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.
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