QuitSmoking LV uses both hypnosis and NLP. Hypnosis is just a state of light relaxation where you can access and focus on the part of your mind (the unconscious) that controls habits like smoking. Your relaxing, (with the therapist’s guidance) creates a slightly altered state of awareness where your subconscious mind can accept positive suggestions or reinforcements about what you want to do. But you DO have to want to stop smoking in the first place because we can’t “make you” want to! There are SO many misconceptions about hypnosis, it’s probably helpful to also tell you what it is NOT:

Hypnosis is NOT a deep ‘trance’ where someone is “controlling your mind”.

During hypnosis, you are aware of everything going on, because you are only RELAXED, not asleep or knocked out somehow. And, there is no such thing as getting ‘stuck’ in hypnosis. If hypnosis could ‘control your mind’, then any hynotherapist could walk in to the nearest bank and ‘make’ the teller give them all the money, but that just doesn’t happen.

Hypnosis does NOT put you to sleep, and won’t make you feel ‘sleepy’ or groggy.

Contrary to what you’ve seen in movies when hypnotherapists wave a pocketwatch in front of someone and say “you’re getting sleepy”, it doesn’t work that way at all. When you are fully and completely hypnotized, you should feel about as relaxed AND AS FULLY AWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS as when you get a nice massage. When done properly, you won’t actually feel like you were ‘hypnotised’ at all – because the only thing you should feel is calm and comfortable.

Hypnosis does NOT make you do anything you don’t want to do.

Forget all you have ever seen on Stage shows with people doing goofy things. Therapeutic Hypnosis is just not like that. In fact, Hypnosis can only help you do what you WANT to do in the first place, so one of the requirements for our clients is that you have to be determined to quit smoking. Hypnosis will absolutely not work on people who don’t actually want to quit, but want us to “make them” stop smoking. We will not accept clients who are not very sure they want to quit.

READ A SCIENTIFIC STUDY ON THE DIFFERENT METHODS OF QUITTING AND HOW HYPNOSIS IS ONE OF THE TOP METHODS PROVEN TO WORK.

You may not realize it, but you use your unconscious mind all the time.

Haven’t you ever been driving along – maybe daydreaming about something,(which is done with the unconscious part of your mind) and all of a sudden, you’re 5 miles down the road and you have no recollection of what you did or how you drove for that time?

Another example is when you’re really looking forward to something fun – a party perhaps – and before you go, you start imagining what you will do or say, what will happen when you get there… (imagining is also done in the unconscious mind) then the phone rings and your attention is immediately focused on answering it. Actually, you flip back and forth between your conscious and unconscious mind like that all the time, every day. It’s normal. Both are very powerful, but in very different ways.

You may have heard the saying, “What ever a man’s mind can conceive and believe, that man can achieve”. That’s the unconscious again. Visualizing something, whether positive or negative, can have an extremely strong influence on what you believe you can do. And if you believe it, it usually happens that way.

Have you ever been convinced – you just knew – you were going to make a big mistake on something, even though there was no real reason you should… and then you went right ahead and blew it? That’s a negative example of your mind’s influence. But what about a positive example? Professional athletes and Olympic Medallists use visualization and their unconscious mind all the time. Right before they go out on the field, or ski down the slope, they are actually visualizing the activity they are about to do in great, vivid detail. Many trainers think visualizing is what gives the athlete their ‘edge’ to win and be successful.

In hypnosis, with suggestions and ideas based on your individual situation, we do that same sort of visualizing, or guided imagery, to help you become a nonsmoker.

What is NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)?

Simply put, NLP connects our words, thoughts and behavior to our goals. It’s the process of forming an association between one thing and another. ‘Neuro’ refers to the thinking process; ‘linguistic’ refers to language – how we use it, and how we are influenced by it; and ‘programming’ refers to connecting the specific goals we set in the session to our thinking. NLP is the art and science of personal excellence. In a sense, NLP is positive thinking turned scientific. It was founded in the 1970s by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. Grinder was then an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, and Bandler was a mathematician and gestalt therapist. NLP is increasingly being applied in personal development, counseling, education and business. Happiness and success are the result of specific patterns of thinking. We combined the use of NLP with the most well-tested and scientifically advanced hypnotherapy techniques to form the one-hour program we use to help you stop smoking.