Resolution Madness

THE HARDEST TIME TO QUIT!

It’s that time of the year again when many smokers who want to give up smoking choose to do the deed and banish the evil weed. We ask, is this the best time to do it?
Statistically 50% of New Year’s resolutions have been broken by the end of the first week. There is some very sound reasoning why this is the case and particularly with smoking. According to government figures only around 7% of smokers who rely on willpower will succeed in quitting on the first attempt. New Year’s Day is perceived by many to be a time to make a fresh start or turn over a new leaf, but in actual fact it’s quite probably the hardest time to quit smoking.

By the last week in December the days are at their shortest and cases of Seasonally affected Disorder (SAD) are coming to a peak and the cold is starting to bite. Christmas is a welcome fillip to the gloom with celebrations and indulgence being the order of the day. However as the year draws to a close, the festivities are over the decorations come down and the unwelcome credit card statement drops on the door mat, merriment can in some turn into less uplifting mood states. Add that to the still long dark nights at the coldest time of the year, it’s a recipe for a dose misery or worse a bout of depression. This is the time of the year when any coping strategies (tobacco, alcohol etc) would be most needed by those who have adopted these behaviours. Hardly the best time to consider quitting! However as stopping smoking is almost certainly the single best thing a smoker can do for their health, stopping at any time is most certainly a positive step. I recommend that should you decide that this is the time when you’re going to quit smoking then you really need the best advice about the easiest way to go about it. One thing is for sure if you rely on willpower alone then unless you now how to use it effectively, statistically there is around a 93% failure rate. In my book and CD I show you how to use your willpower effectively which alone can increase your willpower up to five times. This even without any other intervention would give you a statistical chance of success of around 35%, nearly double the success rate of the NHS stop smoking service!
You need not only get the best advice about how to use your willpower but also new coping strategies which can be installed using effective hypnotic intervention and NLP.( the change technique that is used by mind game TV personalities. These techniques are highly effective and work) All this gives you a far higher chance of success.

To get a copy of my Book and CD, leave your details in my secure comments section and I'll attach them in an email to you. Your details will not be on view as my comments section is regulated . If you really want to quit smoking now, do yourself a favour and make it easy on yourself, use an effective method!

Have a very happy new year....

Nigel.

You are being conned by cigerette producers

Are you addicted to nicotine?

Most smokers believe that they are and if you are one of these then let me ask you another question. If you were not addicted to nicotine would it be easy for you to stop? The belief that nicotine is a very addictive chemical is a common one and fuelled partly by the government and partly by the tobacco manufacturers. I believe they want you to think this. I totally disagree with this notion! Before you say ‘well I am addicted and you can say what you like’ just listen to my reasoning. In America a few years ago a Large Law firm commissioned a study to find out whether nicotine was an addictive chemical. They were taking a large cigarette producer to court on behalf of clients with tobacco related diseases They commissioned the leading experts in the field of chemical addictions and these experts produced a 600-page report. None of them said categorically that nicotine was an addictive chemical! Kind of interesting eh? As a therapist I look at people from a behavioural point of view, so if I want to find out if something is addictive I compare it with a proven addiction. So let’s take heroin, (generally accepted as a strongly addictive chemical) as an example. An average Heroine Addict suffers terrible physical withdrawal symptoms, (sweats, shakes, heart palpitations, vomiting, nausea, hallucinations and more). Now when was the last time you stopped smoking and suffered such horrible physical symptoms? You might get grumpy and lose your temper more easily you might even over eat but you don’t get such horrible symptoms. Also your average heroine addict cannot make it through the night without their body waking them up for more heroine. The only heroine addicts that get full nights sleep are also alcoholics (because the Alcohol numbs their brain). The only trouble being that when they get up in the morning they have to take all of the Heroine that they would have taken during the night just to get out of bed! Now When was the last time that you had to smoke all the cigarettes that you would have smoked if you were awake all night? It never happens. You might wake up and smoke one or two but you don’t have to smoke all those that you would have smoked if you were awake. So why do you only want a cigarette when you’re awake? Because if you were an addict that means your body requires the chemical, so why does it only want it when you’re awake?

Now here’s the low-down, the proof that what I’m saying is true. Have you ever tried to stop using Nicotine replacement therapy or NRT? (Patches Gums lozenges) These all contain huge amounts of Nicotine. The average regular strength cigarette contains around 1 milligram of Nicotine, (low tar and ultra lights even less), you can check if you like by looking at the box. Nicotine replacement treatments vary in the quantity of nicotine they supply your body with and contain up to114 milligrams! Now That is a massive dose, that's more nicotine than 2o boxes cigarettes! And you use the same amount every day. For at least six weeks! That’s 210 boxes of twenty. Now if nicotine was such an addictive chemical why don’t you get addicted to patches, I've never seen a private patient asking for help getting off patches. Call me cynical but where do you think the patch manufacturers get their nicotine? Do you think it could be the tobacco manufacturers?

