Hypnosis to Drink Less

What does cutting down actually mean?

Three different situations often go by the same name, and confusing them leads to aiming at the wrong goal.

• Risky use is drinking that has no visible consequence yet but does carry health risks. No symptoms, no dependence: that is the ground this page covers.
• Harmful use already has consequences on health, work, family or safety, without dependence being necessarily present.
• Dependence adds a physical and psychological dimension: loss of control over the amount, compelling cravings, tolerance, and signs of withdrawal on stopping. It is a matter for addiction medicine, and the goal is discussed there with a doctor. If that is you, the useful page is Hypnosis for Alcohol Withdrawal.

Where to set the line?

We do not set it for you and we publish no thresholds of our own. Low-risk drinking guidelines exist, set by health authorities and revised regularly: in France by Santé publique France (in French), in Canada by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, whose guidance was revised recently in a more cautious direction. Reading them is worth more than relying on the average of the people around you, which is always reassuring and rarely relevant.

Cut down or stop?

Both goals are legitimate in contemporary addiction medicine, and the second is not morally superior to the first. Where there is dependence, abstinence is generally the safest goal and that is what practice guidelines recommend; but it is not the only recognised path, and those same guidelines ask that a person's own goal be accepted rather than imposed on them. What is not negotiable lies elsewhere: whatever the goal, it is discussed with a doctor before anything is changed. And we sell moderation to nobody as a universal answer.

What a hypnosis session can aim at

Let us start with what hypnosis does not do.

It does not set your goal for you. It does not treat dependence and has no place on its own in that situation. It will not make you feel disgusted by alcohol: aversion suggestions are not part of our practice. It does not strengthen your willpower, because willpower is not the lever, and anyone telling you otherwise has not looked at what actually happens at seven in the evening. And it guarantees no result.

What the work does aim at:

• Undoing the automatic habit. The first drink is rarely a decision: it is a sequence, arriving, putting the keys down, opening the fridge. The work separates the situation from the gesture, through the same learning mechanism that tied them together.
• Giving the drink back its status as a choice. Not forbidding it: being able to say yes for real, or no for real, at a given moment.
• Handing to something else what alcohol was doing: unwinding, marking the end of the day, getting through an evening, lightening an emotion.
• Getting through social situations without it being an ordeal, which is the most common point of failure.
• Easing what feeds the drinking, end-of-day anxiety and difficulty sleeping in particular.

If your goal is a trial pause rather than a lasting change, the way in is here: Hypnosis for Dry January.

When cutting down is no longer enough

This needs saying plainly, because few sites do: cutting down is not always a workable goal.

Some signs indicate that the goal should be discussed again with a doctor rather than persisted with alone. You set a limit and it does not hold, week after week, despite a sincere intention. The first drink triggers the next ones without the decision still being yours. You drink to take away a physical discomfort. The people around you are worried, however clumsily. You hide it, you play it down, you count out loud differently from how you count in your head.

None of this disqualifies you or boxes you in. It only indicates that the right person to talk to, at this stage, is not a hypnotherapist. We will tell you so if we see it at the first conversation, and that is part of the work.

What the research says

Research on hypnosis and alcohol is scarce and does not allow any conclusion. Better to write that than to dress it up.

A Norwegian randomised trial published in 2019 compared Ericksonian hypnosis sessions with motivational interviewing in people hospitalised for alcohol use disorder. Thirty-one people took part, far too few to settle anything. Both groups reduced their drinking, and the gap in favour of hypnosis at one year did not reach statistical significance. The authors note that only two randomised controlled trials existed at the time on this subject.

A Cochrane review of hypnotherapy for smoking cessation reaches a comparable conclusion: the evidence does not establish superiority over other behavioural approaches, and if a benefit exists, it is small at most.

What is documented in this field is addiction medicine: early identification, brief interventions, motivational interviewing, cognitive and behavioural therapies, self-control training, medication where indicated, and peer support groups. Hypnosis comes as support inside that framework, not instead of it.

Book an appointment

The first conversation is there precisely to work out whether hypnosis is the right resource for your situation, and a clear answer, including "see your doctor first", is part of the work. Ask us a question or book an appointment. Our practitioners who work in English see people in Montreal, Sherbrooke, Gatineau, Paris and Lille, and by video wherever you are in the world. The number of sessions is worked out at the first conversation.

For the common ground behind all these questions, our page Hypnosis for Alcohol and Drinking Less brings together what hypnosis can and cannot do, and the situations where the first step is a doctor.