Ways to Help You Stop Smoking

When you choose to stop smoking, natural techniques to overcome your urge to smoke are the best choice that will help you quit smoking. Natural products do not have the side effects associated and charges related to medications.

Stop smoking medications can help however they have numerous unfavorable negative effects. They can also get costly. Since they only work while you are taking them the cost can really accumulate. Also, they aren’t safe for everybody according to their medical problem.

There are a lot of natural techniques to help you stop smoking. Let’s take a closer inspection at a number of your choices.

Hypnotherapy

This requires tackling your psychological aspect. Analyze probable situations that prompt you to light a cigarette. Try avoiding such situations. Remain calm and composed without getting agitated or worried. Practice deep breathing exercises for three to five minutes whenever you long for nicotine.

St. John’s Wort

This natural herb is an antidepressant. Whenever you smoke, nicotine increases dopamine levels. These levels drop when you stop smoking. St. John’s wort increases dopamine levels in brain in similar fashion like nicotine and reduces your urge for any smoke.

Determination

Fix a date to quit smoking. Remain determined not to surrender to any temptation. Avoid bars, clubs, casinos, hotels, and other locations that could trigger need to smoke. Participate in alternative activities like playing games, heading out for very long and brisk walks, find a sport to keep you just busy and occupied. Keep home and workplace clean of ashtrays, cigarette packs, lighters, and similar objects.

NLP

NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. It’s a branch of psychotherapy that has been around for a long time but simply recently has shown to be very effective at helping smokers to quit smoking. In a recent test of 5,000 smokers who participated in an NLP session 97.2% were still smokeless six months after the test.

NLP works very well because it targets and destroys the cravings to smoke. Once the cravings to smoke have been removed it is really really simple to stop smoking. Natural NLP methods can greatly increase your odds of quitting smoking by removing the cravings to smoke.

You do not have visit a doctor or professional to realize the benefits of NLP. You can stop smoking using NLP in your own home by listening to an easy audio session.

The great author Mark Twain summed it all up nicely when he uttered the immortal line “To quit smoking is easy, I’ve done it a thousand times!” And for those of you who have tried to quit and failed you know exactly what he meant. You also know that to quit smoking is not easy it’s hard! Then there are the withdrawal symptoms as well as the craving for a cigarette – headaches, feelings of nausea, bowel problems, nose dripping, and putting on weight are just some of the symptoms you can suffer when you try to stop smoking. And if you do succeed in quitting the urge for a cigarette is still there, always nagging away at you just waiting for something to get you back on the cigarettes again. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just stop smoking and feel and think like a person who has never touched a cigarette in their lives? Well you could you know, it is possible, and this article is going to tell you how. Lighting a cigarette, holding it, inhaling the smoke and exhaling slowly can give you a wonderful feeling of relaxation. Well, there is another way you can get that feeling of relaxation and that is through practicing Self Hypnosis. Now the word hypnosis to a good many people means the showman they have seen on the TV making people do stupid things like imagining they are dogs or something. That kind of stuff is pure entertainment nothing more. True hypnosis either practiced on a person by a qualified hypnotherapist , or at home by yourself, is a wonderful therapeutic method of achieving a state of very deep relaxation. To reach this state, which is known as a trance, all you need to do is follow some very simple steps. Then when you are in this state you can start working on your subconscious mind which actually controls all of your bodily functions. But one very important point to remember is this – your subconscious mind, although it runs your body, cannot think for itself! What that means is it will accept anything you tell it, if you tell it often enough. Think about it, you originally convinced your subconscious mind that your body couldn’t function properly without a cigarette. So now all you have to do is convince it that it can. And the way you work on your subconscious is through visualization. You visualize what it would feel like to be a non smoker, to actually hate the smell of cigarettes to feel sick at the thought of smoking. If you really and truly want to quit your subconscious mind will program your body so that you won’t suffer any nasty withdrawal symptoms. But…here’s the most important thing, you don’t stop smoking while you’re hypnotizing yourself! You wait until your subconscious mind tells you that you are ready to quit smoking for good.

Quit smoking tips like these to help you stop smoking have been around for years. Some of the suggestions you’ll read below will connect with you – others may not. And that’s fine. Take a scan through them – if something clicks give it a try.

This is just one of a number of articles to come, containing tips to help you quit smoking so come back again and see what new tips I’ve been able to dig up for you. To see more tips click the link at the end of the article to visit the Quit Smoking Breakthrough.

Here’s as basic a quit smoking tip as you can get – “do not smoke any cigarette’s at all”. According to CDC if you try to smoke a fewer number of cigarettes but not stop completely you’re more likely to end up smoking the same amount again.

They add that low tar and nicotine cigarettes “do little good” and that the only “safe” choice is to quit completely, whether it’s quitting cold turkey or with the help of some kind of aid.

