Top 10 New Year Resolutions – Are Yours On The List?

Do you make a resolution on New Year’s Eve? If so, you’re in good company! Forty five percent of Americans make New Year’s Resolutions, and there are a few repeat offenders every January first!

In fact, as we go through the list of the top-10 New Year Resolutions, if you are like most folks, you will most likely notice a handful of resolutions that you (either with or without success) attempted to accomplish in the past.

10) Finish that around the house “to-do” list.
9) Read more.
8) Get organized.
7) Save Money.
6) Volunteer.
5) Better work/life balance.
4) Quit smoking.
3) Learn something new.
2) Drink less alcohol.

and the #1 resolution is:
1) Lose weight.

Now - the nice part about a new year resolution is that if you didn’t get around to something last year, you get to add it to your list for this coming year.  However, the problem that most people have is that they keep adding the same exact things year after year or worse yet – they failed at it so many times in the past that they don’t even bother trying anymore.

So how can you accomplish your goal(s) this coming year?

Back when I managed a marketing firm, the company I worked for loved management training.  I took management courses and training every month or so. To be honest, some of what we learned was pretty worthless, but one element has stuck with me, and that’s how to create an reachable goal. A goal – or a New Year’s resolution – is much more likely to succeed if it is FAST:

Flexible – If you’re not able to meet your goal, how will you adapt?
Attainable – How are you going to achieve this? Do you have a plan?
Specific – With a specific goal you know when you’re on the right track.
Timed - Set a time limit or better yet - set smaller mini-goals every few months.

So, how can you use "FAST" to make your New Year’s resolutions successful? Let’s look at the #1 resolution: Lose weight:

• Make it flexible – The main thing to understand about goals is that they should be adjustable - so this part might happen on-the-fly.  For example, if you hurt your ankle in February, you might be off your feet for a while.  Therefore, you can be flexible by adjusting your goal for the year or trying to make up the lost time by exercising more once you’re on your feet again. Flexibility stops real life problems from derailing your whole plan.

• Make it attainable – Losing 100 pounds by January 15th is not very realistic.  Therefore, set a goal that you can truly live with.  For example, - "I will lose five pounds by March 1st, and I’ll do that by walking for 30 minutes a day."

• Make it specific – Losing weight is not really a goal because it is wide open to interpretation.  For example, are you looking to lose 1 pound or 100 pounds this year?  Instead make it specific - "I want to lose 20 pounds by by 2015."

• Make it timed –  While the ultimate goal may be 20 pounds in a year, you need to break up the timing for how you intend to reach this long-term goal - "I want to lose five pounds by March 1ts, five more by June 1st, five more by September 1st, and five more by December 1st."

So as you can see, when you approach your New Year resolution with a plan of action, you are more likely to reach your desired goal.  One final thing to remember is that while most people want to go it alone, there’s no shame in asking for help.  After all - when you quit smoking with the patch, you’re getting help.  When you lose weight by joining a food program or gym, you’re getting help.  When you save money by using a finance balancing software or money management company, you’re getting help.

Therefore, if you need a little help with reaching your new year goals, be sure to contact us to see if we can help cross that resolution off your list - forever!

Get Help With Your New Year Goals Now       

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.

Positive Change Hypnosis RI

The Elves Are Hard At Work...

With the holiday season among us, many people are searching for the perfect gift idea.

Here at Positive Change Hypnosis, we are jumping into the holiday celebration by offering our holiday gift certificates. We only offer these during the month of December. Our gift certificates make a perfect gift for the special someone who is looking to lose weight, stop smoking, and manage pain and more. Best of all, our gift certificate covers our complete 3 Step Hypnosis Program so your whoever you give it to won’t incur any additional cost or fees.

In addition to our holiday gift certificates, many people are downloading our Stop Smoking and Weight Loss hypnosis MP3’s. There is no waiting for delivery, you can simply download it from our website, burn it to a CD, wrap it up and you’re done!

Now, I suppose that some people are also downloading our MP3’s in preparation to New Years eve. This way they can be ready for when they make that New Year resolution to stop smoking or lose a few pounds.

Whatever the reason(s), we just wanted to quickly remind our readers that Positive Change has a few great gift ideas that many people are taking advantage of and that can help ease your shopping a little this season.

And remember that when you give the gift of hypnosis you're really giving the gift of a better, healthier and happier life. We are not aware of any store that currently sells or offers that as a gift.

Visit our website today!
http://www.positivechangehypnosis.net/

Our Survey Results

As part of our live hypnosis service for the month of July, August and September we sent all of our clients a satisfaction survey and the results are in.

We are proud to announce that we had an overall 99.6% "extremely satisfied" response from our clients!

We are also happy that some of our clients provided great helpful feedback as this truly does help us ensure that we serve all of our clients to the best of our ability.

We also want to report that we have brought back the ability to download our weight loss and stop smoking hypnosis programs via instant download from our website. Today was officially marked as day one and we had a terrific response, especially from people outside the New England area that may not have the ability to visit us for hypnosis.

In closing we are looking forward to continuing this extraordinary momentum.

Visit Us Today

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

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!

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.

Quit Smoking With Hypnosis

More Proof That Hypnosis Is The Way To Go!

Now, before I get started I just want to mention that I like Kirstie Alley and I am not picking on her. But I do have a burning question that needs to be answered…what happened to that wonderful Jenny Craig weight loss program? I guess it was just another prime example that weight loss programs and diets do not really work. If you want to change even your body, you have to change your mind first.

Here at Positive Change Hypnosis we are constantly telling people that in order to create change, even when it comes to changing our bodies, the change itself has to be created in our minds. This is because when we have to constantly think about the change itself, we are then solely relying on willpower and conscious thoughts, which can be difficult.

Think about driving a car or simply walking down the street for a moment. When you are driving a car or taking a walk down the street most of the actions that you performing are automatic and come natural to you. While drive a car, you do not have to think about it each time you apply the gas or the break. The same goes for walking. When you are taking a walk, do you really have to think about putting one foot in front of the other?

These actions come natural to us because while we are performing them, our subconscious minds are running on autopilot and doing the work for us. And so, when we want to change something in our lives, it simply makes all the sense in the world to change our way of think about it.

Take into consideration losing weight and quitting smoking. When we try to quit smoking or lose weight many people rely on willpower only. Although we are putting forth our best efforts, we are still left with the lingering thoughts of cigarettes or food floating around in our minds. And because these reminders remain in our minds we are constantly fighting the urges to overcome them.

People stand a better chance of success by using hypnosis because it allows us to change something in our lives by removing or change our thoughts about it. In essence, if you brain no longer craves cigarettes or snacks, it will naturally be easier to stop smoking or lose weight because you are no longer thinking about these things.

Change Your Way Of Thinking With Hypnosis