Habits & Addictions
Hypnosis to stop drinking
Become a non-drinker, free and clear, one steady day at a time.
Stop Drinking is a session for the time when the urge arrives and the usual answer is not an option.
It settles the body first, then spends the middle of the track on one specific idea, repeated in one of three ways you can choose between. The aim is to sit still while the urge rises and falls.
The glass is often in your hand before you have noticed the decision to pour it. The day ends with the usual plan to stop tomorrow, but that plan does not survive the six o'clock feeling.
The problem is not the decision in the cold light of day, but the speed of it when the evening actually arrives.
What’s in it
A calm way to let the urge to drink rise and pass on its own, and the clear, free feeling of a non-drinker.
Why do it
Riding out the wave is a skill the mind rehearses here, so each session makes the next clear day easier to keep, one steady day at a time.
- Theme
- Habits & Addictions
- Delivery styles
- 3
- Lengths
- Quick ~10mStandard ~20mDeep ~45m
- Ends
- Calm and present
- Stages
- 4
- On this shelf
- 23 sessions
Timeline: Start to Finish
The build spends its time rehearsing the non-drinker in the present tense. You listen to the version of you who lets the urge rise and pass, without doing anything else.
3 of the 4 stages are named techniques with a published origin, credited under each.
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InductionStage 16 min
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
A classic head-to-toe relaxation. Tense and release, or simply soften, each muscle group in sequence.
After Edmund Jacobson PMR (1929); Dave Elman Hypnotherapy · what progressive muscle relaxation is
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DeepenerStage 23 min
Staircase Descent
Visualized stairs descending into a deeper level of trance. Each step takes you down.
After Ledochowski, Deep Trance Training Manual
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Suggestion ScriptStage 310 min
Stop Drinking — Balanced
-
AwakeningStage 42 min
Calm Alert Awakening
Awake and present, but calm rather than energized. Good for evening or pre-meeting use.
After Yapko, Trancework
Three ways to say it
The same goal, written three ways. You pick the one that sounds like something you would believe — and you can hear a different one tomorrow without rebuilding anything.
Balanced
Let the urge rise and pass on a slow breath, and grow the clear, free steadiness of a non-drinker. The default.
Future self
Meet the free, clear version of you a week, a month, a year on, with the drinking quietly behind you.
New identity
Step into being a non-drinker now, free and clear, with the drinking a closed chapter and no shame to carry.
Where it sits
The things you keep doing, and stopping doing them.
Before you press play
- This one asks for a bit of care. In the app it opens with a consent step before anything plays.
Hypnosis is not for everyone. If you have epilepsy, a psychotic illness, or you are under psychiatric care, talk to your clinician before using this — here or anywhere.
Why this works — and what the research actually says
Group-level, not session-level: no study has tested this exact session, and we will not pretend otherwise. Every source below was opened and read on 2026-08-25 before it was quoted.
Why do it as hypnosis?
This is not about arguing with yourself when you are tired. It is about rehearsing the moment the urge arrives and letting it sit there without acting on it.
Hypnosis creates a quiet space where the habit loop can be observed and interrupted at leisure, without anything else demanding your attention.
It is a practice of watching the feeling rise and pass, without needing to fix it immediately.
Quitting smoking: the honest answer is that nobody knows yet
Cochrane grades medical evidence for a living. It reviewed 14 trials of hypnotherapy for quitting smoking, covering 1,926 people followed for at least six months.
Its verdict was not that it works, and not that it fails — it was that there is not enough good evidence to tell. If there is a benefit, they say it is small at most.
- 14 randomised trials, 1,926 people, followed six months or more
- Verdict: insufficient evidence either way
- Only 1 of the 14 trials was judged at low risk of bias
Worth knowing: The review rates its own evidence as ranging "from low to very low certainty, as there was not enough information and many of the studies had issues with their designs".
One study was judged at low risk of bias overall, ten at high risk and three unclear. On safety, most studies did not report whether adverse events were even collected.
The exact wording and figures
A Cochrane review pooled 14 randomised controlled trials with 1,926 participants.
Its conclusion: "There is insufficient evidence to determine whether hypnotherapy is more effective for smoking cessation than other forms of behavioural support or unassisted quitting.
If a benefit is present, current evidence suggests the benefit is small at most."
We sell sessions for this. We are showing you the review that declines to endorse them, because you should know what the evidence says before you decide.
Barnes J, McRobbie H, Dong CY, Walker N, Hartmann-Boyce J (2019). Hypnotherapy for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CD001008.
plain-language summary free to read
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