A less popular (and maybe for good reason) methods for smoking cessation is aversion therapy. While other treatments, such as hypnosis, might focus on the pleasurable alternatives to smoking, aversion therapy emphasizes the “stick” rather than the “carrot.”

Essentially, aversion therapy pairs the pleasurable experience of smoking a cigarette with some unpleasant stimulus. The objective is to reduce or eliminate the urge to smoke. Once the smoker no longer associates smoking with positive experiences, then the desire to smoke might be quelled.

Negative Stimuli

The idea seems valid enough, but what is the “negative stimuli” used to reduce the desire to smoke? In a classic example taken from the tradition of studying laboratory mice, small electric shocks are given each time someone picks up a cigarette or triggers certain keys associated with the desire to smoke.

Less painful, and less potentially dangerous, is the method of “satiation smoking” or “rapid smoking,” whereby people are forced to smoke a large number of cigarettes in a short amount of time, specifically one puff every six seconds or to smoke twice a person’s normal number of cigarettes over an allotted period. The idea is to induce symptoms of nicotine toxicity, actually make the smoker feel sick.

Another method is known as “visualization,” or the effort to replace positive images associated with smoking with negative associations. Also used as part of hypnosis, this technique is almost exclusively centered around the mental aspect of smoking cessation.

Effectiveness

Some might be drawn to this type of therapy because it is very direct. Often the desire to quit smoking centers around a negative opinion of oneself and the inability to quit previously. Inflicting pain or inducing nausea might do more to reinforce those negative self opinions than to deter smoking; still, it is seen as “doing something.”

Analysis of clinical research would seem to differ. Most studies show such aversion therapies have no real effect in the effort to stop smoking. Many studies that report a positive effect are biased and can contain serious reporting errors, experts say. Other results indicate aversion therapies, such as rapid smoking, are effective only 2 percent of the time, a result deemed to be not worth the time or expense.

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