Yeah, I have no idea what those folks were doing. I know I can get the result because I did, back in the day. I'm not a licensed hypnotherapist but I went through an exploratory phase in my 20's which included experimentation with hypnosis. It was easy to develop "profound" hypnotic phenomenon like arm catalepsy (your arm is basically asleep, if you feel it with your other hand it feels like someone else's arm, etc.) I don't know what to tell you.

I actually only ever tried smoking cessation once, at a party, to demonstrate hypnosis. A friend of a friend went from two packs a day to two cigarettes a day, and a month later she was still barely smoking. YMMV.

Oh man! I just remembered what happened: I went into an online quit-smoking chatroom and offered to help people quit and they tore me a new one. People were howling for my blood! That's why I never went into business as a therapist. (That and I'm kind of an anti-social curmudgeon.)