What makes you reach for more nicotine?
The nicotine in a cigarette or vape causes three important biochemical reactions in your body that keep you reaching for more - the first is adrenaline, which puts you into fight or flight mode, causing your liver to release glucose into your bloodstream to give you energy to fight or run away. It creates that feeling of slight anxiety. Second, nicotine inhibits the production of insulin (allows cells and muscles to access glucose) so the glucose stays in your bloodstream, creating hyperglycemia — high blood sugar. This feels like increased alertness and mental clarity, feeling like you’re more focused or sharper. Third, nicotine releases dopamine, which gives you that feeling of pleasure and satisfaction, and takes the edge off the anxiety from the adrenaline. For about 20 minutes, the combined effect of these three reactions in your brain makes you feel like nicotine is your best friend, and who would have thought it could be so easy… But as your body removes the nicotine and dopamine from your bloodstream and the adrenaline wears off, your insulin levels return to normal, causing a rapid drop in blood sugar — hypoglycemia — which feels like low energy, brain fog, and irritability.
Regular smoking creates a physical dependency on nicotine: every time you want to relax or sleep, or wake up, or concentrate, or be sociable - your body relies on cigarettes or vape to do those things instead of relying on its natural abilities. This creates a complicated situation because when your body becomes reliant on nicotine, your subconscious mind expects to get more of that every time your blood sugar gets low, and that creates a craving: that makes you decide consciously to smoke. If physical dependency develops, the subconscious expectation will always win over your conscious willpower, because even if you are trying to cut down, your subconscious mind controls 90 to 95 percent of your behavior, whereas your conscious mind has at most 5 to 10 percent control. With your subconscious approval of smoking, it becomes woven into your daily rituals — your morning coffee, the cigarette after meals, the break at work, the way you manage stress or anxiety. If you tend to be introverted, nicotine can become the solution to social anxiety and make it easier to talk to people, or if you have unresolved trauma or grief, or stress, smoking often becomes a way of self-soothing.
How does Andrew’s Hypnotherapy Stop Smoking method work?
The reason cold turkey fails for most people is that you’re fighting both the physical dependency and the subconscious craving at the same time, and without a healthy alternative to handle stress, it’s often a case of stopping for a few weeks, and then a stress event drives you right back to it. My method is a combination of teaching meditation in hypnosis so you can manage stress naturally using a skill that anyone can learn, and the smoking cessation method I learned as a student at HMI — Hypnosis Motivation Institute in California — which brings you back to your initial reaction to your first cigarette. The symptoms are usually: burning throat, unpleasant taste, coughing, salivating, nausea - most people hate it the first time! Through this method you realize that you have suppressed your body’s natural response to nicotine, through conditioning - you’ve taught your body to handle smoking by doing it enough times to override the symptoms of illness. In the HMI method you reconnect with your nervous system in hypnosis, and bring back those initial natural reactions, and actively build up an aversion to nicotine, so that you never want it anywhere near you again.
Learning to meditate is the fundamental healthy alternative to nicotine, for stress relief. As a client you receive my Assisted Meditation soundtrack, which makes it easy to learn to meditate while feeling the benefits. The HMI method uses a schedule for gradually reducing your nicotine intake over the five sessions, one session per week, giving your body a chance to detox and eliminate any cravings. This means you develop your skill in meditating over five weeks, so that by the time you stop smoking you are already quite proficient in releasing stress naturally. The genius of the HMI method is this: You start your schedule by doubling your normal daily tobacco use - because this makes you feel like you’re smoking way too much, and you can’t wait to stop! If you are smoking five cigarettes a day and you decide to do this course - you’d start the first week smoking ten cigarettes a day. Then the second week you reduce to seven a day, the third week three, the fourth week one, and the fifth week zero. So regardless of how heavily you smoke, on your fifth session you become an ex-smoker.
What happens in a Hypnotherapy Stop Smoking session?
Your first session is two hours to give us time to cover your history, set up your five-session schedule, and complete the first hypnosis session. Remaining session are one hour, beginning with a thirty to forty minute conversation for feedback about your progress with meditation; changes in your smoking experience since your last session; and any dreams you remember since the last session. We also talk about specific things you don’t like about smoking, your reasons for wanting to stop, and also all the things you like about being healthy, that you’re looking forward to enjoying as an ex-smoker - feeling healthy and closer to nature, breathing only fresh air, being free of toxins. As we are talking I create your hypnosis script using the wishes and memories you tell me about, so your experience in hypnosis always feels relevant and personal to you.
Hypnosis usually takes about twenty to thirty minutes. Choose a comfortable spot at home, where you can relax and not be interrupted. You’ll hear the psychoacoustic soundtrack and my voice streaming through your headphones, and the video allows me to gauge your emotional reactions to your early memories of smoking. You could communicate with me if you wanted to, but mostly people just go with the experience. I guide you to meditate, developing your skill in dropping your thoughts and creating a space where your mind can rest naturally, feeling healthy and well. After a few minutes rehearsing this technique, I’ll talk about how you described your first cigarette - you felt a little unwell. Then I bring you back to your meditation - you drop the cigarette, relieved to feel healthy again. We continue alternating between unwelcoming smoking memories and nurturing self-care, and each time we circle back to smoking, your subconscious mind replaces the expectation and craving with aversion: You start not-wanting to smoke! After about twenty minutes I gently bring you out, and we discuss your experience.
