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How to quit smoking through hypnotherapy: expert tips and quitters’ stories

  • Hypnotherapy can help people quit smoking, but one expert says you have to be serious about giving up and that people have misconceptions of the practice
  • With World No Tobacco Day on May 31, a couple reveal how hypnotherapy helped them quit lighting up for the sake of starting a family

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A couple reveal how they quit smoking for the sake of starting a family, plus the specialists reveal why “hypnotherapy is not a magic wand that you wave” to help you stop lighting up. Photo: Getty Images

The tide against smoking is moving in the right direction, but with just under one in 10 people in Hong Kong’s adult population still a smoker, there is still a way to go, says Christine Deschemin, a French hypnotherapist who founded Renewed Edge Hypnotherapy Centre, in Central on Hong Kong Island.

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Deschemin’s clients come to her to beat fear, anxiety or addiction – and “a large portion” want her help quitting smoking.

“Most of my clients have stressful jobs and smoke to calm down. Many have tried to go ‘cold turkey’ using nicotine patches and gum, and it hasn’t worked,” she says.

With a new client, Deschemin’s first move is to figure out their motivation for wanting to quit.

Hypnotherapy is not a magic wand that you wave and you just stop doing something. You have to figure out the why first,” she says.
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If someone has been sent to her as an ultimatum by their spouse, for example, it probably is not going to work – they must want to quit smoking themselves, she says.

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