Jan
4
Posted in
This page pulls together my most useful posts and other information and links about smoking and how to stop smoking. As a hypnotherapist and health coach, I see a lot of people who want to quit smoking cigarettes, and I’ve studied the topic and become a bit of a stop smoking expert.
I have a series of videos in which I interview a client whom I helped to quit smoking (How to Get Unstuck), and she makes a great point: Stopping smoking is not just the best change you can make for your health. It’s a personal development issue. Quitting smoking is about taking back control of your life. It’s not just a medical issue, it’s an emotional issue too, as my article Smoking and anger management explores.
Not only anger, but also anxiety and depression are linked to smoking. In fact, one study found that people who smoke tend to have reduced quality of life. But smoking is widely used for stress management, creating a vicious cycle. (Smokers also sleep less soundly and become increasingly socially isolated, both of which are harmful to general and mental health). Even secondhand smoke can be linked to depression.
What’s more, every year, hundreds of thousands of people fail to stop smoking in my small country alone – millions worldwide. Help to quit smoking is badly needed.
So I’ve now released a free stop smoking ebook which is also part of an affordable online course for people who want help to stop smoking. The course is called Smokefree Life, and you can get it through that link, for about the cost of a couple of packs of cigarettes.
As well as material drawn from the posts and links I’ve set out below, it includes other useful quit-smoking methods, tools, tips and techniques, 5 relaxing hypnotherapy audio tracks and some of my best advice on stress management and motivation.
How nicotine works
When you smoke a cigarette, nicotine is absorbed through your lungs into your bloodstream and reaches your brain. (Most of the poisons in cigarettes are there to help it get to your brain more quickly.) In the brain, it stimulates receptors which directly affect the dopamine system, which is your motivation and reward system. This is one reason it’s so hard for many people to stop smoking cigarettes, because they fool your brain into wanting them (even if you don’t like them). How Stuff Works has an excellent summary of the whole process.
Ways to quit smoking
Smoking is a complex behaviour, and there is not just one method to stop smoking. Controversy rages, of course, over the best stop-smoking method: is it drugs, behavioural counselling, hypnosis? Despite the extreme positions you’ll find on all of those ways to stop smoking, there is evidence for all of them, and none of them is a magic bullet. Quit Smoking Methods sets out to list them all (with user contributions, some of them bizarre). Here are the ones I know most about.
Nicotine Replacement Therapy
I used to be opposed to NRT, but I’ve now changed my mind on nicotine replacement therapy. Like every other treatment, it doesn’t work for everyone quitting smoking, and it needs to be provided by someone who knows what they’re doing, and used correctly, if it’s going to be effective. But, with those disclaimers, I don’t believe it’s harmful and I do believe it’s helpful. I give it to my clients if it’s appropriate for their situation, based on a standard test that’s also in my ebook How to Stop Smoking (I’m authorised to give out NRT subsidy cards).
(For an alternative view claiming that NRT is harmful, see Ginzel et al from the Journal of Health Psychology, 2007.)
Stop-Smoking Drugs
Other drugs, such as varenicline (Chantix or Champix), are sometimes prescribed by doctors to help in stopping smoking. Among my most popular blog posts are two questioning the effectiveness and safety of varenicline: Just say no to stop-smoking drugs and more bad publicity for Chantix/Champix. The advice I hear is that (like anything else) it doesn’t work for everyone, but the people it does work for it works for really quickly. But it can have bad side effects, like any drug that messes about with your brain chemistry. Sounds like a last-resort option to me.
Hypnosis to Quit Smoking
As a Registered Hypnotherapist I’m obviously interested in helping people quit smoking with hypnosis. But does it work? (People ask me that all the time.) I go into the evidence in several articles here:
- News flash: Hypnosis isn’t magic (but it can help you stop smoking) reviews a 1992 study which surveyed a number of scientific studies and concluded that hypnosis was one of the more effective methods available. That study has been put under question for the methodology of some of the trials, though.
- Further study on hypnotherapy for smoking looks at a more recent study, in 2007, which supported quit-smoking hypnosis. Again, though, the study was flawed.
- In Why it’s hard to find good studies on hypnotherapy for smoking, I talk about how methods which are suitable for testing drugs are not as suitable for testing a non-drug method.
- This leads in turn to organisations such as Action on Smoking and Health raising questions about hypnotherapy, as I discuss in ASH “concerns” about hypnotherapy for smoking cessation.
