I beg your pardon, it was a 50% complete abstention rate and a 75% drop in consumption for the people who made their own hypnosis recordings. Oops! Still pretty spectacular.
As I said, motivation to give up smoking had been found to be the most important factor in most studies. In mine motivation didn’t rate. I told you about the people who didn’t want to give up but did and were pretty annoyed. Well the guy who was my most motivated to give up actually ended up smoking more. He was in my hetero-hypnosis group. My instructions were to play the recording at least four times a week, and I encouraged the participants to give feedback.
Well, this man was an academic at U.T.,S. He was busting to give up smoking. He played the recording heaps more than I had requested and his feedback could have made a substantial book. And he ended up smoking more, one of the few participants of the programme who did. Weird! It made me wonder whether there was an optimum amount of times listening to the recording and too much was counter-productive. Who knew. At the end of the follow-ups I sent him the script, urging him to make a recording himself.
I had a hunch this would work: that he had a strong unconscious resistance to being told what to do by another, no matter how much he wanted to co-operate.
Another interesting finding was that initially most people kind of cringed listening to their own voice. That was weird too: as the Programme advanced it seemed not only did most people come to be O.K. with it, but actually begin to like it. I think us Australians are naturally modest and self-effacing and often lacking in self-esteem.
ånd I got the strong impression that getting to like how you sounded brought about a substantial increase in self-esteem.