem.

Mixed Feelings?

It is quite normal for clients to have mixed feelings about stopping smoking. It is part of my job to help them make sense of all that, and get rid of any conflicts there might be about quitting. Then there are the ideas and beliefs that support the habit:

Stress

Lots of smokers assume that smoking helps them deal with stress. In reality it causes tiredness and hypertension (high blood pressure). Stress also causes high blood pressure, so the combination triggers heart attacks and strokes that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

A Simple Misunderstanding

So why does the Subconscious mind respond to stress by sending an impulse to light up? Simply because it does not know that nicotine causes blood pressure to rise – in fact it was given the opposite impression! Almost every advert for tobacco you ever saw or heard tried to make out that smoking was either calming or relaxing.

Tobacco advertising has been made illegal in the U.K. now, but we all grew up surrounded by messages like this: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet”, or “Relax, with a fuller flavour…” none of which means anything rationally, but it sure suggests pleasure and relaxation. That advertising was not aimed at your conscious mind, you see. It was intended to make a lasting impact on your Subconscious mind.

Lasting, indeed!

These suggestions – that tobacco is calming or pleasurable – were so effectively planted in everyone’s mind that they are still in common circulation – in real conversations, and therefore also in drama too. So although tobacco advertising was officially banned from TV screens in the U.K. over a decade ago, the repetition of the original suggestions from the tobacco companies can still be heard over the airwaves today!

Coronation Street Sponsors Tobacco as a Stress Reliever!

Not deliberately, of course. But twice in the last year I have heard the notion that smoking relieves stress repeated in conversations on that show – which is not true, but it is a common enough misunderstanding because we were all bombarded with that brainwashing. The tobacco industry did not spend millions of pounds every year doing that for nothing – they hypnotised millions of people into believing that tobacco is useful or pleasant in some way. So what I do is really de-hypnosis, which returns you to normal. We were all born non-smokers, after all.

The Pleasure Issue

Not all smokers are of the opinion that tobacco smoking is a pleasure, but some are.  Long before any of us smoked, we were all bombarded with millions of suggestions that smoking is a pleasure, yet most smokers remember that their first encounters with tobacco were nauseating.  So whatever it was that made us pick up the second cigarette, it certainly wasn’t because we enjoyed the first one.  It was the same thing that made us pick up the first one – the influence of others, a spirit of rebellion, curiosity, trying to be more grown up – that sort of thing!  Notice how that had nothing at all to do with nicotine?  What’s more, you knew that then.  And if there is a pleasure in smoking, how come we didn’t notice it straight away, eh?

Tobacco smoking is just inhaling the fumes from burning dead leaves, and it is not addiction it is just a compulsive habit. The average habit costs about £1800 a year – most of it tax – and if someone asked you to describe the pleasure of smoking, could you find anything to say?

If you would like to be free from the habit without struggle, without weight-gain – give us a call!

Office: 0161-474-8120 Monday-Friday 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., or call/text 07748 838 644 any day, any time.

Consultant Hypnotherapist Chris Holmes BA(Hons) HPD DipCAH MNCH is a Senior Registered Hypnotherapy Practitioner (General Hypnotherapy Register) and has been providing effective and confidential hypnosis and hypnotherapy services at Central Hypnotherapy for Stockport, Manchester, Tameside and Cheshire since August 2000.

The vast majority of smokers who come to see me to quit smoking have chosen to do so because they know someone who has been to Central Hypnotherapy already and been successful. Word of mouth has always been the best recommendation of all. In addition to that though, I have always sought to build connections with other professions, to raise the profile of hypnotherapy generally. This has become very successful over the years, with quite a lot of my clients eventually coming to hypnotherapy via this route – usually after having tried willpower, gum, patches and other medications, but with no lasting success.  This does not prevent them from being successful with hypnotherapy though, as many doctors and dentists in the Stockport area now know!

In the Beginning

It wasn’t always like that, though. When I first launched Central Hypnotherapy I contacted GP practices by letter to explain what hypnotherapy could do, but of course I never got a single referral during the first year. Then it started to change, as my clients reported their personal success with hypnotherapy to their doctor during ordinary consultations.

Regular Contact

So I began sending regular bulletins to GP practices in the Stockport area, and a small supply of my little ‘Stop Smoking in One Session’ cards. I hoped they would decide to display them in their waiting rooms, alongside all the stuff about nicotine patches and gum. I also sent along copies of my clients’ written reports of success, not just for smoking but other issues too. I wanted to build up a general awareness of the kind of success hypnotherapy can produce. I then began to send the same sort of material to dental surgeries.

A Review

After a few years, I decided to assess how many doctors and dentists were happy to display our contact details alongside other promotional literature available in their waiting rooms, so I sent them all a simple Yes or No form, and an s.a.e., explaining that we didn’t want to be a nuisance, so if the mailshots were just being chucked straight in the bin anyway, please let us know and we will delete that practice from the mailing list and never bother them again. Then I braced myself for a deluge of requests to kindly ‘go away’…

A Nice Surprise

In the event, only 25% of GP practices asked to be removed from the list, and there were some very supportive reassurances from the other 75% of returned forms. Amongst the dental practices, only 15% opted out! So ever since then we have sent cards here, there and everywhere, and will continue to promote hypnotherapy with confidence and enthusiasm!

