Does hypnotherapy work for drinking?

Sometimes. It depends on what the drink is doing for you.

Hypnotherapy is a recognised clinical method, and it can change a drinking habit. But the research on drinking is thin, and you should hear that before you spend a penny.

Plenty of people reading this are partway through a month off. Many hit the same wall in the second week: the pull turns up at one particular hour, and it is strong. That hour tells you more than you might think.

What the research says

One small trial gives the best picture. It ran at a Norwegian inpatient clinic and was published in 2019, following 31 people with alcohol use disorder, all on a six-week group programme.

Sixteen also had five individual sessions of Ericksonian hypnotherapy, a gentle, conversational style. Fifteen had individual motivational interviewing instead.

At one year, both groups had cut their drinking significantly. The AUDIT score, a standard questionnaire for measuring drinking, fell furthest in the hypnotherapy group. But the difference only reached what researchers call a trend level, and the authors said the study was underpowered.

The result is encouraging and small. It shows both groups drinking much less a year on. Whether hypnotherapy beat motivational interviewing, or added anything to the group programme, stays open.

The wider picture is similar. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health reports that evidence for hypnosis in alcohol use disorder remains limited and short of definitive. Smoking is better studied, and a 2019 Cochrane review of 14 studies found insufficient evidence that hypnotherapy beats other support. The question is open.

Both groups in the Norwegian trial drank significantly less a year later. Whether hypnotherapy added anything is still an open question.

Who it tends to suit

Drinking does different jobs in different people. For some it is physical, because the body has come to expect it. If you drink heavily every day, do not stop suddenly without speaking to your GP first, because stopping can be dangerous. That is a medical matter before anything else.

For a lot of people the drinking is routine. A pint when the key goes in the door. A second with the news.

A bottle opened while the tea cooks. It runs on cue and habit, and willpower alone keeps losing to it.

When I ask what the first drink does, people usually go quiet, then say something like "it switches me off from work" or "it quietens my head". Most tell me they barely notice the second and third. The first one is doing the work.

This is the drinking I think hypnotherapy suits best. I take a careful history first.

I ask when the evening drink began, what was going on in your life then, and what has kept it there since. Often it started in a hard stretch years ago and stayed on after the stretch ended. I am looking for the pattern and where it started.

Then, with clinical hypnotherapy, I work beneath conscious thinking on the habit itself: the hour, the cue, and the job the first drink has been doing. What tends to change first is that the hour arrives and the pull is quieter, or has moved to something else. The last stage is making that hold on ordinary evenings, the Friday, the bad day, the job that overran.

Hypnotherapy can change the pattern around the drink. The wanting to change has to come from you.

Where it stops

Sometimes the drinking is tied to a specific memory that still fires in the present, a bad day years ago or a loss. For that I use EMDR, where you follow my hand from side to side while holding the memory in mind, so it stops landing as though it is happening now.

I cannot want it for you. If you are in the room because someone else asked, the sessions have little to grip. How far the change goes varies from person to person, and I say so at the start.

Most people expect to lose control and find they are aware of me throughout. It feels like a deep, focused calm, and you stay in charge of what you agree to.

If you are in the middle of a month off, note the hour the pull is strongest and what happened just before it. Write both down for a week. That is the first thing I would ask you for.