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Stop Smoking

Stop Smoking – You Can Do It If Only You Believe You Can

The only problem with quitting smoking is that the smoker simply does not want to quit. Even though they may be suffering from breathlessness, cardio-vascular problems, threats of amputation, lungs filling up with fluid, cancers of a whole host of organs… they do not want to stop smoking. They don’t want the ill-health either. They want to smoke and be healthy.

Now if smoking a cigarette killed you within 24 hours, there wouldn’t be many takers, the tobacco industry would never have got off the ground, and Sir Walter Raleigh would have died before he got the chance to lose his head. If smoking killed you within a week, then the connection would have taken a little longer to make but you’d probably have to grow your own tobacco because no one else would be doing it.

Because it takes tobacco anything from twenty to fifty years to do the job; and because death isn’t instantaneous, and instead is long, slow, and painful; then smokers pretend ‘it won’t happen to me’ and the Tobacco Barons are laughing all the way to the bank.

So the real problem is that smokers pretend that smoking is good for them, ignore all evidence to the contrary, and believe that smoking is a pleasurable activity without which life wouldn’t be worth living anyway.

Beliefs are powerful. Even if they have no connection with reality. If you believe something then that thing is TRUE for you. It might not be true for anyone else, but it’s true for you. Smokers believe they are addicted. This is a myth propagated by those who have a vested interest in selling tobacco products: like cigarettes, and nicotine gums and patches. Smokers believe that smoking makes them feel good and that nothing else can do that.

If you have a belief that says ‘life isn’t worth living without this thing‘ then you have a belief that allows the thing to kill you.

The solution is to solve the real problem. Instead of giving up cigarettes, give up the belief that they are needed in order to make life worthwhile. Beliefs are not easy to give up, or change. The more important they are, the more resistant they are. If you have a belief that says I always need to have ten dollars in my pocket in order to feel safe and you put your hand in your pocket and pull out a twenty dollar bill, then you will feel okay. But if you put your hand in your pocket and find it contains only five dollars then you will feel some anxiety.

Change the belief to five dollars makes me feel safe, put your hand in your pocket and pull out five dollars and you feel okay. The important thing here is that nothing has changed in the physical world. All that has changed is your belief. Changing your belief can reduce anxiety levels.

So imagine a belief like ‘Cigarettes keep me safe, I must always have a packet with me’. Imagine having that belief and finding yourself without cigarettes!

Now imagine having a belief ‘cigarettes contain many poisons, I don’t want one near me’. Imagine having that belief and finding a packet of cigarettes in your pocket or bag.

The easiest way to change a belief without having to battle against the conscious resistance that says ‘but this is true, that’s why I believe it’ is to use hypnosis. Hypnosis causes shifts at the subconscious level and it feels almost as if you have just changed your mind about smoking

Michael Hadfield D. Hyp., MBSCH

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Stop Smoking

Nicotine, Addiction & Stopping Smoking

Nicotine is an interesting substance. It is an alkaloid – this is a bitter tasting poison manufactured by plants and stored in their leaves and stems to stop them being eaten by animals. It is a friendly warning from the plant world to the animal world saying ‘don’t eat this it will make you ill’.

Humans are well known for living out of harmony with their natural environment.

I’ve yet to treat a smoker who isn’t surprised when I tell them that nicotine is a highly toxic poison. They don’t know that they are smoking something that is three times as toxic as arsenic and more lethal than strychnine. They are also surprised that nicotine is used as a pesticide and is so toxic that a few drops of the pure substance on the skin can be fatal. This is quite important. Nicotine does not have to be ingested to kill you.

A lethal dose can be quite easily absorbed via the skin.

But of course it is obvious that nicotine can be absorbed through the skin because otherwise nicotine patches would be a waste of time – wouldn’t they?

And of course there is that other favourite – the nicotine gum; so you can spend hours exercising your jaw muscles and get your poison absorbed through the lining of your mouth, throat and stomach.

The real problem is that smokers are treated like addicts who are so addicted that it is a complete waste of time even bothering to even attempt to wean them off the substance they are ‘addicted’ to. All that modern medical science can do for these poor addicts is to separate out the toxin from all the other nasty stuff in the tobacco leaf and give it to them in a pure form.

In its pure form it takes just 60mg of nicotine to turn a 150lb adult into a corpse.

And it does it very rapidly. So it seems like a really good idea to chew this stuff and stick it in close contact with your skin – doesn’t it?

I get smokers coming to see me for help in quitting. A significant number have tried patches or gum. Quite often they tell me they ended up using the gum, or the patches, and smoking as well. That was when they realised they needed some real help if they were to succeed in stopping.

About 600 years ago the very best minds on this planet had no doubts at all that what we know as planet Earth was as flat as a pancake. They were mistaken. Those minds were just as intelligent as the minds we use today. We just have greater knowledge and more recorded history. About 500 years ago the very best minds on this planet thought the sun revolved around the Earth. They were mistaken too.

Some of the very best minds on the planet today believe that nicotine is addictive in the same way that heroine is addictive.

They are mistaken.

Most cigarettes are smoked in response to environmental stimuli e,g, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, food (afterwards, not during), driving, getting off an aeroplane, telephone calls, sex (afterwards, not during), commercial breaks…

This is not an addiction it is training.

Hypnosis interferes with the automatic (i.e. without thought) responses that trigger lighting up.

Hypnosis makes giving up easier than it can be otherwise.

Stop Smoking at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home
Stop Smoking at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home

Michael Hadfield D.Hyp., MBSCH

Categories
self-help Stop Smoking

Is Nicotine Really Addictive?

