It isnt effective if it's watered down with self-doubt With autosuggestion you say to yourself: "I'm going to quit smoking. It would be stupid to risk lung cancer or heart disease for a lousy cigarette. Besides, I'm tired of smoking."

Your conscious attention is upon the resolve to quit. Your conscious begins raising doubts. You begin to think about the consequences of breaking the cigarette habit. You wonder about the jitters and whether it's worth it or not. You begin to rationalize, weighing the "good" and the "bad" and naturally favoring that which you believe to be the most pleasurable.

Your resolution is subjected to scrutiny by logic and past experience. In the light of past failures, the conscious mind is forced to admit: "I should quit smoking, but I wonder if I can."

The autosuggestion has been watered down with self-doubt. It becomes, "I hope I can give up the cigarette habit." With more rationalizing and more
self-doubt, it eventually becomes, "Oh, what's the use.

 
When you argue with yourself, you defeat the purpose.You make the suggestion stronger. "I am definitely going to quit," you tell yourself determinedly. "I'm not going to fool around this time. I'll use every bit of will power I've got to lick it. I know the medical researchers are giving me the facts."
In arguing with itself, the conscious mind must accept the information offered by the subconscious memory.

Whether it wants to admit them or not, there are the statements from the tobacco industry advertising, the advice from friends who have told you not to worry about smoking (they don't), plus your previous doubts about the harmful effects of the cigarette habit and your ability to cope with it.
The autosuggestion is therefore watered down even further.

It becomes, "It may be harmful to my health to smoke, but I'm not quite sure. And while I know it wouldn't do any harm to quit, I'm not quite sure that I can quit. In fact, I probably can't. So why try again anyway?"

There cant be any "flaws" in the playback

To be effective, suggestions must be received under hypnosis without critical evaluation. There must be no doubt or challenge when they are given to the subconscious mind.

Lacking the power to reason, the subconscious must then accept them exactly as they are received. And when recalled from the subconscious memory, the suggestions are "played back" exactly and are used to form new logic.

This is the suggestive force of hypnotism. And it cannot be stressed too strongly that the suggestions must be received without critical evaluation.

If you have ever witnessed a demonstration of hypnotism, you may have seen the power of a post-hypnotic suggestion. Frequently, for example, the hypnotist tells his subject that when he is awakened, he will see a $10 bill on the floor—but that he will be unable to pick it up. The hypnotist then awakens the subject and informs him that he can have the money, if he can pick it up.

Because of the post-hypnotic suggestion, the person finds that he is literally unable to lift the $10 bill from the floor.
Can you appreciate now why I have insisted that you do not set the target date for ending your cigarette habit until at least a week or ten days after you have read this book and begun the practice of self-hypnosis?

The target date will be established as a post-hypnotic suggestion. If you establish it in the right way, it will become easy to stop (possibly it would be better to say that it will be difficult NOT to stop).

You could stop in a minute (if it didnt make you nervous)

The smoking habit can be stopped instantly with hetero-hypnosis and a post-hypnotic suggestion that a cigarette will taste so bad that the subject will refuse to continue smoking it. The subject is told, while in the hypnotic trance, that when he awakens the cigar-rettes he smokes will taste like "burning rubber."

In his awakened state, the subject often reasons that someone has tampered with his cigarettes. But the same taste of "burning rubber" is in a new pack and will persist until the post-hypnotic suggestion is removed or wears away.

But this is absolutely no way to assist a person to rid himself of the cigarette habit permanently. The habit isn't removed—it's only inhibited. The desire to smoke remains. The frustration of the desire to smoke can create serious nervous tension.

However, this same powerful suggestive force of post-hypnotic suggestion can be employed positively during self-hypnosis to change subconscious feelings toward the smoking habit. With a change of attitude, the desire is gone and the habit is whipped.