I was on holiday recently and for the second time in as many years I was amazed to see that the apartment we were staying in didn’t have a smoke alarm. When you travel with kids you’re more alert for that kind of thing than when young, carefree and single, and the realisation that there wasn’t one of the little plastic boxes screwed to the ceiling preceded a predictable round of tutting.

It was no big deal, but it did annoy me, especially when it’s such an inexpensive bit of kit and so well-proven as a life-saver. When you work in London it’s pretty much the norm to see smoke detectors everywhere – always a comfort when stories of house-fires seem so depressingly frequent.

Smoking killing families, too

When I got back, my eye was drawn to a statistic that I stumbled across about smoking being the biggest single cause of fatal house fires. Not only is smoking killing smokers, it’s killing their families, too.

According to a government report, smoking is to blame in 36 per cent of fatal house fires.

In surveys, huge numbers of people who smoke say they want to quit, and yet so many of them do very little about it. Among the ones that do try, failure rates are high because many simply wake up and say, “Right, let me see if I can go without cigarettes today.” It’s a tactic that’s almost certainly doomed to fail, because in most cases cigarettes have unconsciously become a large part of the smoker’s life.

Hypnotherapy for smoking

The failure rates of smokers who want to quit are very frustrating to me as a London-based hypnotherapist, as I know how effective people’s attempts can be when done right.

Our own work in London and Winchester has resulted in many clients who were able to quit smoking quickly and with minimum fuss. We have a whole suite of proven techniques that make people not just stop, but really want to do so – and believe that they can, too. That’s pretty powerful stuff – especially when compared to the rather more directionless approach that many people try.

Popular treatment

It’s little wonder that hypnotherapy for stopping smoking is one of our most popular treatments – and success can usually be achieved very quickly. When I tell people this they often don’t believe it, as they’re so used to the idea of using patches for six months or chewing nicotine-rich gum for the next 10 years.

For not much more than the price of an Xbox, a smoker who used hypnotherapy to quit his or her smoking habit could wave goodbye to cigarettes. And save around £50,000 over the next 20 years in the process…