Hypnosis: Stopping Addiction

Hypnosis can play a major role in addiction treatment. There are all kinds of substances to which people can become addicted, often involving drugs, alcohol, or certain behaviors.

However, over time this can cause all sorts of problems, so people often want to quit anyway.

But how do you stop an addiction? This is far from easy. This is where hypnosis and hypnotherapy can play a supportive role.

Caution! Always see a doctor if you want to quit a drug or alcohol addiction. This is because your body can also become addicted to certain substances so stopping all at once can be dangerous. Always stop under the supervision of a doctor. They can help you, for example, with tapering off or medication to support you in quitting your addiction.

Hypnosis and drugs

Hypnosis can be very helpful in overcoming drug addiction. In a case of a woman who needed $500 daily for her cocaine addiction, self-hypnosis helped.

She used a self-hypnosis recording to quit smoking, but every time she heard the word “smoking,” she would think of the word “snorting coke.” She listened to the recording three times a day for four months and was then able to overcome her cocaine addiction.

Nine years later, she still had not had a relapse[1].

In her case, this was quite special, as she had not otherwise sought other help.

You can guess that it can go faster than 4 months if you do enlist additional help and not just use self-hypnosis. Also, this is not always wise because you can also become physically addicted to drugs. So always consult with your doctor about your plan of action.

In another study in which methadone addicts, who still used heroin occasionally, participated in group hypnosis, it was found that it helped them quit heroin altogether. After 2 years, 80% of the participants had still stopped using heroin, but some of them were now receiving benzodiazepines (medication).

Which is a lot better than heroin use anyway.

In this study, participants received 1 hypnosis group session per week for 10 weeks[2].

The studies on hypnosis and quitting drugs are very small. So you can't generalize the results to everyone yet, but it does show that hypnosis can be incredibly powerful.

If even a self-hypnosis audio track can help with cocaine addiction and group hypnosis can help you stop using heroin, what could happen if you undergo hypnotherapy? Or if someone in addiction treatment works with you one-on-one using hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy?

Hypnosis and alcohol

With alcohol addiction, professional guidance is very important, because you also become physically dependent. Withdrawal symptoms can be very severe and even fatal. So always do this under the supervision of a doctor. They can prescribe medication to prevent you from experiencing delirium or seizures.

Hypnosis has been used for decades to help people quit drinking. Miller was already using hypnosis to help people get rid of alcohol addiction in the late 1950s. A total of 24 people participated whose addiction had lasted from 3 to 34 years. While in hypnosis, participants were suggested to relive the ill effects of alcohol, such as the hangover and cumbersome feeling of a "hangover." This allowed participants to stop. Only three of them started drinking again anyway. One person of the three was still able to be helped with additional hypnotherapy[3].

If you’ve stopped using alcohol or drugs, self-hypnosis can be used to prevent a relapse. One way to do this is by boosting self-confidence. A study involving veterans who had overcome an alcohol or drug addiction found that self-hypnosis can be effectively used to boost self-confidence, promote calm, and reduce anger and impulsivity. This was especially true when the veterans listened to the self-hypnosis recording at least three to five times a week[4].

In a clinic in Norway, Ericksonian hypnotherapy was applied to see how it does compared with motivational interviewing. In addition to group therapy, participants received five hours of individual therapy.

Hypnotherapy did as well as motivational interviewing to help people quit their alcohol addiction. A year later, hypnotherapy was found to do even marginally better than motivational interviewing in preventing relapse into alcohol addiction[5].

Knowledge of hypnosis can be invaluable to addiction treatment providers. Especially for people who do not respond well to standard treatment.

Hypnosis and drug addiction

If you’ve ever suffered from anxiety or been prescribed pain medication to recover from surgery, short-term medication may have inadvertently led to an addiction.

So how do you stop without getting mad at your doctor for not wanting to prescribe you more?

Just as with other addictions, hypnosis can play a role here. Suggestions can be used to reduce the craving for the drug.

Consider, for example, the feeling that oxazepam does help you relax, but on the other hand, it also leaves you completely unable to do anything. Incidentally, this feeling can also be achieved without medication—through meditation, yoga, or even a relaxing massage.

There may also be underlying psychological issues that explain why, for example, you want to continue taking certain medications. Perhaps you no longer think about certain worries you have while under the influence of the medication, but they resurface once the medication wears off.

In that case, hypnosis can help you identify the beliefs causing these worries and what is preventing you from addressing them. This alone can go a long way toward alleviating the worry or taking the steps needed to find a solution.

Hypnosis and eating addiction

In cases of food addiction, there are often psychological factors that contribute to overeating. Cognitive behavioral therapy is one way to address these factors differently; this approach can be supplemented and reinforced with mindfulness and hypnosis.

Hypnosis can help by creating a “virtual gastric band,” at the very least making it easier to recognize the feeling of fullness and be more mindful of food. In addition, hypnosis can contribute to self-acceptance, reducing food cravings, and emotional eating[6].

Just as with other addictions, the underlying causes and beliefs behind a food addiction can be examined. By combining hypnosis with cognitive behavioral therapy, much can be done to address or change those causes and beliefs.

Hypnosis and behavioral addiction

By behavioral addictions, you can think of anything you can do yourself that might make you "happy," but which then gets completely out of control and then makes you unhappy.

Think, for example, of sex addiction, gambling addiction, gaming addiction, shopping addiction, love/relationship addiction, and even work addiction. It feels great at first, but over time, you can run into financial, social, or health problems.

Even then, it is important to achieve the goal, feeling good, that got you addicted to certain behaviors in a different way.

For masturbation addiction, the swish technique can also be used. This has also been used with twenty-somethings who had become addicted to masturbation. In this technique, the behavior you no longer want is replaced with other behavior. So if you get the urge to masturbate, you can replace it by drinking a glass of water, doing some push-ups or going for a walk. This can already be very helpful in stopping this type of behavioral addiction[7].

Gambling addiction is usually treated with cognitive behavioral therapy, you can also do this with hypnosis and self-hypnosis which works just as well as cognitive behavioral therapy on its own. Researchers indicate that self-hypnosis can be a good addition to normal therapy to stop gambling and can add value in shorter interventions[8].

Hypnosis in addiction treatment

There are quite a few addictions that people can suffer from, and each one has its own challenges. With one addiction there may be a physical challenge, while another addiction may have a psychological challenge.

In all cases, hypnosis can provide significant support in stopping addiction and preventing relapse.

Therefore, knowledge of hypnosis can greatly help someone working with addicts or former addicts to provide additional support to individuals during difficult times. In this way, you ensure that the coin can actually be given with X days clean.

Would you like to know exactly how hypnosis works and see if you can use it to help people struggling with addictions? Then join us for the free online masterclass.

Or register directly for one of our seminars or trainings. The training is hybrid which means that the training is available both live online and classroom on-site.

Ideal if you can't attend class for a change, or live on the other side of the world 😉.

Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:

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