A growing number of vapers are seeking help from hypnotherapists to quit amid concern about the health and environmental impact of e-cigarettes.
Hypnotherapists in England and Scotland have noted a rise in the number of clients, particularly young women, who want to quit the habit. Lydia Johnson, a clinical hypnotherapist and founder of the London Clinic of Hypnotherapy, takes 30 bookings a week and says about seven are linked to vaping. Previously, more people would come to her about smoking but she has noticed a shift.
“It’s a big percentage,” Johnson said. “It’s so appealing to the younger generation, even down to my son’s age. They look like sweets or highlighter pens.”
Susan Hepburn, a hypnotherapist who has a practice on Harley Street in London, has seen a 40% rise in people coming to her for help. “I see more clients who want to quit vaping as opposed to quitting smoking cigarettes these days,” she said, adding that she had noticed a shift about seven years ago.
Hepburn said she saw mostly young women who were concerned about their health as they were coughing a lot. Clients said they were vaping constantly because of how easy it was to do “indoors, in meetings or in the bedroom”, she said.
Another hypnotherapist, Deanne Bloomfield, based in Hertfordshire, said she saw about seven people a week about vaping and it tended to be younger people. She said many felt trapped and that their vaping was out of control.
Steve Barclay, while he was the health secretary, expressed alarm at a threefold rise in three years in the number of children who used e-cigarettes, as ministers took the first step towards banning candy-coloured disposable vapes.
He said he was concerned “as a dad” by e-cigarettes being marketed like sweets. Barclay, who is now environment secretary, said that while vaping was better than smoking, “for people that don’t smoke, they shouldn’t be vaping”.
Karen Jackson, 62, from Hertfordshire smoked for about 15 years when she was in her late teens and 20s. She gave up when she had children but always felt tempted to go back. She tried vaping and started out on a low-nicotine dose before the level she was taking crept up.
Soon it became a problem and she developed a chest pain that she felt was linked to e-cigarettes. Jackson was desperate to give up but found herself picking up nicotine time and again. That was when she turned to hypnotherapy.
“I was vaping all the time because it is so easy to pick up and puff on,” she said. Two and a half years after her first hypnotherapy session, she has not touched a vape since.
“It was expensive but it was great and we spoke for three hours on Zoom,” she said. She had tried hypnotherapy before and it was not effective. This time, something clicked.
“I do not even think about it now,” she said. “In the session, my hypnotherapist, Deanne, was talking about taking care of your mental and physical health. She was talking in a calm way about trying to reset and refigure your mindset and what made me think I needed to vape.”
Jackson said she realised it was time to break the addiction, connecting it with her long-term cigarette use. “After my session, the craving just disappeared,” she said.
Johnson said hypnotherapy was different from what people imagined, and it was not always like it appeared on television. “The way I work is understanding the difference between our conscious and subconscious mind, and using hypnotherapy to quieten down the conscious mind and really tap into the subconscious, which is 90% of you.”
She said she reminded people of what they really thought about vaping, “almost like a pause moment”. She begins with a three-hour session and clients take home an audio clip that they listen to over the next 21 days.
She said people wanted to give up vaping for health and environmental reasons and often told her it felt like an unsustainable product.
