Jan
4
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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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Jun
8
It’s Southern Hemisphere winter now, and the nights are longer and colder and the days are shorter and darker. There are a lot of stressed people around, trying to squeeze too much day out of too little energy. And one of the strategies they’re using, of course, is to drink a lot of coffee.
 photo credit: SuperFantastic
I’ve never been a coffee drinker. I’m one of those rare people who doesn’t even like the smell of coffee, so the current fashion for drinking fancy coffees has passed me by completely. Nor do I like substances that change my mental state. I prefer to do that for myself.
So what do I do when I want to be more alert? How can I possibly get through a busy day without a cup of coffee?
Before I answer that, I’d like to discuss the findings of a study just published in Neuropsychopharmacology by Peter J. Rogers and colleagues. What they did was take 162 people who consumed little or no caffeine and 217 people who were medium/high caffeine consumers. They told them not to consume caffeine for 16 hours, and then gave them either two doses of caffeine 90 minutes apart, or two doses of a neutral placebo.
The participants gave a self-rating of anxiety, alertness and headache before and after the first dose and after the second dose.
Before I discuss the results, let’s briefly talk about how caffeine works. The study refers to it as an “adenosine A1 and A2A receptor antagonist”, which just means that it’s about the same shape as a signalling chemical in your brain called adenosine, and it can fit into the receptors for adenosine and block adenosine itself from connecting there and giving the brain its signal. And what adenosine signals is that you’re getting tired. It’s a product of processes in your body which lead to fatigue.
So caffeine blocks off the signal from your body to your brain that tells you you’re getting tired. It doesn’t give you any extra energy; it just hides from you the fact that you’re running low. It’s a bit like disconnecting the lead from your fuel tank to your fuel gauge. It doesn’t give you more fuel. It just prevents you from realising that you don’t have much left.
photo credit: chego101
Back to the results of the study. The scientists already knew that a particular genetic variation in the receptors for adenosine (the signalling chemical I just mentioned) increases the anxiety-producing side effect of caffeine. What the scientists were actually trying to find out was whether this genetic factor also affected the amount of caffeine people would habitually drink, and whether drinking it regularly would reduce the anxiety-producing effect.
What they discovered was that drinking more caffeine reduced the anxiety effect for everyone, regardless of genetics (the brain presumably adjusts itself after a while). But it’s their other conclusion that is receiving press coverage. They found no increase in alertness from caffeine. The no-or-low consumption group didn’t become more alert, and the medium-to-high group went from being less alert because of caffeine withdrawal effects to being as alert as they would have been if they hadn’t been coffee drinkers.
So, let’s sum up. Caffeine isn’t increasing your energy, it’s just hiding from you the fact that you’re low on energy – disconnecting your mind from your body, which in my personal view is one of the biggest problems of the modern West, but I’ll forcibly restrain myself from that rant for now. Ahem.
It’s not increasing your energy, and it’s not increasing your alertness. It only feels like it’s increasing your alertness because the withdrawal symptoms make you less alert, and having the caffeine takes you back to where you would have been without it.
So “caffeine to wake you up and give you more energy and alertness” is a big con, an illusion. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons why people drink it – for the taste, for the social connection, for the break, even for the warmth. But if you’re drinking coffee (or tea) for increased energy and alertness, the news is all bad.
I said I’d tell you what I do instead, didn’t I? I’ve just started a new practice in the mornings. What I do is set my alarm a little bit earlier, and spend 10 minutes doing a concentration meditation. All I do is use my simple meditation method, but tweak it by focussing strongly on the word that I say with each outbreath – paying attention to it, and returning to it if I find my mind wandering off at all.
This wakes my mind up and focusses it. Then throughout the day, and especially at the end of the day, I practice letting go of tension, stress and anxiety – all the things that eat my energy if I let them. The answer to “I don’t have enough energy” isn’t “let’s pretend I do” but “what can I do to waste less?”
photo credit: JohnSeb
I don’t have time to go into the letting-go techniques in depth here, but there’s a lot more in my upcoming Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit. By following that link I just gave you, you can get in on my special Beat The Rush List – meaning you’ll be among the first to know when it’s available and you’ll be eligible for a substantial discount before it gets released to the general public. It’s fashionable to compare the price of things to cups of coffee – if you’re on the Beat The Rush list, the price of the Toolkit will be not very many cups of coffee at all.
