Hypnotherapy Didn't Work the First Time. Then It Did.
Hypnotherapy Didnât Work the First Time. Then It Did.
My name is Mike Sullivan. Iâm 48, I live in Seattle, and I quit smoking eleven months ago through hypnotherapy. If you just rolled your eyes, I understand. I would have too. Hypnotherapy sounds like something between a magic trick and a scam, and the first time I tried it, thatâs exactly what it felt like. But the second time, with a different practitioner and a different mindset, it broke something loose in my brain that twenty-five years of smoking had cemented in place. I havenât touched a cigarette since.
A Quarter Century of Lucky Strikes
I started smoking at 23 in 1999. I was a software tester at a small company in Redmond, working long hours during the dot-com boom, and smoking was the social currency of the break room. Weâd huddle outside the office building in the Seattle rain, passing around Lucky Strikes and complaining about deadlines. I picked Lucky Strikes because my grandfather smoked them and I thought the red circle on the pack looked cool. Not a great reason to start a lifelong addiction, but I doubt anyoneâs reason holds up under scrutiny.
The tech industry kept me smoking for the next two and a half decades. I moved from testing to project management, from Redmond to Bellevue to eventually Seattle proper. The companies changed, the products changed, but the cigarette breaks stayed constant. Before a meeting, after a meeting, during a build, after a deployment, when something crashed in production. The stress in tech is a particular flavor: youâre sitting at a desk, your body is still, but your mind is racing, and a cigarette was the only thing that made me feel like I was doing something physical to manage the mental pressure.
I settled into a steady pack a day by my late twenties. Twenty cigarettes, spread from morning to night, like a metronome ticking through my days. I smoked through two job layoffs, a divorce at 35, moving apartments six times, and the slow graying of my hair. Lucky Strikes got harder to find in stores as the years went on, so I switched to Camel Yellows around 2015 and stuck with those until I quit.
Attempts Before Hypnotherapy
I tried quitting four times before I found what worked.
At 32, cold turkey. Lasted five days. The insomnia was what killed me. I couldnât sleep more than two or three hours at a stretch, and as a PM running multiple projects, showing up to work sleep-deprived and irritable wasnât sustainable. I caved on day five after a meeting where I snapped at a developer over something trivial.
At 36, right after my divorce. Nicotine patches, Habitrol brand. Made it three weeks. The patches kept the physical withdrawal manageable, but I was also dealing with the emotional wreckage of a marriage ending, and cigarettes had always been my emotional regulation tool. Smoking a cigarette on the deck of my new apartment while processing the fact that my marriage was over felt necessary. I know it wasnât. But in that moment, it felt like the only comfort available.
At 40, Chantix. My doctor prescribed it and I gave it a real shot. Took it for about five weeks. The nausea was bad the first week and then settled into something tolerable. The vivid dreams were intense but manageable. What I couldnât handle was the flatness. I felt emotionally muted, like someone had turned down the color saturation on my entire life. I wasnât sad, wasnât happy, wasnât anything. My therapist (Iâd been seeing one since the divorce) noted the change and we agreed to stop the Chantix. Back to Camels.
At 43, I tried a vape. Bought a Vaporesso pod system, 35mg nicotine salt juice. I successfully stopped smoking combustible cigarettes for about two months. But I vaped constantly. At my desk, in the bathroom, in bed before sleep. My nicotine intake skyrocketed. When I eventually tried to step down the nicotine concentration, the cravings came back ferocious and I returned to cigarettes. That experience taught me that for some people, vaping is a lateral move, not a step forward.
Hypnotherapy, Round One
In 2023, my sister Rebecca sent me a link to a hypnotherapist in Ballard who specialized in smoking cessation. Sheâd seen him quit smoking on a Facebook ad and thought I should try it. I was skeptical but I was also running out of options, so I booked a session.
