change your thinking to quit easily

Why is it easy to stop smoking?

And great change techniques from http://www.12free.org/

Stopping smoking is easy for the body and mind to do because both have excellent memory for the desired state of being a non smoker. There are millions of smokers who really wish that they could become non-smokers and cannot imagine how they could cope without there chosen form of tobacco. In the field of hypnosis there are many instances where people have been able to recover forgotten information, sometimes from many years before. There are many remarkable cases of subjects recalling information that they had absolutely no conscious connection to. The ability to understand foreign languages during hypnosis and not in the normal state is a good example of this. These and other examples are good evidence that our brains record all experience in all representational systems (visual. auditory or feeling) whether consciously or not.

What relevance to stopping smoking is this?

Well the fact of the matter is people are not born smoking and usually spend most of their childhood as happy healthy non-smokers and manage perfectly well without cigarettes. Cigarette smoke is absolutely obnoxious and repellent the first time it’s inhaled. The body really does know that it’s not good for it. The body will remember how it feels to be a non smoker without too much effort… It prefers to be that way. However it also remembers habits just the same way. This creates the paradox of the smoker who wants to stop but can’t control the habit and finds it hard. They actually feel like they are fighting themselves.
So why is it easy to stop smoking?
The habit mechanism is there for a reason. It’s there so that you can learn things permanently. I see habits like programs on a computer. Your average computer has a number of programs on the desk top which sit there causing no problems, most users only use two of three programs in their package of software. Not using the other programs doesn’t cause the computer any harm. These programs can sit on that desktop for month’s even years on end and never get used… When they are finally clicked on they will work perfectly. Habits are just the same. Once you learn a habit, which you do by repetition, it stays in your brain permanently. Not doing the habit won’t harm you but if you do it, it will work perfectly. It has to be that way otherwise you could forget how to swim or you could forget how to drive or ride a bike or forget that fire is hot. Smoking is a habit that is reinforced everyday since the smoker took it up steadily. Not doing it however will not cause the smoker any actual harm. In fact quite the opposite it will do the smoker an awful lot of good. The vast majority of smokers who have trouble stopping think that it is going to be hard to stop smoking. What they don’t often think is that it will be easy to stop. Smokers who stop easily, and there are many, actually do think that it will be easy. And that really is the case. The plain fact of the matter is when smokers start thinking about stopping they are in either one group or the other. It doesn’t help matters when smokers are being bombarded by negative messages about how hard it will be to stop. From the media and misguided health organizations. This reinforces their belief system actually making it hard to stop smoking because what you believe tends to influence your judgments.
Overlooking the obvious.
There is one real truth about the habit mechanism and that is you never forget a habit. So once you are a smoker you will know how to be a smoker for ever. This leads us on to the fact that once you stop smoking you have to stay stopped if you want to be a non smoker. A little bit obvious but true. Just like riding a bike once you get back on the saddle you’ll do it easily. Not riding a bike doesn’t do you any harm in just the same way that not smoking will not do you any harm. This habit mechanism can however be extremely useful. The fact that you were born with the ability to be happy and healthy without a cigarette is another habit that you can start using again and just like before it will work perfectly. Hypnosis is a great way to go back in time in your mind and remember what it felt like as a non smoker. Sometimes when we do this the conversation that develops between the child non smoker about to try smoking and the adult smoker who wants to stop is very amusing. Once both parties agree it isn’t and wasn’t such a good thing to do, subjects can feel as if they have never smoked.

Cravings

What smokers experience as withdrawal symptoms are no more than conditioned reflexes linked to certain daily activities. The influence of nicotine on the brain chemistry need hardly be considered as nicotine is entirely metabolised from the body within three days. Many smokers believe they are addicted to nicotine leading them to believe that it will be hard to cope without it. This notion is proliferated by the governments and tobacco manufacturers, who try to get smokers to stop using nicotine replacement therapy or NRT (you have to smell a fish when you realise the nicotine in patches etc comes from the tobacco manufacturers) You only have to look at the facts to realise that this is just not the case. An average day’s patch contains the same amount of nicotine as six packs of twenty regular tar cigarettes. Nobody gets addicted to patches!! All that nicotine does is to open the neural pathways in the brain that connects the good feeling to the memory of when the smoker started smoking The memory of the good feeling however will linger and it’s this memory to the perceived feel good factor that is interpreted as nicotine addiction. Most smokers will say at one stage or another that they enjoyed smoking. What they are really enjoying is the feelings linked to the cigarette and being remembered. Feelings like ‘one of the gang’ or ‘being rebellious’ or ‘feeling grown up’ or actually getting excited by the oxygen rich blood rushing through the brain in response to the stimulation of nicotine, ( which is just as easy to do by deep breathing). Because the smoker keeps on reinforcing by smoking this good feeling memory will be well learnt. After three days of stopping smoking the nicotine is completely gone it cannot affect the body .The only thing that a smoker is craving is a good feeling. There are not many things that people do consistently to remember good feelings. If they did then they would also be linked to the good feelings. I sometimes wonder why children aren’t taught how to recall and experience good feelings without the need to resort to mind altering chemicals it would be a really healthy way forward. Major corporations know how effective this can be by linking good feelings with their products. It’s so easy to do. For example. If we were going to do an ad for being a non smoker then we could say: What is being a non-smoker like?
Well …..
Being a non smoker is like being woken up at 6.00am on a Saturday morning and realising that you don’t have to go to work,
Being a non smoker is like when you’re driving toward a red light and it changes to green just in time
Being a non smoker is like having a big sheet of bubble wrap to burst all on your own.
Being a non smoker is like being the first person to walk on squeaky fresh fallen snow.
Being a non smoker is like finding money in jeans that you can get in to now you’ve lost weight.
Being a non smoker is like the smell of fresh bread cooking
Being a non smoker makes you feel great…… you know what that feels like ….. Don’t you?