- But in Why I still use hypnosis for smoking cessation, I go in depth through a study claimed by the New Zealand Ministry of Health to provide “evidence that hypnosis does not improve long-term abstinence rates over any intervention providing the same amount of time and attention to the participant”, and show why that negative claim is incorrect.
- Finally, I look at a study called Hypnosis for smoking cessation: A randomized trial, which describes an excellent intervention that is very similar to what I do, and in a well-constructed experiment produced good support for the idea that you can stop smoking with hypnosis.
Support from others
Support from other people is very important if you want to stop smoking cigarettes. Some people are even using social media to help them quit smoking.
How to quit smoking
So, you might be asking, can you help me quit smoking? I’m glad you asked.
Start out with 10 tips to stop smoking and Dealing with recovery effects from smoking. (“Recovery effects” are also known as withdrawal symptoms.) They’re just two of my free online resources to stop smoking.
If you find you need more help, though, take a look at my free stop-smoking ebook, How to Stop Smoking, and my stop smoking online course, Smokefree Life. I’ve deliberately kept the course very affordable so that as many people as possible can get stop-smoking help (if I made it free, though, you wouldn’t have as much motivation to complete it, so I do charge something). A quit-smoking ebook, a simple, research-based method to quit smoking, a self-check, a quit plan template, and 5 hypnotherapy audio recordings in MP3 format are all included, and it covers questions that a lot of people have such as how to quit smoking without gaining weight, quit smoking withdrawal symptoms and the benefits of giving up smoking. Click here to find out more.
Technorati Tags: stop smoking, quit smoking, how to stop smoking, smoking cessation
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Aug
3
I have a Thing about control.
 photo credit: Jesse757
Not about controlling other people. (In fact, I kind of have a Thing about not controlling other people, because I hate other people trying to control me.) And not even so much about being in control of what’s happening around me, because I figured out early on that that wasn’t realistic.
My Thing is about being in control of myself.
This is why I’ve never got really drunk, for example, and in fact why I hardly ever drink at all.
I realise I’m unusual in this – at least, in how much I’m like this. But what it does is it gives me a lot of empathy for people who feel out of control, and a powerful motivation to learn techniques for getting back in control.
Which is why I do what I do. I work with people, typically stressed, busy people, who feel that their thoughts, emotions and behaviours aren’t completely under their control and who are increasingly unhappy about that. And I help them to regain that sense of control, so that they can decide on the direction of their lives and turn their attention to living their best life without being held back.
In my case, the out-of-controlness in my life has mainly been my emotions. (For other people it’s more thoughts or behaviour, but it’s all linked together somewhere down in there.) In particular, I went through an experience of several years in which I felt very out of control of my emotions.
I did my master’s degree in one year, which the university I attended let you do in that particular field, and I was involved in a lot of other things that year as well. In retrospect, I was doing too much – and it wore me down and made me emotionally vulnerable.
I fell in love, and it wasn’t reciprocated, but I had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find that out for a long time, and then I kept hoping, and had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find out again for a long time that the answer was still no, and in the meantime I’d started training for something that I wasn’t suited for or any good at, and living with too many other people, and members of my close family, in another country, were ill, and I was extremely short of money and then I got ill (from the stress), and there were times I wanted to hurl plates at my housemates I was so angry, and there were times I wanted to kill myself I was so depressed, and I started to have panic attacks whenever I was in a crowd, and the upshot was that I couldn’t work full-time for several years and carried the hurt and bitterness for many more years.
So I learned a lot about stress.
And I learned a lot, over the years that followed, about personal development and about how people work, because I wanted to understand myself and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t go down that path again.
And finally I discovered hypnotherapy. And once I figured out that it wasn’t about someone else controlling you, but about you having more control over yourself, I realised that this was what I’d been looking for.
Around the same time I started learning to meditate, which is another path to self-control. In the form I practice it, it’s about letting go of superficial thoughts (which include emotions) and allowing your true self to arise.
One day it was my turn to lead our little meditation group, and nobody else happened to turn up. So I was sitting by myself in an empty building, and fear came to visit, because I also have a Thing about being alone which is deeper and more buried than the control thing.
So I let fear go, and fear came, and I let fear go, and after about 20 minutes the timer went off and that was OK. Nothing terrible had happened because fear had come.
