But ... What Actually Is Smoking?

The large majority of smokers started smoking when they were very young, because of peer-pressure, in order to feel more grown-up and ‘cool’. Things, however, have changed dramatically in recent years and our society now sees smoking for what it is: a very harmful habit which can lead to a painful and premature death . It is also costly, at a time when people are trying to cut down on expenses. Smoking is antisocial; smokers’ clothes smell badly and many people are repelled by this.

There are many methods that claim to help you stop smoking but most have very poor rates of success and in some cases they are totally ineffective. More and more smokers are trying to stop but often they have grown disillusioned and cynical after various and repeated failures. Drugs, patches, gums: are they familiar to you? Have you really lost all hope of freeing yourself from this ugly habit? Then try hypnotherapy. It has been proved to be the most successful method of stopping smoking, with a success rate above 90% and I shall explain to you why.

The fact is that most commonly used methods treat smoking as an addiction , while it is not. An addiction is characterised by chemical transformations in the body. These transformations appear in the physical body and the mind has no power over them: chemical transformations are neutralised by other chemical substances. Addictions also cause serious physical withdrawal symptoms because of their chemically-based nature.

This doesn’t happen with smoking: nicotine is expelled from the body in as little as 48 hours. If nicotine were so addictive, people who use nicotine patches to stop smoking should then go to rehab clinics to get rid of the nicotine addiction , but there are no rehab clinics for nicotine addicts.

Smoking is not an addiction, but a habit and therefore it is the mind that needs to be involved if we want to get rid of it. Our conscious mind is facing challenges all the time and this is why - as soon as an action becomes familiar and is repeated several times – the conscious mind stops focusing on it and entrusts it to our “automatic pilot”, the subconscious. Think of the time when you learnt to drive, or to swim, or to play a musical instrument. At the beginning the whole task seemed to be extremely complicated and very absorbing, leaving no space for anything else in your mind because you were so concentrated on it. Then, with constant repetition, little by little it becomes easier and easier until you start relaxing and – if you drive for example – you manage to listen to the radio or to speak with your fellow passengers. If you play piano you start paying attention to the interpretation and not only to hitting the right key at the right moment. This is because your mind divides the complex task of driving or playing the piano into many small tasks and the simplest ones become automated, which means that you do them automatically, spontaneously, without consciously thinking of them. When you were a little child you learnt how to open a door and how to stand on two feet and walk: they were very complicated actions at the beginning, which absorbed you completely, but then they became so familiar to you by repetition that you now do them without thinking.

Now think that every time you light up you perform a series of actions which are always the same (opening the packet, removing the cigarette, putting it in your mouth, finding the lighter or the matches, lighting the cigarette ...). Multiply each of these actions by the number of cigarettes you smoke in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year ... and you will see what a strong and powerful habit smoking has become for you. Automatic actions are regulated by the subconscious in order to leave the conscious mind free to deal with challenges and decision-making. Hypnosis is the best tool to reach the subconscious directly and make the changes you need, quickly and effortlessly. The only thing required from you is a real desire to stop; you must really want to stop. If you come to me reluctantly, without being committed to stopping smoking, purely because a friend, your partner or a relative asked you to do so, you will not succeed.

This is because will-power belongs to the conscious mind: will-power is what makes us get up early in the morning and go to work because we need an income, even if we would prefer to sleep longer. Desire comes from the subconscious and is the force that makes us overcome all sorts of obstacles in order to reach something we want. If you run a marathon it is because you want to arrive first. The key word for will-power is “must” while the key word for desire is “want”. If you think you must stop smoking because someone else wants you to, but you are not fully committed to stopping, then hypnosis will not help you. However if you really wish to stop smoking, there is no easier method than hypnosis .

© Renata Bartoli 2009