You get the idea. Thoughts can make you feel good and linking something to great thoughts and memories opens up neural pathways in the brain that link that something to the feeling of the original experience. From the example above you can see how easy it is to get good feelings from thoughts. How can we get these feeling when we need them? As simple as it may sound, just thinking about them. And if we include a physical aspect to the thought then we can get immediate access to good feelings. Try this:

1. Pick out your favourite experience thing from the list above or any really wonderful experience you've had.
2. Now squeeze your ear lobe and start seeing that nice thought in your minds eye like you’re really there looking out of your own eyes, and make that scene big and bright and loud remembering how you felt, all the while keep squeezing your ear lobe, do this for 30 seconds. Now release your ear lobe.. Now say the word ‘magic‘….and squeeze that same ear lobe again.
3. Now repeat from step 1, It should now be impossible for you to squeeze that ear lobe without recalling that nice feeling, if not repeat again.

This is all cigarettes are doing for smokers. Just imagine if you practiced doing the above twenty times a day with a different great feeling on twenty different parts of you body. Who needs cigarettes to get great feelings? In the film The Sound of Music Julie Andrews sang a song about her favourite things when she was feeling bad. You know “ white flowing dresses with blue satin sashes , snow flakes that fall on my nose and eye lashes , brown paper packages tied up with string”…….. and so on. This technique can and does actually work. I wonder if Mr Rogers and Mr Hammerstien realised that they were doing NLP before Richard Bandler and John Grinder invented it!

The point is Focus on what you want !
Unfortunately smokers who find it hard to stop are being their own worst enemy. The reason smokers who find it hard to quit feel this way is because they tend to focus on what they don’t want not on what they do want. From my experience of dealing with thousands of smokers who want to stop and are finding it tough, I found that a large majority of them have the following problem. They were all saying things to themselves like: “I must not smoke”, “I’ve stopped smoking”, “I don’t smoke any more”, “I really need one“. This makes it so hard because it focuses the mind on what they are trying not to do. If you say “I must not eat a chocolate cake”, what do you think about? I was the same when I was trying to stop a 45 a day habit. This occurred to me after I questioned many smokers who stopped easily, and again there are thousands. In NLP we use what is known as modelling. This is where you find out how people do things and teach it to other people. So I questioned lots of smokers who quit easily to find out what they did. I found out that they all had one thing in common. They were all giving themselves mental pats on the back by focusing on what they wanted and now have. Things like: “I feel so much fitter”, “I smell really clean”, “I can really taste my food”, “I go on two holidays a year now”, “I feel great”, “I feel really proud of myself.” This was a startling difference from the smokers who were finding it hard to stop. So we started to tell smokers to focus on what they wanted using their strongest representational system (Visual, auditory or kinesthetic) whenever they had the feeling that it was time to smoke. Our success rates went through the roof. Now we are able to give our private clients a lifetime guarantee that they will become non smokers.

Addictive personalities?

I am of the firm opinion that no person is born with a propensity toward addictive substances or behaviours. A person may come from a family with a long history of depression or mental illness which would lean them toward needing a coping strategy. This may be genetic which I personally doubt, more likely to be handed down learned behaviours. Any strategy still needs to be learnt from somewhere. This also means that they can therefore learn new strategies. The Smoking habit as I can see is entirely environmental. This means that people are more likely to become smokers if they are in regular contact with smokers or have been subjected to tobacco marketing. As we deduced before people are not born smoking tobacco. People are more likely to become smokers if their parents smoke or their friends or hero’s smoke. Which reminds me of a story that the Famous psychologist and renowned hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson told about his son Bert.
Bert had six boys and one girl and was concerned about them taking up smoking, drinking drugs and so on. So from an early age he would show them harmless but interesting looking stuff, like axle grease. When the kids asked about it, he’d say “why don’t you take a taste? Or he would take a pretty bottle.” Why don’t you smell it” when it contained ammonia which smells awful. Every one of his kids learned to be very worried about what they put into their mouths. It was a good way to learn as children learn by experience.
There is no genetic link either. According to the theory of evolution genes take thousands of years to mutate due to environmental changes. Not only that but evolution also states that the strongest survive. Regular smokers will ensure that they are not the strongest

Old Habits die hard?