The “Not Proven” myth

One GP who did opt out also wrote the comment that hypnotherapy for smoking cessation was “not proven”, which is a common enough suggestion in medical circles, but I have to say with all due respect that the comment is quite wrong. In fact I prove that hypnotherapy is an excellent smoking cessation method just about every working day of my life, usually in just one session. And when I was asked by Channel M television to prove it by helping one of their staff to stop smoking, I went ahead and did that too – in just one session. (More about that below, in “As Seen on TV”.)

So if you’re a smoker, and you’d rather be a non-smoker, give me a call and I’ll prove it to you too!

Consultant Hypnotherapist Chris Holmes BA(Hons) HPD DipCAH MNCH is a Senior Registered Hypnotherapy Practitioner (General Hypnotherapy Register) and has been providing effective and confidential hypnosis and hypnotherapy services at Central Hypnotherapy for Stockport, Manchester, Tameside and Cheshire since August 2000.

Office: 0161-474-8120 Monday-Friday 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., or call/text 07748 838 644 any day, any time.

By the time smokers call me to enquire about hypnotherapy, they have usually tried various methods to quit before: willpower, nicotine gum, patches and lozenges. Some may have tried Zyban, or the more recent Champix tablets.

Whether the smoker stopped smoking for a while or not, whilst using these methods, the quitting attempt can only be said to have “succeeded” if they became a happy non-smoker and stayed that way. Short-term effects are irrelevant, yet all the medications were originally passed as “effective” based upon their short-term effects alone.

Complete freedom: that is the aim of hypnotherapy, and somewhere between 60% and 70% of clients will have achieved that goal by the end of the first session.

Needing a Second Session

You don’t need to be much of a mathematician, therefore, to figure out that 30% to 40% of clients will either need further help straight away, or later down the line. This is both normal and unavoidable. You see, those clients have not “failed”, and neither did hypnotherapy.  Success with hypnotherapy is always easy, but it isn’t always immediate.

It is not the hypnotherapist that shuts down the habit and the cravings, it is the client’s Subconscious mind.  The Subconscious controls all habitual behaviour, and can change it easily, though the conscious mind cannot. The hypnotherapist’s task is to present the case for change to the Subconscious during the trance part of the session. If the client has no Subconscious objection to the change – no conflict over it – then the change will go through immediately. But if there is a conflict over it, the Subconscious may hesitate at first – or perhaps wobble later on down the line (relapse).

Normal delays or hitches

It is quite common for clients to over-react to that sort of development – assuming something has ‘gone wrong’ – but they needn’t really be worried, because these waverings are quite normal in a minority of clients and they are easily fixed with a second session.

The second session is not just a repeat of the first session!  It is a careful assessment of the actual conflict, followed by a cure for that.  Compared to a smoking habit, the overall cost is not expensive.  Of those who need to come back at some point for a second session, about three-quarters will be successful with that – so needing further session-time does not mean there is a problem with the hypnotherapy process, it is just normal in some cases.

Using hypnotherapy to quit smoking is very likely to save you a fortune over the coming months and years, so it is well worth calling for more info: Office: 0161-474-8120 Monday-Friday 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., or call/text 07748 838 644 any day, any time.

Consultant Hypnotherapist Chris Holmes has been Director of Central Hypnotherapy Stockport since August 2000

I’ve always wanted to be able to say: “As Seen on TV!” Now I can, because after my book on smoking cessation was featured in a newspaper article, I was invited onto the live Breakfast Show on Channel M (TV for Manchester!) to talk about it. Later – 29th January 2008 – they invited me back and issued a challenge: could I help a member of their staff to stop smoking with hypnotherapy?

The woman in question, Samantha Jordan, was someone I had never met before the show. The plan was to do one session at my office, then go back on the show later and discuss the results. The session took place on the 9th February 2008, and about a month later (12th March) we went back on the show.

Sam reported no cravings at all since the session, no desire to smoke, that she was perfectly comfortable around other people smoking but didn’t want one, in fact the thought of smoking herself was now unpleasant to her. She had not found herself eating more or gaining any weight, in fact she said she felt much healthier in every way. The TV presenters seemed astonished, but I wasn’t surprised in the least, and in my judgement it is unlikely Sam will ever smoke again.

Now, ask yourself this question: Why would I accept a challenge like that? To work with someone who probably wouldn’t have thought of contacting me if the TV Station hadn’t needed a volunteer, just one session, then have to go back on live TV to talk about the results? Why take the risk? What if it hadn’t worked?

The answer is simple: that’s what usually happens, so I reckoned it was well worth the small risk of looking like an idiot myself for the great opportunity to demonstrate to thousands of smokers that hypnotherapy is by far the easiest and most successful way of quitting smoking, and anyone can do it. You won’t gain weight either, and it requires zero effort from the smoker. Interested?

If you require any particular info about hypnotherapy, call me (Chris) on:
Office: 0161-474-8120 Monday-Friday 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., or call/text 07748 838 644 any day, any time.

Consultant Hypnotherapist Chris Holmes BA(Hons) HPD DipCAH MNCH is a Senior Registered Hypnotherapy Practitioner (General Hypnotherapy Register) and has been providing effective and confidential hypnosis and hypnotherapy services at Central Hypnotherapy for Stockport, Manchester, Tameside and Cheshire since August 2000.