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.

Positive Change Hypnosis RI

I change my mind

Think of a time when you have tried to change or improve something in your life such as giving up cigarettes, losing weight, excising and more. Like most people, you probably purchased or used some kind of aid like diet pills, medications, a workout center membership or patches. Now, many of you most likely saw some pretty positive results for a period of time. However, you most likely ended up returning back to your old ways.

This is because when we try to change, we are trying to fix the physical action but doing nothing for the mental part which is actually the force that controls every single aspect of our lives right down to our decision making processes. And so although it is possible and even pretty easy to control the “here and now” part of our minds it is difficult to control the “recorded” elements that produce automatic actions.

Now, some folks reading this blog might be thinking “yeah right, I have total control over my own mind and what I do.” Think again! Here is a quick test you can perform right now as you are reading this blog. Raise your left or right arm up in the air, hold it up in the air for 5 seconds then put it back down. I’ll wait while you do this……..

Ok so you most likely had no problems performing this action. Great job!! Raising your arm and putting it down is an action that you have learned and have been doing almost since birth. And counting to 5 is also something that you learned at a young age. And so, all in all this was pretty easy for most people to do and this shows that you can control your actions with your mind right? We shall see…

Let’s move onto part 2 of the test. I want you to blink your eyes 5 times. All finished? Again for most people this should have proven to be a simple task and therefore, you have so far proven that you have very good control over your actions. EXCELENT!!!

Now here is part 3. You already know that you CAN control your arms and eyelid muscles with you mind because you were able to raise your arms and blink your eyes. Now, since you have total control over your actions, I want you to talk your mind into keeping your eyelids open without blinking. Remember that you used your mind to put your arm up and down and also to blink your eyes. So talking yourself into keeping your eyes open should be no problem. If or when you do blink your eyes you can continue reading on.

Ok, so if you are reading this next paragraph you failed the total mind control test because you told yourself not to blink your eyes yet you ended up doing so. What happened? Well, your mind basically told you to take a hike and decided on its own that it was not going to listen to your reasoning. And so, when your mind sensed that your eyes were getting dry, the automatic reaction caused you to blink no matter how determined you were to keep from doing so.

So let’s sum this all up. The mind records involuntary actions that will be needed in the future such as blinking your eyes, the beating of your heart, digesting food and more. Unfortunately, the definition of the word Habit is an acquired pattern of behavior that has become almost involuntary as a result of frequent repetition. Since habits like snacking on junk food, smoking cigarettes, fingernail biting and more become involuntary, you no longer need to tell your mind that you would like to perform these actions and they become second nature. The downside is that when it comes to a point when you want to stop doing these things, because they are now involuntary quitting is as difficult as keeping your eyes open without blinking.

This is the main reason why we so often hear people say that they had quit smoking for “X” number of years but started right back up again. Or that they lost “X” number of pounds but gained it all back. Quitting these habits with your mind alone make work for a while, however just like keeping your eyes open, your mind is going to keep saying “take a hike” until you finally give back into temptation. Now, we can try to rely on items that trick us. For example, stop smoking patches and gum supply us with nicotine and diet pills trick our minds into thinking that we are full. But using these items makes about as much sense as me constructing some kind of clamp to keep my eyelids from closing. Sure this clamp will keep them open while I am using it. However, as soon as I remove this clamp I will blink my eyes again. Therefore did I really fix anything?

The conclusion – while hypnosis does not truly “erase” involuntary actions, it does reprogram them so that the ending result is not the same. For example, I can’t erase eating from your memory but I can make it so that you crave carrot sticks instead of junk food when you get hungry. And I can’t erase cigarettes from your memory but I can make it so that instead of reaching for that smoke, instead you naturally reach for a glass of water or feel the urge to take a walk. So you see, this is why hypnosis works while other things fail. It gives us the opportunity to change where the habit truly lives…our minds.

Change Your Life With Hypnosis

Stop Smoking Product/Service Comparison Facts

I love facts because there is no right or wrong in them. They completely remove the human element of opinion, which is often used to guide people towards a certain direction. Whether you chose to accept them or ignore them by looking the other way, facts they are what they are…the way something really is.

Here Are A Few Stop Smoking Product/Service Comparison Facts:

Nicotine Patches
Average Cost: 14 count $44.00 X 26 weeks = $1,144 per year
Result – Relies on willpower because you are expected to eventually quit on your own.
Health Risk: All drugs including nicotine replacement products have some degree of side effects

Electronic Cigarettes
Average Cost: Starter kit $29.95. Additional monthly refills $14.95 X 11 months = $194.40 per year
Result – Relies on willpower because you are expected to eventually quit on your own.
Health Risk: All drugs including nicotine replacement products have some degree of side effects

Nicotine Gum
Average Cost: 170 count $52.00 X 52 weeks = $2,704 per year
Result – Relies on willpower because you are expected to eventually quit on your own.
Health Risk: All drugs including nicotine replacement products have some degree of side effects.

Misc. Stop Smoking Prescription Pills
Average Cost: Per pill $3.00 X 365 day = $1,095 per year
Result – Relies on willpower because you are expected to eventually quit on your own.
Health Risks – Could cause any of the following: blackouts, dizziness, fainting, excessive sweating, dry mouth, abdominal pain, cramps, memory loss, heart attack, stroke, suicide, possible death and more.

