How I told people to stop smoking in 1987 vs. 2025

My parents love to tell a story about how when I was five years old, I used to give one of their friends a very hard time for smoking cigarettes. I would shout “No smoking!” while handing the poor man a slip of paper with a hand-drawn picture indicating the same, whenever he would light up. They all thought it was very cute.

It’s no wonder that in my adult life, I would make a career out of helping people to stop smoking — albeit with their full consent these days. Out of all the issues that I’ve seen over my 18 years in practice, smoking cessation has always been at the top of the list. In recent years, I’ve seen increasing numbers of clients who want to stop vaping, too.

Without exaggeration, I treat these cases as a matter of life-or-death: When my client is successful, they experience only positive benefits (after a brief period of adjustment), and future children will have a grandfather or grandmother. When they are unsuccessful, there is needless suffering. As a hypnotist, most of my success stories don’t result in 10, 15, or even 20 high-quality years added to the client’s life, but smoking cessation is the one exception.

Get all the stop-smoking support you need through our free hypnu™ app

In 2025, I’m returning to my childhood roots by telling people to stop smoking for free. I’m at the point in my life where I don’t need to put a price tag on literally everything (I’m looking at you, American politicians). Especially for something as important as prolonging human life.

A few years ago, I summarized everything I knew about smoking cessation into a series of recordings that I named The Smoking Breakup Plan. It’s a self-directed program that you can use to arrive at a mentality where you’re done with cigarettes and want nothing more to do with them. I tried selling the program online, with limited success (people kept paying me to hypnotize them in-person instead).

Now that my company owns and operates the hypnu™ app, I’ve repurposed these recordings and released them for free, in the Daytime section of the app:

Here’s an App Store link, if you use an iPhone.
Here’s the Play Store link, if you use Android.

There’s no catch. All of my recordings on hypnu™ are free. If you want to support the app through the optional Premium membership, you’ll have access to 20 other hypnotists in English and German. And if you want me to hypnotize you using my personal attention, we now have flat-rate pricing for smoking cessation only. Tell every smoker you know.