The practitioner was a guy named Steve who worked out of a small office above a yoga studio. The session lasted about an hour. He had me sit in a recliner, close my eyes, and he walked me through a progressive relaxation exercise. Tense your feet, release. Tense your calves, release. All the way up the body. Then he started talking in this slow, measured voice about my relationship with cigarettes, using visualization techniques. Imagine putting the cigarettes in a box. Close the lid. Lock the box. Throw away the key.
Iâll be honest: I didnât really go under. I was lying there with my eyes closed, fully aware of the traffic noise outside and the yoga class downstairs, thinking about whether Iâd remembered to move my car for street cleaning. Steveâs voice was soothing but I couldnât let go of my analytical brain enough to really sink into it.
I left feeling relaxed but not transformed. I didnât smoke that evening, or the next day. But by day three, the cravings were just as strong as ever and I didnât feel like I had any new tools to fight them. By the end of the week, I was smoking again. I chalked hypnotherapy up as another method that didnât work and moved on.
What Changed
Two years later, in late 2024, I was at a dinner party in Fremont. A woman named Linda, a friend of a friend, mentioned that sheâd quit a twenty-year smoking habit through hypnotherapy. I told her Iâd tried it and it hadnât worked. She asked me about my experience and I described the session with Steve.
Linda said something that reframed the whole thing for me. She said, âHypnotherapy isnât one thing. It depends enormously on the practitioner, the technique, and whether youâre actually open to it. The first time, you were testing it. You werenât surrendering to it.â
She was right. Iâd gone into Steveâs office as a skeptic running an experiment. I was observing the process instead of participating in it. I was looking for proof that it wouldnât work, and thatâs exactly what I found.
Linda recommended her practitioner, a woman named Dr. Karen Reeves who worked out of an office in Capitol Hill. Dr. Reeves had a PhD in clinical psychology and had trained specifically in clinical hypnosis for behavioral change. This wasnât a guy above a yoga studio with a Facebook ad. This was someone with credentials and a method.
Hypnotherapy, Round Two
I booked a session with Dr. Reeves in January 2025. Before the hypnosis, she spent forty-five minutes just talking with me. She wanted to understand my smoking history, my previous quit attempts, my triggers, my beliefs about smoking. She asked me what I thought cigarettes did for me, and I gave the standard answers: stress relief, mental clarity, habit, social connection.
She didnât argue with me. She just noted everything down and then said, âLetâs see if we can update some of those beliefs.â
The hypnosis session was different from Steveâs. Dr. Reeves didnât use the tense-and-release progressive relaxation. She used a conversational induction, talking me into a relaxed state through a series of questions and guided imagery that felt more like a deep conversation than a medical procedure. I donât remember the exact transition from normal consciousness to the hypnotic state. One moment I was aware of the room, and the next I was somewhere deeper, still aware but less attached to the analytical part of my brain.
She didnât tell me to put cigarettes in a box. Instead, she had me visualize myself as a non-smoker. Not quitting. Not resisting. Just already free. She had me imagine waking up without the first thought being about a cigarette. Walking past someone smoking and feeling nothing. Handling a stressful work situation with deep breaths instead of nicotine. These werenât fantasies. They were rehearsals. My brain was practicing being a non-smoker.
She also worked on the identity piece, which no other method had addressed. For 25 years, Iâd been âMike who smokes.â She helped me separate my identity from the habit. I wasnât giving up a part of myself. I was shedding something that had attached itself to me.
The session lasted about ninety minutes total. When I opened my eyes, I felt calm in a way that was hard to describe. Not euphoric, not transformed, just quiet. Like a persistent noise in the background had stopped and I was hearing silence for the first time.
I scheduled two follow-up sessions, one a week later and one two weeks after that. Dr. Reeves said the initial session plants the seed but the follow-ups reinforce it while the new neural pathways are forming.
After the Session
I didnât smoke that night. Or the next day. Or the day after. But hereâs what was strange: I wasnât white-knuckling it. The craving was there, faintly, like a whisper instead of a shout. Iâd notice it and then it would fade. The compulsive urgency was gone.
