Categories
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