Hypnosis Worked on the Second Session After 27 Years of Smoking

I started smoking when I was 23 years old, standing in the parking lot of a bar in Capitol Hill with a group of people I desperately wanted to impress. Someone offered me a cigarette. I took it. That was 1999. I smoked every single day for the next 27 years.

By the time I was 50, I had tried to quit more times than I can accurately count. I tried Nicorette gum twice, once in my 30s and once in my early 40s. I used the nicotine patch for a month and a half before I caved at a work conference where everyone was smoking on the hotel patio. I tried Chantix in 2019 and made it six weeks before a particularly brutal stretch of Seattle winter darkness brought me back to a pack of American Spirits. Every attempt had a story. Every story ended the same way.

I want to be very clear that when a coworker suggested hypnosis, I thought she was losing her mind. I am a data analyst. I live inside spreadsheets and statistical models. The idea of a stranger swinging a watch in front of my face and telling me I was getting sleepy felt about as medically credible as healing crystals. But I had run out of conventional options, and I was tired. So tired. My lungs hurt every morning. I was spending close to $400 a month on cigarettes. My apartment smelled like an ashtray no matter how many candles I burned. I made an appointment with a certified clinical hypnotherapist named Dr. Sandra Osei in Bellevue, mostly because she had good reviews and a professional website that didn’t look like it was made in 2003.

The first session was completely useless. I will not sugarcoat that. I sat in a leather recliner in her office, she walked me through a relaxation induction, spoke to me in a calm and measured voice about my relationship with smoking, and when it was over I drove home and smoked a cigarette in my car before I even got onto the freeway. Nothing happened. I didn’t feel different. I didn’t feel relaxed. I felt like I’d just paid $175 to take a nap in a stranger’s office.

Here is what I did not understand at the time: I was too guarded. Dr. Osei told me this when I called her to report that the session had not worked. She said it in a gentle but direct way. She said that some patients, particularly analytical types who are skeptical of the process, spend the first session monitoring themselves rather than allowing themselves to simply receive the suggestions. She asked if I would be willing to come back. She said the second session could be very different if I approached it differently. She asked me to spend the week between sessions genuinely entertaining the possibility that it might work, not forcing myself to believe it, just holding it as a real option rather than a long shot.

That week between sessions was the hardest part of this whole experience. Not because of cravings, but because of uncertainty. I had spent so much of my life failing to quit that I had developed a kind of armor around the whole subject. Every failed attempt had added another layer. Believing something might work meant opening myself up to being disappointed again. Sitting with that possibility for seven days, smoking my cigarettes and genuinely trying to stay open rather than dismissive, was uncomfortable in a way I hadn’t expected.

When I went back for the second session, something was different. I can’t explain it in terms that would satisfy my data-analyst brain, and three years later I have made peace with that. Dr. Osei used an approach she called ego-strengthening, combined with suggestions designed to shift how I understood my own identity. Not just suggestions to avoid cigarettes, but suggestions about who I was. She spoke to me about the version of myself that did not smoke, not as a future self I was trying to reach, but as the truest version of who I already was. The smoker, she suggested, was a coping mechanism I had adopted. It was not me.

I drove home after that second session and I did not smoke. I waited for the craving to hit. It came, around 9 PM when I would normally have my last cigarette of the day on my balcony. But it was different. It felt more like a memory of wanting a cigarette than an actual desire for one. Like the signal was coming from somewhere outside myself rather than from inside. I went to bed. I woke up the next morning and still didn’t smoke.

I won’t pretend the next two weeks were easy. There were moments, particularly when I was stressed at work or sitting in traffic, where the pull was real. But the thing that had changed was the way I narrated the craving to myself. Before the hypnosis, a craving felt like proof that I was a smoker who couldn’t quit. After the second session, a craving felt like my old habit making noise. The distinction sounds small. It wasn’t.

I went back to Dr. Osei for two follow-up sessions over the next month, more reinforcement than necessity. She also taught me a self-hypnosis technique, a brief breathing and visualization exercise I could do when cravings spiked. I used it probably a dozen times total over the first three months.

I have now been smoke-free for three years.

There are things I still cannot explain. Why did the second session work when the first didn’t? Was it purely the shift in my attitude, or did something else happen neurologically during that second induction? I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that I no longer wake up with a cough. I no longer avoid hugging people because I’m worried about how I smell. I no longer calculate how many cigarettes I have left and whether I need to stop at the gas station. Those small freedoms are enormous when you add them all up.

I am not going to tell you that hypnosis will work for you the way it worked for me. It doesn’t work for everyone, and even the practitioners who believe in it most strongly will tell you that. What I will tell you is this: if something hasn’t worked, that does not mean nothing will work. It means you haven’t found the right thing yet. I failed at quitting so many times that I had started to believe quitting was simply not possible for me. I was wrong.

If you’re still smoking and you’re reading this, I want you to know that the specific method matters less than the willingness to keep trying different ones. Whatever you’ve already tried that didn’t work, let it go. It’s information, not a verdict. There are people in Seattle, in your city, in your town, who were exactly where you are, and they found a way out. So will you.

Give the second session a chance. Give yourself a second chance. I’m glad I did.