Technorati Tags: caffeine, coffee, energy, alertness, concentration, meditation, anxiety
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Aug
11
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m reading Candace Pert’s fascinating book Molecules of Emotion at the moment, and her theory of the “bodymind” as one integrated, dynamic network is seizing my imagination. She’s a prominent scientist who has worked mostly on peptides, the “molecules of emotion” of her title, which are the means of communication between a number of bodymind systems.
photo credit: net_efekt
Peptides are made up of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. There are a number of different amino acids, but there are 8 in particular that we can’t make for ourselves out of other amino acids, and we have to take these in through our food. They do get recycled, and if our diet is inadequate we can sometimes get them from the proteins that make up much of our body’s structure, but ultimately we have to eat them or we won’t have enough.
Because the peptides (and other messenger molecules which keep the body’s systems coordinated) are made from them, a lack of one of these essential amino acids is clearly a problem. Normally this doesn’t occur, of course, since they are common enough that any reasonably normal diet should contain all of them in sufficient quantity. Vegetarians have to be careful, though, and there are some subtleties to be aware of.
photo credit: Tina Keller
As an example, I’ll start with tryptophan, which I came across when researching my Sleeper’s Checklist. Tryptophan is the precursor to the neurotransmitter serotonin and the neurohormone melatonin. Melatonin is thought to be involved in regulating the sleep-wake cycle, while serotonin is well known for its role in mood regulation. Antidepressant drugs apparently relieve depression by affecting the levels of serotonin available in the brain. The exact reason why this relieves depression (and why the antidepressant effects take a couple of weeks to kick in, even though the effect on serotonin is very rapid) is not yet fully understood.
Serotonin is also important in the digestive system for regulating the movement of the intestines, and in fact about 8 or 9 times as much serotonin is found in the digestive system as in the brain. In the brain, it modulates appetite, sexual desire, mood, anger and sleep, among other behaviours and drives. A Swedish study has even suggested a correlation between the density of a particular kind of serotonin receptor in the brain and the likelihood of having had a religious experience.
photo credit: h.koppdelaney
Since serotonin is made from tryptophan, and we can’t make tryptophan, it’s important to have adequate levels of tryptophan intake in our diet – but it’s not just that simple (things seldom are when neurotransmitters are involved). Two other amino acids, phenylalanine and leucine, “compete” with tryptophan to be transported into the brain across the protective membrane which surrounds it (the blood-brain barrier), so not just the absolute amount, but also the ratio, of tryptophan to these other amino acids is important. Also, in some conditions such as lactose intolerance (difficulty digesting dairy products) or fructose malabsorption, tryptophan is not properly absorbed by the gut. Interestingly, fructose malabsorption has been linked to depression.
photo credit: steffenz
So what foods help balance the books for tryptophan? Bananas, dates, pineapples, plums and nuts are mentioned in one article on nutrition, depression and sleep. However, an editorial in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience tends to minimize the contribution of diet to serotonin levels, though it does note some interesting correlations between levels of American corn or maize consumption and homicide rates in countries around the world (corn being relatively low in tryptophan). That article places more stress on changes in thinking, exercise, and exposure to light as non-drug means of raising serotonin levels (and I’ll talk about those more in future posts).
Not just serotonin levels, but the rate of serotonin turnover, seem to be significant in relation to violent behaviour and suicide. Low serotonin turnover, for reasons as yet not understood, correlates with high rates of these behaviours. So it isn’t just how much you have, but how long you’ve had it, apparently.
I was recently reading about another study correlating consumption low-tryptophan foods with aggression, not at a population level but in individuals. Moeller et al. (Tryptophan depletion and aggressive responding in healthy males, published in Psychopharmacology) found in 1996 that healthy young men, after 24 hours of a low-tryptophan diet and having been given a tryptophan-free amino acid mixture, responded significantly more aggressively a few hours afterwards than the same subjects under control conditions. So feeding aggressive or suicidal people on, for example, Diet Coke and corn chips (high in phenylalanine, low in tryptophan) seems like it would be a bad idea.
I’m not going to do the Usual Internet Thing and make a flat-out statement about how eating such-and-such a food will work a miraculous change in your mood because of its tryptophan content, though. The mechanisms are more complex than that. Diet does contribute to mood, and so eating a well-balanced diet that is well adapted for your particular biochemistry and other circumstances is an important contribution to keeping your bodymind in good order, but it’s just not as simple as eating more tryptophan-containing foods in order to feel better.
For further information, I suggest Nutritiondata.com and the World’s Healthiest Foods website, two excellent sources of information about food and health. (Those links lead to pages directly relevant to tryptophan.)
Technorati Tags: nutrition, tryptophan, serotonin, mood
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