Hypnosis
Average Cost: Live session $125.00 – Audio session $19.95 = Max cost $375.00
Result – Permanent for 80% to 95% after a 1 to 3 sessions
Health Risks: None

To some degree, with the exception of hypnosis, all of the items listed above rely on willpower, meaning that at some point during use of the item, you must actively make the effort to stop smoking. Now, assuming that willpower has failed for you in the past, otherwise you would not even have the need for stop smoking aids, you will need to accept that since these items do not affect your willpower, you are in essence doing just like before and quitting on you own. Therefore, if quitting on your own failed for you in the past, then you should plan on using whichever aid you choose, for the rest of your life.

How much would that cost?
Lifetime supply based on the following scenario
A 30 year old person wants to quit smoking and lives to be 85 years old = 55 years of product usage.

Nicotine Patches - $62,920.00
Electronic Cigarettes - $9,867.00
Nicotine Gum - $148,720.00
Misc. Stop Smoking/Prescription Pills - $60,225.00

In closing, we are not sharing this information to discourage anyone. We are simply pointing out the facts. The manufacturing and selling of temporary stop smoking items is a booming business. And from the amounts of money listed above, you can clearly see why. Haven’t you had enough of falling victim to a product that requires regular purchases in order to gain any benefit from it? It sort of sounds a lot like what cigarette companies themselves are doing!

Positive Change Hypnosis

Quit smoking before your kids reach third grade

Nine-year Public Health Sciences study reveals window of opportunity for smoking parents to increase the chances of raising smoke-free children

A PHS study shows if both parents quit smoking by the time their child is 8 or 9, the child's odds of becoming a smoker drop by nearly 40 percent.

New findings from the Public Health Sciences Division may provide a compelling reason for smoking parents of young children to kick the habit. Researchers have found that parents who quit smoking before their child reaches third grade will significantly reduce their child's odds of becoming a smoker by the time their senior year of high school rolls around.

Specifically, if one parent quits by the time the child is 8 or 9, the child's odds of being a daily or monthly smoker at age 17 or 18 decrease by 25 percent. If both parents quit, the child's chances of smoking drops by nearly 40 percent, according to Jonathan B. Bricker and colleagues at Fred Hutchinson and the University of Washington.

"Statistics show that if a child reaches age 18 without becoming a smoker, his or her odds of remaining smoke-free are around 90 percent. Therefore, our results indicate that if all smoking parents were to quit by the time their children were around age 8, it could prevent 136,000 young people in the United States from becoming daily, long-term smokers," said Bricker, a research associate in the center's Cancer Prevention and Trials Program.

The most surprising finding of the study, Bricker said, was that parental influence on smoking was not affected by the child's age when the last parent quit, as long as it was by the time the child was 8 or 9. "It didn't matter whether one or both parents quit when the child was a baby, a toddler or in third grade," Bricker said. "The most important thing was that they quit." More research is needed, however, to determine the benefits, if any, of parental-smoking cessation after children are 8 or 9.

There also was no evidence that parent or child gender had any impact on the link between parental-smoking cessation and children's smoking behavior; mothers were no more influential than fathers and girls were no more susceptible than boys.

Not surprisingly, those least likely to smoke were the children of parents who had never taken up the habit. Smoking prevalence in 12th grade was 14 percent when neither parents had ever smoked as compared to 37 percent when both parents were current smokers and 26 percent when both parents had quit by the time the child was in third grade.

The study appears in this month's issue of the journal Addiction. Co-authors include PHS colleagues Dr. Arthur Peterson, Dr. Robyn Andersen, Kathleen Kealy and Patrick Marek; and UW colleagues Dr. Irwin Sarason and Dr. Brian LeRoux.

The findings are based on data collected from more than 3,000 children and parents in 20 school districts in Washington. Information on parents' smoking behavior was collected when the children were in the third grade (8 or 9 years old), and data on children's smoking behavior was collected nine years later, when the children were in 12th grade (17 or 18 years old). Student self-reports of smoking activity were found to be largely accurate as verified through saliva tests that checked for the presence of cotinine, a by-product of nicotine.

"This study is unique because it is the first prospective study to follow a large group of parents and children over time to examine the relationship between parental-smoking cessation when children are young and how it relates to smoking behavior in late adolescence," said Bricker, who's also a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology in the UW Department of Psychology.

Impact may be even greater

How and why are children impacted by parental-smoking cessation?
Jonathan Bricker and colleagues suspect it's largely because parents who've quit may engage in anti-smoking behaviors that reduce their children's overall exposure to cigarettes, from requesting nonsmoking sections in restaurants to banning smoking at home.

While more research into the mechanisms of parental influence is needed, researchers do know is that the window of vulnerability for smoking tends to open around age 8 and close around age 20. This "smoking-acquisition period" may be influenced by a combination of genetics, and parental and peer models of smoking. It also may stem from a child's desire to emulate adult behavior, Bricker said, although in reality, only about 25 percent of adults smoke.

"Because adolescence is a period in which children are developing an identity as an adult, they are, in a sense, trying on behaviors like trying on clothes amd such. Behaviors they think will make them feel like adults."

Kick the smoking habit today!