Many modern hypnotists are now combining traditional stop smoking hypnosis or hypnotherapy with Emotional Freedom Techniques for emotional triggers, as well as advice about eating habits, nutrition, and treatment to stop the need to overeat once the client stops smoking. And some hypnotists are fond of calling smoking just a habit, whilst others may call it a kind of addiction. Every hypnotist using additional modern techniques is finding their own combination that works for their clients.

I feel it is important first of all to address the issue of calling smoking habit or addiction. I have recently been reading up on Habit versus Addiction and it seems that semantics are getting in the way. When I was in my early twenties, a long time ago, it was recognized that there was what was called ¨psychological addiction¨, in other words, the emotional need for a substance. Now, the psychologists do not like using the word ¨addiction¨ it seems unless there was a big ¨physical¨ withdrawal such as in the case of a heroin addict going cold turkey. Now I use the words ¨need¨ or ¨desire¨ to avoid making it just a habit. You see, what a psychologist calls a habit is not what the layman calls a habit. The originator of EFT expressed it very eloquently in one of his DVDs. He said if he had a habit of putting his right shoe on before his left shoe, then that is a habit, and all he needed to change it is put a note by his shoes reminding him to put the left shoe on first, and he would simply do it. But he asked members of the audience, if a smoker can simply stop smoking by leaving a note on their cigarettes reminding them not to smoke, and successfully quit the habit.The audience said no, and he explained that it is because there are emotional reasons why a smoker smokes.

But I am a holistic healer and a scientist and seriously challenge anyone to tell me exactly where the physical ends and the emotional begins and prove it. The problem I find for the client with this arbitrary distinction between addiction and habit is that the client then tries to convince themselves that they need to change habits rather than address the emotional reasons why they smoke. That is, a habit as perceived in layman´s terms, not habit as psychologists call what a layman calls a ¨psychological addiction¨. So then one has to address overeating, and this is because the emotional reasons behind the smoking simply get transferred to another destructive activity, that of overeating. But hypnosis is very popular and lucrative, and no matter what we do to persuade the client to stop smoking from the root, they want the perceived magic of trance and are willing to pay more for it, rather than face their emotions in the waking state and release them relatively faster with EFT. What to do? I mix the two when the client wants. But my heart is warmed every time someone quits smoking from the root and holistically changes their life for the better. Hence my preferred stop smoking solution is EFT and a bit of NLP plus some basic holistic health education. We did it at the London EFT clinic I was running, and very successfully – it was EFT-only for most people.

Talking about location, I also am finding the local culture has a lot to do with it. For example, in the UK where I started, people were educated by the government not to skip breakfast, and that if they waited till the afternoon to start eating, they would get ravenous and likely to overeat, as well as needing the breakfast to kick-start their metabolism. Here in South Africa, where I now live, most people are totally ignorant of this and many force themselves to go without food till the evening. No prizes for guessing the favourite method of hunger control! Many people think the body does not need food during the day, and so they are ignorant of what hunger actually is, that they call hunger a need to smoke. They have never tried to give their bodies the nutrition it is so strongly asking for. Instead, when they get that feeling that other people call hunger, this type of smoker thinks that it means they have to have a cigarette. This is because cigarettes drug away the feeling of hunger. And this type of smoker is either underweight or is so used to eating one meal a day that they are used to packing it full of energy and do not realize they have to make changes to it when they start addressing the genuine need for eating.Those who were underweight are usually terrified when they start becoming a normal weight. They had been so used to being too thin that they identify as that person. so work needs to be done on the disordered eating, identity, and everything else around it.

This is why I find stop smoking treatment with EFT so satisfying. One holistically heals everything behind the smoking, and when it is all healed, the smoker then simply stops and feels no need to ever smoke again.

© Suzanne Zacharia 2010. My name is Suzanne Zacharia and I am committed to spreading the word about health options. I believe that the more and better options one has, the more choice there is.

A virus caught along with 5 other students at university at the end of 1986, plus medical negligence, meant that I got smokers lung at a relatively young age. In desperation for help with my symptoms and quality of life, I turned to complementary therapy, and I have outlived one doctor’s prognosis by many years now.

I am now a complementary therapist, author of the Stop Smoking E-book at http://www.stop-smoking-ebooks.com and trainer specializing in energy healing. Want to use this article? You can, as long as you credit me with it and invite your readers to get my FREE book “EFT How-To For You” at http://www.EFT-Scripts.com