November 5, 2013

I regularly provide counseling to help people stop smoking, and often use hypnosis as a part of my approach. One of the first questions I hear from people is: Does hypnosis really work? Can it really help me stop smoking?

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I’m not an advertiser — I’m a clinician and a scientist, so I tend to be a little bit conservative about telling people just how much more effective hypnosis actually is than all other available treatments. So I’ve compiled this brief review of the scientific literature on methods to stop smoking so that you can make the comparison for yourself and really see the difference in effectiveness. In putting this together, I’ve focused strongly on rigorous, meta-analytic studies — which are studies that combine the results of many other smaller studies in order to get much more comprehensive results.

Here are the major interventions currently being used to help people stop smoking:

From reviewing the literature, my conclusion is that New Scientist was correct when they declared hypnosis “the best way of giving up smoking.” Particularly when used in a personalized manner, in conjunction with motivational interviewing and behavioral counseling, there is simply nothing that comes close to matching its effectiveness.

In 2011, I worked with Dr. Edward Frischholz, Ph.D., ABPH on further developing a brief hypnotic treatment for smoking originally developed in the 1960s and under continuous refinement since that time. The method’s effectiveness has been confirmed in numerous studies. In the most recent published study, from the American Journal of Psychiatry, this method achieved 30% success at a six-month follow-up (in a single session!) — measured by complete 100% abstinence for the entire six month period (Spiegel, Frischholz, Fleiss, & Spiegel, 1993). If a participant smoked even one cigarette at a party a single time during the entire six months, it was counted as a failure.

By studying the real-life circumstances associated with both successful and unsuccessful outcomes, we were able to modify the technique in order to achieve an additional 8% success at 6 months follow-up. I presented these findings to the Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis at their annual conference in 2011.

And as we continue to update and refine this method, we find that more and more of our patients are finding it easy and enjoyable to become non-smokers… permanently.

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