Nicotine is a substance that is important to the economy of the planet. Yet it is a substance that even most of its users know very little about. For many years nicotine and smoking were pretty much the same thing, but now you can get nicotine on its own in the form of gums, patches, and inhalers. This is a substance that has high toxicity and is lethal in small doses – so why is it able to provide significant revenue for an industry, and for those governments that place high duty on the purchase of cigarettes. The reason is that nicotine is believed to be highly addictive. But it is believed to be highly addictive by only some experts, while other experts are convinced it is nothing of the sort.

There is a world of difference between being addicted, in the clinical sense, to something and to really liking it or liking how it makes you feel. Sex isn’t addictive, yet most people like it, enjoy it, and engage in it over a period of many decades. Those same people, if it isn’t available, may find themselves wishing for a suitable partner and thinking about it a lot. That’s not an addiction. That’s a desire. But as soon as you get engrossed in something that captivates your attention and interest, then thoughts of sex disappear.

I see a lot of smokers who come to me for help in stopping smoking. Around half of them believe they are addicted to nicotine; around a quarter believe it is part addiction part habit; and the rest see it as purely a habit. The interesting thing is that there is no correlation between the number of cigarettes a smoker smokes per day and their beliefs about it being a habit or an addiction.

No one doubts that heroine is an addictive substance. There is also no doubt that some heroine addicts commit crimes to fund their habit. Now it may be that cigarettes are so readily available, and smokers organise their smokes so carefully that a smoker never runs out of cigarettes – but still it’s difficult to imagine a normally law-abiding smoker who has run out of cigarettes breaking into the local tobacconist to pick up a packet of twenty because they’ll be insane with craving by morning if they don’t get a cigarette RIGHT NOW.

That must surely cast a shadow of doubt on the addictiveness of tobacco smoking.

One of the factors of significance in addiction is habituation. Habituation is what happens when the body gets used to, or tolerates, a drug that is taken on a regular basis. It means that the same dose, over time, gives less and less effect. So one of the characteristics of addiction is that the dose slowly increases. Those of you who have taken drugs like valium (diazepam), or other benzodiazepenes, will be familiar with this effect. The first few days of taking them put your world back to normal, but by the time you visit the doctor a week later you are suffering again and so he ups the dose. Then a month or two later the dose is increased again or the drug changed to one with a stronger effect.

Cigarette smokers have invariably smoked the same number of cigarettes per day for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years or more.

That alone must surely cast a shadow of doubt on the addictiveness of tobacco smoking.

When there’s a myth that’s so pervasive within the culture that it has become a Belief, I look to see who benefits. Clearly in my own country (the UK) four powerful groups benefit: the tobacco industry, the government, the pharmaceutical industry, and the National Health Service.

· the tobacco industry makes enormous profits for itself.

· the Government raises Revenue from every tobacco product sold.

· the Pharmaceutical Industry sells nicotine delivery systems and ‘anti-smoking’ drugs.

· the National Health Service attracts massive funding to treat smoking-related disease.

Just to give an idea of the huge size of the smoking ‘pie’; in 2004 Gallaher, third largest UK tobacco company, paid Duty of £5,500,000,000 and claimed a pre-tax profit of £429,000,000.

In the same year, Imperial Tobacco, the largest UK tobacco company paid £8,000,000,000 Duty, and claimed a pre-tax profit of £688,000,000.

In comparison to that the treatment of smoking related disease means the National Health Service can attract £1,500,000,000 per year from the Government – a drop in the ocean compared to the duty that tobacco sales raise. So from the Government’s point of view it makes more economic sense to keep smokers smoking and simply invest a small portion of the Revenue that they pour into Government coffers to pay for medical professionals to look after them when they get sick.

Could this have anything to do with the reason that when smoker’s seek medical help to quit smoking, they are offered nicotine replacement therapy, or Zyban (actually an anti-depressant)? These treatments don’t have a very good track record, but they do keep the Pharmaceutical Industry happy.

Now I’m not suggesting conspiracy here. Just economics. We all know, just like when governments decide that wars are to be fought and individual lives and suffering become meaningless, that with economics money is all that matters, people don’t (except when we need your vote). Just like wars, the economics of smoking is filled with propaganda.

If somebody tells you something enough times, then you may begin to believe it.

The main propaganda that is promoted in relation to smoking is that nicotine is physiologically addictive.

I have treated plenty of 20 a day smokers who happily sit on a 10-12 hour transatlantic flight, enjoying the book, movie, view, conversation… and only ‘crave’ a cigarette the minute they get off the plane and into an area where smoking is allowed. I have never met a smoker who gets up in the middle of the night for a cigarette. Even after they get up they shower, enjoy breakfast, and it isn’t until they sit down to enjoy the mug of tea or coffee that they light up – at last! Yet they can be lighting up at the rate of one an hour throughout the day.

This isn’t addiction – it’s a habit.

Hypnosis could well be the very best treatment to break a habit, because a habit is purely a mind thing.

Hypnosis makes it very easy to just change your mind.

You will agree that tobacco is big business. The Tobacco Barons, the Pharmacy Kings, and the Men from the Ministry are not going to allow Billions to slip through their fingers. If smokers believe that they are addicted to something that isn’t an addictive substance, then the only people who are going to suffer are the smokers. Misinformation means Revenue. Setting the record straight is only of benefit to smokers. Setting the record straight is detrimental to vested interests. So you have a choice if you smoke. You can choose to use hypnosis break the habit and then spend your hard-earned cash on something enjoyable.
Michael Hadfield  D.Hyp., MBSCH