Another tip to help quit smoking is to “write down why you want to quit”. Be specific about what you’re looking for out of this effort to quit smoking. Especially in the areas of you life (day to day, and long term), you’re health, your family and your children. You may find it surprising just how helpful it is to have a heartfelt “reason why” to help you to quit smoking.

My wife, Trisha, quit cold turkey, no aids, no gum, just cold turkey. Her “reason why” came in the form of a man who was leading exercises on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii.

This guy looked like he was maybe in his late 50′s. It turned out he was 93-years-old! When he said his youthfulness was in part to not smoking cigarettes – that was all she wrote! Trisha quit that very moment. That single experience was all she needed to toss the cigarettes for good. Her “reason why”.

She still had to be strong about not smoking, it but that “reason why” was strong enough to keep her strong enough about not smoking and making her quit permanent.

Can you think of a “reason why” that’s that important to you?

One tip is to realize that “it will take effort to quit smoking”. The CDC says that the habit forming effects of nicotine and the bad moods and strong desires of “really wanting to smoke” have to be accepted as something you’ll have to deal with. Put another way they said – “there is no easy way”.

I have to say here that this statement “there is no easy way” needs to be taken very seriously. Especially if you use any of the “standard” ways or techniques for quitting cigarettes.

I found the truth of this statement every time I’d tried and failed to quit smoking. Over a dozen try’s to quit I was pulled back time and again. So yes, you do need to expect it to take effort – maybe a ton of effort – everybody’s different.

You see every “standard” way of quitting smoking, whether it’s nicotine patches or gum, or pharmaceutical drugs, hypnosis, or herbal formulas, are designed only to “help” you deal with the cravings and urges, the emotional unpredictability and all the other issues you have to deal with when trying to quit smoking cigarettes.

They weren’t designed to actually affect the “smoking habit” that ties you to cigarette smoking. With “standard” ways of quitting cigarettes you have to accept that you will have to wrestle with the “smoking habit” you’ve developed. You may have to wrestle with this “smoking habit” long after the nicotine has left your body. It’s an unfortunate fact.

Yes, it’s true that I eventually found a way that made quitting cigarettes automatic for myself. A technique that actually made me feel like a non-smoker the instant I quit – 20+ years ago. A technique that actually did “dismantle” my smoking habit. So when I quit, I felt just like I’d never smoked a cigarette before in my life. After over 20 years as a smoker. It really took me by surprise.

Hypnosis has been viewed as an effective method of changing habits for many years. It was recognized as a viable treatment in 1957 by the American Medical Association and the British Medical Association. And even before that it was used by Dr. James Esdaile as far back as 1845 as an analgesic so that he could perform what would be an extremely painful surgery on a patient without the use of chemical anesthesia.

If you can change a person’s perception of pain and cut into that person in a very tender area of their body, don’t you think that hypnosis used properly could change your perceptions about other things? And that is one of the ways that hypnosis to quit smoking can help you become a nonsmoker.

The way that you respond to being without cigarettes is only a perception. You saw how powerfully you can change your perceptions to the physical sensation of pain. Hypnosis can change the way that you respond to any physical and mental withdrawal that stopping smoking might produce. Would you be more able to continue being a nonsmoker once you stop, if you didn’t have to deal with any of the withdrawals that are associated with quitting smoking? Of course you would!

There is also some mistaken ideas that you hold onto about cigarettes and what they do for you. Some people think that smoking calms them down. Nicotine is a stimulant, so I have to ask, how do you think taking a stimulant could have a calming affect? It couldn’t! There’s something else going on that causes that calming affect because it’s definitely not the cigarette.

When you do a behavior and make an association between that behavior and a feeling it becomes a cause and effect relationship. When you were a teenager you probably listened to music. Music is a fad or transient phenomena. It is popular for a time and then some other music comes in to take it’s place. If you were to listen to a song today that was popular when you were a teen, just the sound of that music could transport you back in time to the feelings, thoughts, and images of things going on in your life around that time. You have created a connection between those sounds and those images, thoughts, and feelings. And that’s what you’ve done with smoking as well. You’ve created an association between smoking and feeling relaxed.

This association between smoking and relaxation shows how really powerful your mind truly is. It has overridden the physical component of nicotine that acts as a stimulant to give you the feeling of relaxation. Imagine how much relaxation you could really feel without the interference of nicotine.

Using hypnosis to quit smoking you will create better and healthier associations that have nothing to do with smoking. You will rid yourself of the illusions of what you think smoking is doing for you and the misconception that quitting smoking is hard. And since there are also individual and personal reasons that smokers have created about smoking, working with a smoking hypnotist will get to the root of those problems as well.