For decades, smokers have been told, and others have been told, that tobacco is highly addictive and that because of this addiction, quitting will necessarily be difficult and they will experience terrible withdrawal symptoms. However, if you look at smoking from a behavioral perspective and compare it to drug addiction, the problem doesn’t really seem to be a matter of nicotine addiction. All the behavioral evidence leads one to the conclusion that the real problem with quitting smoking lies elsewhere.
In a true physical addiction, one develops a tolerance to the drug, thus needing more and more over time. But smokers build up to smoking a certain number of cigarettes a day and then stay at that number for the rest of their lives (or go up or down as they please). Also, someone who is addicted to a drug like heroin, who hasn’t had their fix in a long time, will have horrible withdrawal symptoms. They tremble, sweat, have palpitations, nausea and hallucinations. Now, have you ever seen someone who was quitting smoking go through that? They can get a little grumpy, but they don’t go through anything like someone with a real chemical addiction.
People who live near smokers sometimes get lung cancer from secondhand smoke. There is so much nicotine in the smoke they breathe that they develop cancer (and sometimes even die), yet it never makes non-smokers addicted to smoking.
Nicotine patches and gum are supposed to help people quit smoking by relieving their addiction to nicotine. There is the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes in a nicotine patch. However, the patches only have a 7% success rate (which, by the way, is about the same success rate as people who quit smoking without any help). That means that even with all that nicotine in the bloodstream, up to 93% of people who wear patches smoke anyway!
If the real problem with quitting smoking was nicotine dependence, then how do you explain the fact that some smokers of 1 or 2 packs a day can quit smoking without cutting down and without going through any kind of withdrawal? When women who smoke find out they are pregnant, they often quit right away. People can quit smoking through hypnosis and never want a cigarette again.
So if the problem with quitting smoking isn’t that it’s a physical addiction, what is? Smoking is a habit, albeit an extremely powerful one. It is probably the most powerful habit there is. This is because it is reinforced every time the smoker takes the cigarette to his mouth, which is about 10 times for each cigarette. Someone who smokes a pack a day puts cigarettes in his mouth 200 times a day. That’s a lot of reinforcement.
Habits are stored in the unconscious mind. The mind clings to its habits because it believes they are important to emotional or physical well-being. So even if a person consciously wants to quit, it can be difficult because the subconscious mind will resist or sabotage them in order to maintain their habit. The easiest way to break a habit is with hypnosis because in hypnosis the hypnotherapist talks to the person’s unconscious mind and switches off the smoking habit. It is a completely safe and effective treatment modality. Hypnosis has the highest success rate of all smoking cessation methods, far higher than any drug, patch, or other smoking cessation method.
So why do some smokers go through withdrawal? Beliefs are very powerful and the body does not know the difference between imagination and reality. If you believe that you are addicted to tobacco and that you will experience withdrawal when you quit, that is what will happen. The first step in breaking free from the unhealthy and costly habit of smoking is to believe that you can do it. Hypnosis can make it an easy process.