And the following weekend I went to a hypnotherapy conference and was more confident and gregarious than I’d ever been in my life.
photo credit: Jeremy Burgin
So my point, and I do have one, is this: If you’re feeling out of control I can completely relate to that. I mean, if I tell you I can control my skin temperature and stop my shaving cuts from bleeding and alter my heartbeat (all of which is true), it sounds like I have some kind of superpower and that I’m totally on top of things. But the reason I can do that stuff (which is a lot easier than it sounds, and also a lot less useful) is that I wanted to learn how to be in control of more important things, like fear and anger and sadness. And stress.
But enough about me. What’s your stress story? I realise you might not want to tell it publicly, so I’ve put a form below that posts, anonymously, to a place that only I will see. I look at all the responses, and I keep them in mind in everything I do, because I want to help other people feel in control of their stress too.
Jul
13
“Eating your own dog food” is the rather disgusting expression the technology industry uses to mean using your own product.
Lately, I’ve been working on what was originally a course on emotions. (It’s now split into a free course on Simple Stress Management Techniques and another, yet-to-be-announced product). Ever since I’ve been working on it, I’ve been dealing with emotional issues in my own life. I thought I’d tell you a little about how that’s been going.
The Case of the Manic Mini
photo credit: christian.senger
I was driving along the road, a little distracted, when a car coming in the other direction cheekily turned across in front of me to go into a side road. Now, I have a bad habit when people do that. I don’t slow down much, so that I can make the point “You really didn’t have room to do that maneuver, hold back a bit in future”. I don’t actually ram into them, of course, or do anything unsafe, but I don’t slow all the way down either.
Next thing I know, out of the same side road, turning across in front of me to go in the other direction, comes a Mini – which definitely shouldn’t have tried that move. I stamped on the brake and swerved and barely missed it.
It shook me up. I’ve been in a few car crashes over the years (most of them not my fault, by the way), and a near miss like that scares me. At one time it would have taken me a good hour or so to calm myself down.
I used a technique that’s in my Simple Stress Management Techniques course – the Welcoming Practice – and by the time I reached my destination a couple of minutes later I was fine.
The Case of the Depressing Day Job
I don’t yet do hypnotherapy full time, though I’m working hard on changing that. I have a day job to help pay the bills. It’s not been going well just lately, and I found for a while that when I was driving to work I’d start feeling down.
When the depressed feeling started, I’d immediately apply a technique of my own invention, which I call the Gut Bump. (It’s in the Simple Stress Management Techniques course.) It’s an immediate mood-lifting technique which involves turning the sinking feeling in your stomach upside-down with a bit of imagination.
It dealt with the sad feelings quite effectively. And I didn’t have to eat, drink or otherwise consume any substances to feel better.
I’ve been using a few other techniques to deal with the stress of the day job, too – the Welcoming Practice and anchoring, for example. They’re in the course too.
The Case of the Youthful Screw-Up
I’ve alluded a few times to a bad experience I had in my early 20s – 20 years ago as I write, in fact. It was largely down to me being clueless, though the fact that the other people around me were also clueless prolonged it and helped it to get worse than it otherwise would have. I won’t go into the grim details, but suffice to say that I became very stressed and very depressed and suffered significant emotional losses. Some things that were very important to me turned out to be impossible, and I took that very hard.
I’ve been aware at various times over the years that some of that hurt had remained with me, and though I’d told myself repeatedly that it was time to get past it, I never completely did.
Until this year. A couple of months back I accidentally came across a way that I could get back in touch with someone peripherally involved in the original mess. At the time, I didn’t feel I could do that, which reminded me that there was still a part of me holding on to the old pain.
One night, I was thinking about the situation and decided to use a trauma-releasing technique which the famous stage hypnotist Andrew Newton recently invented. I learned it from him earlier this year, so it was fresh in my mind. (It’ll be in the advanced version of the course.)
It took two repetitions, maybe 10 minutes or a little more. And after 20 years, the trauma was finally dealt with.
I contacted my old friend.
This Stuff Works
I could say more about how I’ve been dealing with stress, calming myself down, and generally navigating choppy emotional waters lately, but I think three stories are enough to make the point. This stuff works. I don’t just teach it, I use it myself on a near-daily basis.
Now it’s your turn.
Technorati Tags: stress, stress management, personal development, anxiety, depression, emotions, hypnotherapy
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