It’s the New Year! 2017 is upon us, and many of us will be making new resolutions ceremoniously to get the year off to a positive start. Presumably, one of the more popular resolves for the end of the year will be a promise to yourself:
“Tonight is my last cigarette.”
Smoking in today’s society is increasingly unacceptable. Many feel the stigma of the smell, the habit and the cost. The allowance of when/where you can smoke has dramatically changed in the last twenty or so years. Many of you probably started smoking in high school, part of the ‘cool crowd’, the ‘parking lot crowd’. You did it to fit in, to feel better, to belong. Furthermore, you were allowed or enabled to smoke without criticism from your peers. Years have passed, and now you are in the opposite scenario. Smoking separates you. Smoking ostracizes you. This is no longer to fit in; twenty years have past, and now what started as a ‘cool, make-you-feel-good activity’ is now leading you down a path of isolation in so many different ways.
As you consider passively making a resolution this New Year’s Eve, consider the following:
Smoking is an addiction. Cigarette smoking use can cause changes to your DNA that accelerates aging in distinct, measurable ways. Progressively reducing the nictoine content of cigarettes does not lead smokers to quit the majority of the time.
In a study of over six thousand mothers and their newborns, it was discovered that smoking cigarettes while pregnant modifies a fetus’ DNA, mirroring patterns seen in adult smokers. This study, the largest of its kind, suggests a potential link between smoking and health complications in children.
It is estimated that if all women quit smoking during pregnancy, approximately four thousand babies would not die each year.
A recent study published by the Scientific Journal of Addiction revealed that the success rate of traditional treatment methods for smoking cessation was only approximately 50%, whereas hypnotherapy-based support for smoking cessation has a 91% success rate.
So why wait until January to quit when you can start a new life whenever you choose?
Living better is your choice.
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The term ‘addiction’ describes a persistent and uncontrollable habit that is harmful to the person. Nicotine is the chemical component of cigarettes that an addict becomes dependant on. As a smoker, you know that almost immediately upon inhalation your body will relax and you will feel calmer. Then, when you experience a craving, you will also experience some combination of the following: irritability, impatience, and anxiety. This is what leads to the second cigarette, and the thousandth cigarette, and so on. Cravings are so powerful that they can be detected in a sort of “memory function” in the brain and can even be detected after death according to a 2016 study done by Science Daily and The University of Vienna Medical School.
According to The Centre for BrainHealth, the ways that a smoker’s brain responds to nicotine curiously depends on a smoker’s belief about the nicotine content. A study recently published in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that smoking a cigarette with nicotine and falsely believing that the cigarette lacked nicotine resulted in reports of failure to satisfy the smoker’s craving. This study shows you how much of this addiction is constructed socially or conditioned through personal experience. In addition, results of this study support previous findings that our belief systems can alter a drug’s effect on cravings; this provides insight into the possible avenues of using hypnotherapy to treat addiction.
Now is really the time to break free from your cigarette smoking and get your life back. Hypnotherapy is a safe, easy, drug-free way of quitting smoking, and it works! To reiterate, according to a study done by The University of Washington Medical School, the success rate for studied individuals using hypnotherapy to quit smoking was 91%. This is because hypnotherapy recognizes that smoking isn’t merely a chemical addiction; rather, it stems from thoughts and beliefs deeply rooted in your subconscious. Whenever there is a conflict between the conscious and the subconscious mind, the latter will always win until you learn to control it. Hypnotherapy helps you change your subconscious inclinations. Your emotional attachments to cigarettes, as well as your daily rituals and habits, can be altered with your participation in hypnotherapy to enable you to increase your sense of pride and empowerment, all of which will help you win your battle with cigarettes and the subconcious mind. Why not trade that sidewalk in and begin your 2017 exactly as you pictured just a few nights ago, with resolve to honor a new, healthier you!
Happy New Year!
One of our Client Care Coordinators published this post.