Smoking is a harmful and addictive habit that affects millions of people around the world. Today, we know about the dangers of smoking, and smokers are urged to stop smoking for the benefit of their own health. This is not an easy task, as smokers start at an extremely young age. The average age of a new smoker is thirteen years old.
A habit formed at such a young age is not easily broken. Nicotine affects many parts of the body and it is hard to pull free without some help. There are many diseases associated with smoking. Most smokers will need some help on how to quit smoking and a variety of methods exist for this very purpose.
There are many different reasons why people start smoking and develop a smoking habit. The main reason that people try smoking is peer pressure. Some young people think smoking will make them appear more mature, and increase their popularity with their peers. It also is forbidden which makes it all the more alluring to teenagers, thus the low starting age for many people. This young age makes quitting smoking more difficult in your later years.
Media can also influence the decision to start smoking. Smoking portrayed in movies or on television can lead someone to think that smoking is harmless. Parents can wield the biggest influence over their children by setting a good example and discussing smoking, its dangers, and expressing their desire for their children not to smoke. Mothers and fathers who smoke are much more likely to have children who smoke.
Smokers begin to crave nicotine, a drug within tobacco. Nicotine can affect your body and mind in many negative ways. Nicotine, once inhaled into the lungs reaches the brain in a mere eight seconds. Once in your brain, nicotine affects your heart rate and blood pressure. Over time it can increase your bad cholesterol and cause the narrowing of your arteries. Nicotine in concentrated doses is a lethal poison, so imagine the damage it does to your body. Nicotine is also addictive and this is why many cannot quit the habit.
Smoking can impact your health on a variety of levels. Getting winded playing a game is one side effect of smoking. More serious smoking related diseases include cancer and emphysema. Strokes and heart disease are also closely linked to cigarette smoking. A person who quits smoking will greatly reduce their chances for these diseases for every year they go without smoking.
These smoking-related medical conditions often have grave consequences. Lung cancer is nearly always fatal unless detected very early and 80% of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking. Heart and lung disease can take years from your life unless you learn how to quit smoking. Emphysema cannot be cured but only managed, plus the damage to your lungs cannot be repaired. Stop smoking benefits include a healthier, longer life and a better quality of life.
There are several different ways to quit smoking, and you must choose the right method for you as an individual. Nicotine gums and patches are made to help slowly release you from the nicotine addiction. Only about 10% of the people who use them are able to quit smoking. Another option is going cold turkey, and this works for up to 11% of the smokers who try to quit this way. Other well known methods to quit smoking include an herbal kit that can guide you through quitting. It has a success rate similar to that of nicotine gums and patches.
Stop smoking hypnosis is a very popular and highly successful option for those who want to quit smoking without experiencing withdrawal symptoms or weight gain. Hypnotherapy has a high success rate with smokers who are trying to quit smoking. Hypnosis might sound like an extreme solution but it delivers positive results up to 70% of the time. This success rate is many times that of other methods.
The reason stop smoking hypnosis is so effective is that it while the physical addiction to nicotine makes up only about 10% of the smoking addiction, the emotional and mental aspects of the habit make up a full 90% of the smoking addiction. Hypnotherapy treats this aspect of the addiction.
In addition, 45% of the smoking behavior is caused by stress, and hypnotherapy has proven to be a powerful, non-invasive tool that can help reprogram the mind to divert it away from stressful thoughts, and towards more positive and relaxing thoughts. In addition, the very essence of hypnosis is that it incorporates a deep state of relaxation.
And about 45% of the smoking behavior is caused by conditioned responses. This occurs when smoking is associated with other activities and events at the unconscious level of mind. For example, if you smoke and simultaneously watch television, your unconscious will associate the image of a cigarette in your hand with the image of the TV. Every time you watch TV, your unconscious flashes an image of the cigarette in your hand, and you feel an urge to smoke.
Hypnosis therapy is routinely used to "extinguish" the conditioned responses by disassociating the unconscious connections between cigarettes and TV, driving, coffee, working on your computer, or any other environment where an unconscious association has been formed.
In summary: Although most smokers think that their inability to quit smoking is due to their addiction to nicotine, in truth it is the
psychological aspects of smoking that present the largest barriers. Hypnotherapy was accepted by the American Medical Association in 1958 as an effective tool for quitting smoking. And hypnosis for smoke cessation is the second most common use of hypnotherapy today.
While hourly rates for hypnotherapists climb higher and higher, there are effective self hypnosis programs on the market that can greatly reduce the cost of obtaining hypnosis treatment. Since everyone is unique, there are no specific "magic" words or post-hypnotic suggestions that will work for everyone. So when choosing hypnosis CDs, look for those that incorporate a broad variety of hypnotic and NLP techniques in a series of at least six or more sessions to enjoy the best possible results. In any event, the cost of the best self hypnosis programs equates to much less than the amount that an average smoker spends every month on cigarettes.