Now One of the ‘traditional’ ways the experts get a heroine addict off the heroine is to give them a replacement drug called methadone (very similar to heroine in nature). This is more safely available at special clinics set up for the purpose. The idea being to gradually wean the addict off this replacement. These same experts are saying ‘one of the ways were going to get you off the cigarettes is to give you a patch that contains more nicotine than you’ve ever had in your entire life’! That’s like saying to a heroine addict ‘have some more heroine’. That really is crazy. And why are there no clinics to wean you of the patches? And what’s even crazier is that the government has been funding nicotine replacement therapy with millions of pounds every year! Now here’s the thing, according to the governments own statistics, if you’re trying to give up smoking using willpower alone then around 6% of those trying will succeed. Of the people trying to stop using the nicotine gums then around 10% of those trying will succeed. Of the people trying to stop using nicotine patches then around 16% of those trying will succeed. What that really means is that at least 84% of people trying to stop smoking using Nicotine replacement DON’T SUCCEED! Which means it doesn’t work! Because it’s not a nicotine addiction! The people who managed to stop using NRT (16%) only did so because they were convinced that it works, it became a self fulfilling prophecy, commonly known as the placebo effect. This is an effect caused by the belief that something is going to work irrespective of the actual content. So basically if you really think something will work then it will !

Why smoking makes you feel good

That's of course if it still does!

Smoking is a coping strategy. Every time you feel stressed or bored, or hungry, or any negative feeling the unconscious will try to make you feel better. That's it's job.... cast your mind back to the first ciggie that you ever had... Was it because all of your peers were smoking and you felt left out? Cos if it was, that is why you smoke. Feeling left out is the worst thing in the world, especially during your formative years. Fitting in is the best feeling in the world at that time. The cigarette then gets linked via the process of anchoring, ( chaining certain feelings to certain things), to that best feeling. Fatal... from that moment on your unconscious has an easy root to a good feeling. You have been conditioned essentially like sheep! Now it might not have been your peers, it might have been your parents who smoked, or an elder brother or a sexual partner, whatever, the mechanism is the same. Something about the actual act of smoking linked you to a pleasurable experience. IT WAS NOT THE NICOTINE. Nicotine addiction is a myth A persons first cigarette always make them feel physically unwell, a human does not need nicotine at all. In fact every time you have nicotine in your body your unconscious is doing it's damnedest to get rid of it, even if you 'Want to smoke and have no intention of quitting!!

If you want to quit then all you have to do is find some other convenient healthy activity that makes you feel really good, chain some type of harmless action to that activity, then every time you feel bad, fire off that action, or every time you would 'normally' smoke fire off that action. this really does work. Some smoking cessation specialists utilise this in their clients to brilliant effect.

Quitting smoking therefor is for all intents and purposes much easier that the drug companies and health organisations would have you believe.

Are drugs really the answer for quitters

The Logic seems plausible; using chemicals to interfere with the brains nicotine habituated receptors. and the percentage of people still quit after six months has increased but where is this leading us?

More and more smokers are being prescribed the 'wonder quit drug' Champix or one of it's many sister drugs, but ultimately the habit will still need to be broken and taking drugs to help with the initial quit is in my view still akin to sweeping the dirt under the carpet. And for what my opinion is worth I am not convinced that there has been nearly enough testing of this group of chemicals and analysis of the side effects. My feeling is that all these drugs will be proved more harm than good. Its only a few months ago that the government has started to back pedal about the 'right category' for cannabis having discovered that it can cause psychosis. Common sense will tell you that replacing one drug with another cannot be the way forward.

The psychological effects of habit breaking are what essentially makes quitting difficult for around half of people who quit. Understanding the psychology of smoking is the real secret to quitting, don't believe the hullabaloo about nicotine addiction, it's over egged hype, mooted by the tobacco companies and government health organisation to frighten people into using there products. Nicotine is gone entirely from your body after 48 hrs. Stopping smoking is for all intents and purposes no more difficult than stopping going to school or stopping biting your nails. If you go about it in the right way, utilising a positive outcome as your reference, illicit a new healthy coping strategy,and eliminating negative harmful self talk and visualisation, then it is actually ridiculously easy to quit. Obviously you will need some kind of help toward these ends and there is plenty of help available. Here I am bound of course to mention my product ...
'1-2-Free', which you can find out about by clicking the words or going via my link buddies. But there are lots of other effective programmes to choose from.

Smokers who want to quit do need help finding out how to quit without drugs and without traditional side effects. My system uses a variety of technologies proven in private treatment based upon Hypnosis and NLP (the relatively new science of change using language and representational systems). A crude form of which was used by The Koreans to psychologically trick and convince their American Prisoners of War to become communists and Anti American, without any torture or truth drugs. They just got them to change the way they saw themselves using simple suggestions and then got their fellow prisoners to see them differently but utilising what they had said... Very simple But highly effective.