During my first six years of clinical hypnotherapy, the success rate with smokers was as low as most nicotine or drug interventions today.

By the end of the 1980s I was gathering information from hundreds of ‘Experts’ virtually all smokers. These were clients who came to the clinic with years of experience smoking nicotine and while they knew

4 5 the effects of nicotine, most smokers never knew how the smoking cycle worked. It remained for me to join the dots up and present a full picture.

As the information built up, I saw the smoking cycle in a totally different light. It was no longer a mysterious drug that required immense will power to escape, but a toxic chemical cycle that gave the illusion of supplying energy and calm, but in fact was sucking out the smoker’s energy on a daily basis and continually winding up his stress. There had to be an antidote for the nicotine addiction and turned out to be quite simple. The deep natural state of rest experienced during hypnosis was the fastest way to unload daily stress, recharge exhausted nerve cells and therefore break the cycle of nicotine addiction and I could show clients how to use self-hypnosis themselves.