As we said before if a smoker actually thinks and believes it’s hard to stop the smoking habit then they really will make it hard on themselves it’s the old self fulfilling prophecy routine. However nothing could be further from the real truth because it really is easy to become a non smoker as the thousands of former smokers who found stopping easy will testify. They really don’t have anything different physically about their brains the only difference they have is their belief system. They really did believe that it would be easy to become a non smoker. The only habits that actually do die hard are habit that people don’t want to stop and habits that preserve you life. Like stopping at the side of a busy road before you cross. Unless you really want to die it would be impossible for you to walk toward a busy road blindfolded and keep on walking. The only time when your brain would let you do this is if you are being pursued by something that was going to cause you more harm.

All other habits are easy to stop. Everybody stops hundreds of habits throughout their life. People usually don’t carry on with the habit of drinking breast milk, people don’t usually need help going to the bathroom, we don’t generally cry when we don’t get what we want, we eventually stop going to school, we get used to not being cooked and cleaned for, eventually children leave home, our whole lives are filled with stopping old habits and starting new ones without any fuss. Stopping smoking is probably one of the only habits that smokers are told continuously will be hard. If we were told that leaving home and looking after yourself is going to be really hard, from the time we started school, there would be a world full of Mummies boys and girls. Habits don’t die hard unless you want them to. There is some really good evidence to show that even hard drugs like heroin for example can be easy to quit which may sound controversial. Again we continually hear how hard getting off these substances will be. But here’s the thing. During the Vietnam war a large percentage of young soldiers were using heroin to help them cope with the appalling situation that they were in. The majority of these never used it again when then returned Home. Many people who go to hospital have morphine administered for pain control on leaving most never need it again.

Assuming a person actually wants to stop smoking then all they really need to do is to stop, focus on what they want and develop new coping strategies for handling stressful situations or moments of temptation. If these new strategies are repeated constantly they will become just as much a habit as the old habit of smoking as the brain learns by repetition. Of course this sound s easy but as a former smoker I know that it really wasn’t as hard to stop smoking as I thought it was going to be.

How can hypnosis and NLP help in becoming a non smoker.

These methods help a person to access and strengthen the part of them that wants to stop smoking and also to help the person gain new strategies that will fulfil the same purpose equally if not better than the cigarettes. As I said before there are many ways to get good feelings. Hypnosis combined with NLP can help the person to select appropriate new feelings and strategies that the part of them that caused the smoking can be happy with. It should be understood that all these therapies are merely helping the person make the right choices and people need to believe that they can be helped. Only yesterday I had a client who was convinced that he could never stop smoking after trying every other method you could name including hypnotherapy. In seven minutes he couldn’t even pick up the packet and I quote, “ I feel like I don’t know how to smoke”, I even put one in his hand and said “go on you know you want it” he couldn’t care less he could only see himself as a non smoker! Now that was pretty dramatic after seven minutes but by no means unique.

If people are having trouble stopping smoking the best way to help them is to change the way they think , people do it all the time. Can you remember the last time you changed your mind? How did you do that? Find out how you did it and use the same process for changing what you believe about stopping smoking. You could do that on your own but it’s a lot easier with help. This is what we do with our therapies and there is not a pointed hat or a pocket watch in sight. No ladies balancing between two chairs by their heads and feet, stiff as a plank, no weird spirally eyes, just somebody showing you how to easily change your mind. Of course there are those who are completely set in their ways and not open to anything out of the ordinary and not willing to try anything they don’t believe in, not even willing to change their thinking. That’s their choice and I wish them luck. We are not here to force people into things we help people who want to be helped and we love doing it. This reminds me of another story. My friends five year son was kissing him good night. The boy said, “Daddy why do you smoke, it makes you smell really bad”, my friend said, “Because I made a mistake when I was a lad and now I can’t stop.” The boy said, “What would happen if you did stop?” My friend said, “I would be a grumpy old man”, “the boy said you already are a grumpy old man, grumpy old men smoke, I know because Mr Appleyard two doors down smokes and he’s very grumpy.” My friend said “Mr Appleyard is only grumpy because his wife keeps nagging him to stop smoking.” What would happen if he did stop smoking“? Replied the boy. Well I suppose his wife would stop nagging him about it” replied my friend. “So then he wouldn’t need to be grumpy anymore.” Said the boy. “That’s right” said my friend “now go to sleep” … The little lad said, “You’re not really grumpy Daddy… I think you need a dummy like I used to have…. I got grumpy when Mummy took that away now I just suck my thumb instead. Don’t tell Mummy.” “what would happen if you didn’t suck your thumb” Said my friend , “ after a think the boy replied “nothing, what would really happen if you didn’t smoke” replied the boy , “nothing” replied my friend he hasn’t smoked since. He used to smoke forty a day. He didn’t get grumpy either. His son helped him change his mind ……at it worked, he wasn’t even thinking about stopping at the time.

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