According to the largest ever study that compared different ways of quitting smoking hypnosis is by far the most effective way to achieve your goal. It turns out that willpower alone is often just not enough.

According to statistics published by the Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) the mortality rate for smokers is twice as high as that for non smokers. Also, on average a smoker will die six years before a non-smoker. Attitudes have changed a great deal over the years and nowadays three out of four smokers say they really would like to give up.

There has been a lot more research into hypnotherapy for smokers than you may at first imagine. One meta analysis combined the results of more than 600 of these studies which included well over 70000 people from Europe and America.

With so much information to work with the analysis can give us a very good idea of what helps and what makes it harder to give up cigarettes.

The highest rate of success was with patients who had been told that they had a serious cardiac disorder, clearly this is a very big incentive to stop. You may be surprised to find that after this the most effective method was hypnosis. It found that hypnotherapy gave a success rate of 30 per cent. When you consider this against people who give up because they are being told they have a very bad health risk then this figure is even more impressive.

You may or may not be surprised to hear that the least successful method was people getting advice from a GP. I guess that none of us like being told what to do, even if it is for the good of our health.

And I wonder if you can guess the success rate in people who used willpower alone? 

It was just 6 per cent. So, there really is no need to try and do it alone with just willpower. You can get help and advice and it really will give you a great chance of success.