A Data-Analytic Evaluation of Smoking Cessation via Online Hypnosis

Abstract

In this article we report the observations of our field study which investigates the success rates of online hypnosis for smoking cessation. Following an international call in Germany, Austria and Switzerland for subjects willing to stop smoking $83$ participants contributed to this study, which took place during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. All subjects received two online hypnosis sessions in small groups and additionally got two MP3 audio files for invididual intensification. The participants sent back several questionnaires, from which we present the evaluation results, and we discuss the problems observed during the study. It turned out that $86\%$ of the participants are smoke-free after $6$ months as long as they participated according to the intervention protocol. Among all smokers after six months we have observed a reduction of $32\%$ in cigarette consumption. This report shall be seen as a statistical evaluation of the collected data and not as the report of a fully pre-designed study in a narrower sense.

20 pages, 10 figures, updated version with elimination of participants which attended the sessions inappropriately