The first week was the hardest, but âhardestâ is relative. Compared to my cold turkey attempt, it was nothing. Compared to the Chantix fog, it was nothing. I had moments of restlessness, especially after meals and during work stress. But the hypnotherapy had given me an automatic response: when the craving appeared, my brain would pull up the image of myself as a non-smoker, calm and free, and the craving would lose its grip.
The second session reinforced everything. Dr. Reeves went deeper into the stress-response reprogramming, helping me build a new association between stress and deep breathing instead of stress and cigarettes. By the third session, I felt like the foundation was set.
The Hardest Moment
Six weeks in. A production outage at work took down a service affecting thousands of users. I was on a bridge call for four hours, triaging, coordinating, feeling the old familiar pressure mounting. My hand kept moving toward my pocket where the pack used to live. Phantom reaching. My body remembered even when my mind was cooperating.
During a five-minute break in the call, I stood on the fire escape of our office building in South Lake Union, the same fire escape where I used to smoke. A coworker was out there puffing away. The smell hit me and for one sharp moment, I wanted it so badly that my chest ached.
I closed my eyes and did what Dr. Reeves had trained me to do. I visualized myself standing on that same fire escape, free, breathing clean air, handling this crisis without chemical assistance. I took five deep breaths. The craving crested and then broke, like a wave. I went back inside and finished the call.
That was the last time a craving seriously threatened me. They still pop up occasionally, faint and fleeting, usually triggered by smell. But they pass in seconds now.
Eleven Months Later
I sleep better than I have in twenty years. The insomnia that plagued every previous quit attempt barely showed up this time. I think the hypnotherapy addressed the anxiety that was driving the insomnia.
My annual physical in October showed improvements across the board. Blood pressure down, lung capacity up, resting heart rate dropped from 78 to 66. My doctor was genuinely surprised by the lung capacity improvement and asked what I was doing differently. When I said hypnotherapy, she raised her eyebrows but said sheâd look into referring other patients.
I run now. Nothing crazy. Three miles, three times a week, around Green Lake. I couldnât have done that a year ago without feeling like my lungs were on fire. Now I finish and feel energized.
The money adds up. About $4,200 saved in eleven months. The three hypnotherapy sessions cost me $750 total, which insurance didnât cover. Still the best $750 Iâve ever spent.
My daughter Megan is 11. She lives with her mom but I have her every other weekend. Last month, she told me she was glad I didnât âgo outside to smoke anymoreâ when she visits. She said it used to make her feel like she wasnât enough to keep me inside. That one hit me hard.
To Someone Considering Hypnotherapy
I get the skepticism. I had it too. And Iâll be upfront: it didnât work the first time. But that doesnât mean hypnotherapy failed. The first practitioner wasnât the right fit, and more importantly, I wasnât ready to let the process work.
If youâre considering it, hereâs what Iâd recommend. Find a clinical hypnotherapist with real credentials, ideally someone with a psychology background and specific training in smoking cessation. This isnât a stage show. Itâs a clinical tool that needs to be wielded by someone who knows what theyâre doing.
Go in open. Not gullible, but open. If you spend the whole session analyzing whether itâs working, youâll block the process. Let your guard down for ninety minutes. You can put it back up after.
Commit to follow-up sessions. One session might plant the seed, but the follow-ups are what help it take root.
And understand that hypnotherapy isnât magic. There will still be cravings, especially in the first month. The difference is that the cravings feel manageable because the hypnotherapy has changed your relationship with them. Theyâre not commands you have to obey. Theyâre just signals that fade if you let them.
You are not alone. People quit every day using methods that sound unusual until they work. Twenty-five years I smoked. Four failed attempts. One round of hypnotherapy that didnât stick. And then one that did. If youâve tried everything else, give this a real shot. You might surprise yourself.