243 Less Smokers in June

Last month, a whopping 243 more people turned to Positive Change Hypnosis to help them kick their smoking habit.  And while we are very proud to be a part of their success story, we are even more proud of the people who actually did the quitting.

Changing your life is not the difficult part, it’s the part of getting started that seems to give most folks the problem.  Lot’s of people talk about or dream about changing their lives.  However, when it comes to putting ideas or words into action, very few seem to be able to do so. 

Therefore, we wanted to commend all of you who took control of your situation and made the move to better your life.  Congratulations!

Positive Change Hypnosis

A Few Stop Smoking Tips...

If you have attempted to kick your smoking habit as part of you New Years resolution, here are a few quick tips to help keep you on track.

Cessation Time Distortion - A recent study found that nicotine cessation causes significant time distortion. Although no subconsciously triggered crave episode will last longer than three minutes, to a quitter the minutes can feel like hours. Keep a clock or watch handy to maintain honest perspective of time because the craving will pass after 3 minutes.

One crave coping technique is to practice slow deep breathing while clearing your mind of all needless chatter by focusing on your favorite person, place or thing. Another is to say your ABCs while associating each letter with your favorite food, person or place. For example, "A" is for grandma's hot apple pie, and so on.

Measuring Victory - Forget about quitting "forever." Like attempting the seemingly impossible task of eating an entire elephant, it's the biggest psychological bite imaginable. Instead, work hard at adopting a realistic victory yardstick that celebrates freedom an hour, challenge and day at a time. If you insist on seeing success only in terms of quitting forever then you will never truly reach your goal.

The Law of Addiction - "Administration of a drug to an addict will cause re-establishment of chemical dependence upon the addictive substance at the old level of use or greater." So simply put, just one puff of nicotine and all your hard work is down the drain. Adherence to just one rule guarantees success to all ... Never Take Another Puff.

Nicotine rewired your brain, growing millions of nicotinic receptors in eleven different regions. Although your mind's nicotine induced dopamine/adrenaline intoxication is an alert high, your chemical dependency is every bit as real and permanent as alcoholism. Treating a true addiction as though it were some nasty little habit is a recipe for relapse. There is no such thing as just one puff. Nicotine dependency recovery truly is an all or nothing proposition.

Avoid All Crutches - A crutch is any form of quitting reliance that you lean upon so heavily in supporting recovery that if quickly removed would likely result in relapse (a person, product, service or activity). If you feel the need to lean upon a quitting buddy for example, be sure that your buddy is either a sturdy long-time ex-smoker or a never-smoker.

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Hypnosis – Changing our thinking

Did you know…
An idea, once accepted, will remain firmly in place until it is replaced by another. For example, up until the fifteenth century, people believed that the earth was flat. When it was proved that the earth was a globe, the people of that time simply accepted this new fact, replacing the old belief with the new one.

And that is the basis of hypnosis. It changes your way of thinking about something so that you actions will automatically follow. You no longer smoke because you are no longer thinking like a smoker. Or you naturally lose weight because your eating habits have changes.

Isn’t time to start giving your mind credit for what it is capable of accomplishing?

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Quitting smoking is easy – I’ve done it a million times!

Although there is a sense of humor to the title of this article, the sad reality is that for many people who smoke and have tried to quit, it rings very true.

Like any other personal change, if you truly want to stop smoking you will need to find something that will help you in achieving this goal. This is not to say that “cold turkey” is going to automatically fail for you. But having less than a 1% success rate and only after multiple attempts, unless you truly believe and live the motto of “no paid-no gain” cold turkey is not the way to go.

So let’s take a look at why people smoke. Besides being one of the hardest addictions to overcome, smoking is so interwoven into our everyday lives that cigarettes are like best friends. They are there to calm you down when you get stressed and they are there to keep you company during alone time. They travel with you when doing things like taking walks, driving your car and they often accompany you during festive and enjoyable times. They occupy you when your are board and they seem to be a perfect fit after meals. And also go so well with other things that we enjoy such as alcoholic beverages and coffee.

So although the nicotine in cigarettes may act as a reminder that it is time to light up, people simply find it hard to part with cigarettes because they don’t want to sever this friendship, especially when it has been going on for an extended period of time. And we all know how hard it is to say goodbye to a good friend who has always been there to celebrate the good times while comforting us through the hard times.

However, we can’t lose sight of the fact that cigarettes have a dark side to them. I remember a Doctor telling me once, “if cigarettes weren’t bad for me, I’d smoke 3 packs a day.” The bottom line is that although they are so enjoyable, you have to remember that their enjoyment comes at a price, which is your health. And just the same as you would quickly sever a friendship if that friend were causing harm to you and your family, you need to sever the cigarette friendship because it is harming you and the people around you.

