The majority of stop smoking clients believe that it’s “just a habit”. It’s to be expected that after 5,10, 20, 30 years or more that the person cannot remember what it was that brought them to the smelly fate of smoking in the first place. As the years go by, they believe it’s “just a habit” and want it gone.
Stop Smoking: Where do habits start?
The thing about this smoking behaviour is, however, that the unconscious memory of what brought you to start smoking is still there. Perhaps you wanted to fit in and be part of the group. Perhaps you were a rebel and wanted to defy your school, your parents and whoever else was watching. Maybe you were an anxious or self-destructive young adult. Perhaps you were curious and you wanted to find out what the attraction was. Maybe it was a good look, back in the day, and made you feel sophisticated. Whatever the motivation, it was something. It wasn’t just a habit.
Your unconscious mind doesn’t know that you no longer have that need to fit in, or if you do, there are better ways to do it. It doesn’t know that being a rebel can look like many other things, things that don’t break the budget or cause an early death, and that smoking is comparatively outdated. Perhaps you are no longer anxious or self-destructive and if you are, you might instead seek assistance for it, or you wouldn’t be in my clinic to try and stop smoking right now. Curiosity is a great characteristic, but I think you know all you need to know about smoking now, and that’s why you want to stop smoking. And we all know that lung cancer, gangrene and blindness are not good looks, just to mention a few of the repercussions.
Translating the Information to Your Unconscious Mind
You can see that there is a story here, it’s not just a habit. Perhaps it feels that way to you now, but the association that lead you down that unsavory pathway is still there, marked on your timeline in a sensory and emotional way. Effectively, in hypnosis, we break the association that led you to start smoking. Even if you tell your unconscious mind that you no longer care about being just like Dad who always looked so cool and grown up, smoking, it can’t hear you because you are not speaking its language. That language is sensory, it is abstract, it’s the stuff that dreams are made of, or in this case, nightmares. If you want to stop smoking, you have to speak the same language in delivering that message. That’s my job. I interpret your goals in a way that your unconscious mind can respond.
There are a toolbox of techniques at my disposal – whatever you respond to best is the way I will go. Typically it will involve direct suggestion hypnosis to get your unconscious mind in a receptive state. The information will be sensory and designed to make an impact. There will be a host of neuro-linguistic programming techniques to get your unconscious mind to understand your intention and to break down earlier beliefs and ideas about the need to smoke. There will be a range of processes to get your unconscious mind to understand how stop smoking is of benefit to you, and how the future can look for you, as a non-smoker.
If you are ready to stop smoking, not because your partner wants you to, not because it might make a good personal challenge, but because you really want to, then book in with Horizons Clinical Hypnotherapy Sunshine Coast for the Problem Habits package, and start a new page.