How many sessions will you need to stop smoking permanently?
The program is five sessions — one session per week over five weeks. The HMI method works regardless of how many cigarettes you smoke or how long you’ve been smoking, because it personalizes to your level by doubling your tobacco intake, and then reducing it steadily over the five-week program. The meditation technique produces results immediately - most people are surprised by the level of calmness and relaxation they can reach in their first session. This is fundamental in replacing nicotine as the solution to stress. The effects of the meditation accumulate with each session, as will your aversion to nicotine, so that by week five, you’re proficient enough in meditation to use it as your primary stress management tool, replacing the reason to smoke cigarettes or vape. The weekly structure provides continuity and accountability, which helps you stay committed through the full program.
If in addition to smoking you have a concern such as trauma, phobias, depression, or you’d like to lose weight, those should be addressed first. This can add significant time to your treatment, but the reason smoking should be at the end of your process is that smoking is a coping mechanism for dealing with stress. Until you resolve your underlying stress, any stressful event can drive you back to smoking even after you’ve stopped. That’s why the meditation is so valuable - it gives you a method that you can use every day to relieve stress, but it would take years to resolve deeper concerns like phobias or trauma using meditation alone. A more direct approach is to use hypnotherapy to resolve those concerns. If you have a question about this, feel free to book a free consultation at the bottom of the page.
Is Andrew’s Hypnotherapy Stop Smoking method effective?
Yes, this method is highly effective. Hypnotherapy for smoking cessation has been extensively studied, and research consistently shows it can support successful quit attempts when combined with behavioral interventions. The success rates for this program are specifically for clients who complete all five sessions and maintain their daily meditation practice. That caveat is important — stopping early significantly increases relapse risk because the aversion isn’t fully built and the meditation skill isn’t developed enough to replace smoking for stress management. What makes hypnotherapy particularly effective is that it addresses both the physical dependency and the psychological patterns simultaneously. The HMI method I use combines aversion therapy to build genuine dislike of nicotine, gradual reduction to eliminate cravings without withdrawal shock, and meditation training to give you a healthy stress management tool that replaces what cigarettes used to do. It’s a comprehensive approach that targets the dependency from multiple angles, which is why it produces sustainable results rather than temporary abstinence.
The HMI method addresses smoking dependency through multiple angles simultaneously. The aversion therapy component retrains your subconscious by reconnecting you with your body’s natural rejection response to nicotine—the burning throat, nausea, and discomfort you experienced the first time you smoked but learned to suppress through conditioning. This creates genuine dislike at a visceral level rather than relying on willpower. The meditation training is particularly crucial because research shows mindfulness-based interventions significantly reduce stress reactivity and support smoking cessation outcomes—giving you a sustainable stress management tool that replaces what cigarettes used to do. The gradual reduction schedule prevents withdrawal shock while allowing five weeks to develop meditation proficiency. Daily practice with the calming soundtracks between sessions reinforces both the aversion learning and stress management skills, creating lasting change at the subconscious level where the smoking habit actually lives. Online sessions are just as effective for smoking cessation, and many clients prefer the privacy and focus of being at home, and there’s no commuting stress that might trigger cravings before or after your session.
What can you expect to feel after one of Andrew’s sessions?
People come out of hypnosis for smoking feeling great - your world seems to makes sense again, everything is the right way up, because in the sessions you nurture the part of yourself that always knew that smoking was bad, but didnt know how to tell the other part of yourself that was suppressing that feeling. You feel liberated, and relieved to have found a way out. The meditation builds confidence in your ability to handle stress simply by releasing it, without needing to relying or depend on something outside of yourself. It’s a feeling of celebrating your independence, being self-sufficient. The hypnosis sessions inspire a healthy outdoor lifestyle - nature and fresh air, so you find you become more active, and because you’re still smoking the allocated amount per day, every cigarette of vape pull reminds you of how you want to stop.
Through the combination of positive focus on health and nature, and negative aversion to nicotine, tobacco loses its appeal. You become disillusioned with it - like a friendship that goes sour when you realize that the person wasn’t actually your friend. Most people struggle to finish smoking their allocated nicotine for the day becomes it feels like a chore instead of something enjoyable or spontaneous. You’re encouraged to make subtle changes to your smoking environment, like replacing an ashtray with a lamp, or removing your smoking paraphernalia to an outside area that has no comfort or appeal, because this tells your subconscious that you are distancing yourself from nicotine and that soon you will lose interest altogether. Changing your brand, or using matches instead of a lighter, interrupts the habit of associating nicotine with leisure, and brings you more into the moment of inhaling the smoke, which feels unnatural.
Ask Andrew how he can help you quit smoking for good
If you have more than one concern that you want to address, or if you don’t relate to the symptoms I’ve described here, please book a free chat and we can discuss your situation. There’s no obligation, just a friendly look at your options to see if we’re a good fit. If you’re ready to start, you can go ahead and book the Quit Cigarettes Hypnosis Package - five sessions with a 95% success rate for clients who complete the program. When you’re ready to be an ex-smoker, I’m here to help.