The best way to do is to start viewing cigarette for what they really are - a bad habit. When people who come to my hypnosis office in Rhode Island to quit smoking, I have most of them smoke their last cigarette outside my office right before their session. However, I tell them that they MUST hold the cigarette in their opposite hand from which they usually do and they have to hold it between their middle and ring finger. If you smoke, give it a try and see how awkward it feels.

So although they are still getting the nicotine, this last cigarette is not very enjoyable. This is to show them that although cigarettes contain drugs and chemicals, smoking is more of a powerful habit. It also shows them why with such items like the stop smoking patch, gums or stop smoking pills it is still tuff to quit because those items do not fix the mental cravings for cigarettes.

And so, once you decide to sever the friendship with cigarettes your final step is deciding on a way to accomplish this goal. Now, if you truly want to kick the smoking habit for good you need to look for a way to get the thoughts of smoking completely out of your mind, in essence becoming an actual non-smoker, which is what we help people do. After all, what is the only difference between a smoker and a non-smoker? Simply put, a non-smoker doesn’t smoke because they don’t think about smoking.

Positive Change Hypnosis

Cigarettes Harbor Harmful Bacteria

Newswise — Cigarettes are "widely contaminated" with bacteria, including some known to cause disease in people, concludes a new international study conducted by a University of Maryland environmental health researcher and microbial ecologists at the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France.

The research team describes the study as the first to show that "cigarettes themselves could be the direct source of exposure to a wide array of potentially pathogenic microbes among smokers and other people exposed to secondhand smoke." Still, the researchers caution that the public health implications are unclear and urge further research.

"We were quite surprised to identify such a wide variety of human bacterial pathogens in these products," says lead researcher Amy R. Sapkota, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland's School of Public Health.

"The commercially-available cigarettes that we tested were chock full of bacteria, as we had hypothesized, but we didn't think we'd find so many that are infectious in humans," explains Sapkota, who holds a joint appointment with the University's Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health and the department of epidemiology and biostatistics.

"If these organisms can survive the smoking process - and we believe they can - then they could possibly go on to contribute to both infectious and chronic illnesses in both smokers and individuals who are exposed to environmental tobacco smoke," Sapkota adds. "So, it's critical that we learn more about the bacterial content of cigarettes, which are used by more than a billion people worldwide."

The study will appear in an upcoming edition of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives and the pre-copyedited manuscript has been posted online.

PUBLIC HEALTH SIGNIFICANCE

The researchers describe the study as the first snapshot of the total population of bacteria in cigarettes. Previous researchers have taken small samples of cigarette tobacco and placed them in cultures to see whether bacteria would grow. But Sapkota's team took a more holistic approach using DNA microarray analysis to estimate the so-called bacterial metagenome, the totality of bacterial genetic material present in the tested cigarettes.

Among the study's findings and conclusions:

* Commercially available cigarettes show a broad array of bacterial diversity, ranging from soil microorganisms to potential human pathogens;
* The is the first study to provide evidence that the numbers of microorganisms in a cigarette may be as "vast as the number of chemical constituents;"
* Hundreds of bacterial species were present in each cigarette, and additional testing is likely to increase that number significantly;
* No significant variability in bacterial diversity was observed across the four different cigarette brands examined: Camel; Kool Filter Kings; Lucky Strike Original Red; and Marlboro Red;
* Bacteria of medical significance to humans were identified in all of the tested cigarettes and included Acinetobacter (associated with lung and blood infections); Bacillus (some varieties associated with food borne illnesses and anthrax); Burkholderia (some forms responsible for respiratory infections); Clostridium(associated with foodborne illnesses and lung infections); Klebsiella (associated with a variety of lung, blood and other infections); and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (an organism that causes 10 percent of all hospital-acquired infections in the United States).

"Now that we've shown that a pack of cigarettes is loaded with bacteria, we will conduct follow-up research to determine the possible roles of these organisms in tobacco-related diseases." Sapkota says.

For example, do cigarette-borne bacteria survive the burning process and go on to colonize smokers' respiratory systems? Existing research suggests that some hardy bacteria can be transmitted this way, the researchers say. This might account for the fact that the respiratory tracts of smokers are characterized by higher levels of bacterial pathogens. But it's also possible that smoking weakens natural immunity and the bacteria come from the general environment rather than from cigarettes. Further research will be needed to determine the possible health impacts of cigarette-borne bacteria.

RESEARCH TEAM

Sapkota is the lead and corresponding author. She conducted the research with Sibel Berger under the guidance of Timothy M. Vogel in 2007 at the Environmental Microbial Genomics Group, Laboratoire Ampère, UMR CNRS 5005, Ecole Centrale de Lyon in Lyon, France.

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