No “Butts” About It: Tips for Quitting Smoking
Mary, a dance instructor, once admitted that cigarettes were her friend. “I need cigarettes to keep me thin and moving. I’d love to quit, but weight gain? Mood swings? No way, never again. I need to feel good.”
Many performers “hypnotize” themselves into believing that cigarettes offer valuable assistance for managing life and performance stress. Dancers, for example, need high and constant energy and have strict weight demands. Cigarettes are often used as a quick fix to perk up and stay slim.
When cigarettes assuage human needs so instantly, they become valuable. This satisfaction trumps most conscious efforts to stop smoking. However, the demand for instant gratification and the feel after smoking can cloud the reality of tomorrow’s diseases, mental decline, financial waste and premature death.
The act of smoking is more than nicotine ingestion. Addictive habits are driven by beliefs, attitudes, emotion, memories and physiologic urges. These constructs are a part of the subconscious mind and the subconscious directs our lives.
How does the mind sanction something as destructive as cigarettes and associate it with decreasing stress, improving attractiveness and keeping weight off?
Interestingly, the subconscious mind has no investment in how you live your life. It integrates life experiences, processes billions of pieces of information and organizes sensory input. The operations of this system can appear illogical and irrational to the conscious mind, but within the subconscious there is order.
Feel fatigued? A cigarette appears to be the only option because of the quick results you feel, and the meaning and urgency you associate with fatigue, i.e., you feel tired. You have to perform. You smoke. You perk up. Tobacco ad campaigns carefully associate the satisfaction of human needs with the use of cigarettes. There are many influences.
Hypnosis and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) offer solutions to explore the experience of smoking, and the cultural and personal subconscious programming. Your perceived “value” of smoking must be faced if you want to quit permanently. Within your subconscious mind is the key to the understanding and termination of your smoking habit.
One step toward change is to examine the influences of that first cigarette, patterns of smoking, paired activities (coffee and cigarettes) and triggers. Personal beliefs and attitudes about smoking and becoming a non-smoker are also important. Each person’s smoking experience is full of stories, images, social bonding, conflict and even trauma.
Hypnotic processes can re-shape the subconscious content associated to smoking. Healing emotions and re-educating the beginner smoker can settle inner conflict.
One technique used in a professional hypnosis session is called Time Line Advancement: What if you could meet a future self who has smoked for 20 more years? Imagine how continuing the pack-a-day habit would affect your future self after an additional 146,000 cigarettes.
Another viable tool is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), or psychological acupressure. Gentle tapping on energy points on the face, chest and hands clears energetic blockages for resolution of many life challenges.
EFT neutralizes the personal experience of smoking and then, strengthens the desired outcome. Cravings, fears and worries can be eliminated. EFT is highly effective and can be learned for personal and professional empowerment.
Hypnosis and EFT can also be used to manage weight gain and any discomfort during the period of transition after your final cigarette. Caring for your personal needs in healthy ways blaze a path away from smoking and toward being a non-smoker, i.e., you feel tired. You use guided breath and imagery. You perk up!
When the previously programmed associations with smoking no longer exist and new responses and options are learned, the subconscious dictates you have created freely initiate new behaviors. You literally do not want noxious smoke in your body.
Here are additional suggestions to become a non-smoker:
1. Get Determined. You stop smoking because you want to quit. You cannot quit for your artistic director or your students.
2. Get Support. Tell people that you are quitting and how they can help. Stay connected.
3. Get information. Along with conventional methods, Hypnosis and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) are self-empowering techniques not only for quitting, but for the personal challenges of quitting. Learn Hypnosis and EFT!
4. Get a Plan. Change requires a strong course of action. Be clear and write it down!
5. Get a Vision. Imagine yourself as a non-smoker at work, at home and in life. See yourself smoke-free!
6. Get Disconnected. Activities paired with smoking must be altered. Make changes in your environment.
With the right combination of determination, support, information and a plan of action anyone who currently smokes cigarettes can become a permanent non-smoker.
A three-year non-smoker, Mary uses Hypnosis and EFT for stress, weight control and maintaining good habits. Her present and future selves are very happy.