Ways To Kick The Smoking Habit - Separate The Truth From The Hype

States throughout the country have banned smokers from public areas. Numerous business organizations have declared their work environments to be smoke-free, and are sanctioning employees if they smoke during work hours. Smokers subject themselves to cold weather and the elements, and smoke away as quickly as possible so that they can go back to their jobs.

In some areas, smoking is as negatively perceived as drug addiction. these as well as other stop smoking benefits, numerous smokers are trying to locate ways to quit smoking.

Three elements constitute an addiction to smoking:

1. People smoke for relaxation and pleasure. This makes up about 45% of the smoking habit.

2. People also smoke because they unconsciously associate agreeable environments or behaviors with cigarettes. This causes them to crave a cigarette every time they encounter that location. For instance, an individual may come to associate smoking with their bedtime ritual. They will come to associate smoking with sleep so strongly that it is almost impossible to go to sleep without having a cigarette first. Example: If you watch TV and smoke, the smoking will become a conditioned response to watching TV. So each time you watch TV, you'll feel an urge to smoke. This is about 45 percent of the smoking addiction.

3. Nicotine actually creates a physical addiction. This element is approximately 10 percent of the smoking habit. Within about three days of quitting smoking, all of the Nicotine has been cleaned from a person’s system!

A significant number of alternatives are designed to help people find ways to quit smoking. One particularly inexpensive way to quit smoking, covered through many insurance agencies, is the nicotine patch. Easy to apply, each patch is worn for 24 hours and can be easily hidden underneath a person’s clothing. The problem with these patches, however, is that they are not very beneficial. Since patches only address the physiological addiction, which results in merely ten percent of the habit, only about seven persons in 100 succeed with this method.

Almost an identical rate of success characterizes nicotine gum or lozenges. Fewer than one-tenth of the individuals who attempt these methods will have success with these ways to quit smoking for as long as six months. In addition, these products have adverse effects. These nicotine replacement therapies, are known to be irritating to the users‘ mouth and lips, while numerous users report skin rashes under the patch. Again, these products merely address the physical addiction, which only includes approximately one-tenth of the habit.

A different approach is the development of psychotherapy and smoking cessation classes. These classes include cognitive therapy and detailed instruction about the adverse results of smoking. These strategies are three times as successful as nicotine replacement methods; the success rate is 22% at six months.

A considerable number of smokers have tried laser treatment programs to help quit smoking. This approach is in some cases paid for by insurance, although it is new. Research studies done by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, have found that these sessions are no more successful than placebo. (Placebo is the result that happens when people think they are taking a treatment, but actually are not.)

Another of the ways to quit smoking appears to be a little more successful than these previous strategies. In one study, smokers trialed shots to help them quit smoking by removing the pleasurable effects of the nicotine rush. This strategy, in the beginning stages of testing for effectiveness, so far appears to work for 15% of the individuals who tried it.

Hypnosis is an alternative way of coaching persons to quit smoking. Hypnosis focuses on re-teaching the unconscious mind to automatically substitute other behaviors to provide contentment and pleasure, as opposed to the smoking addiction. It is also utilized to eradicate or "extinguish" behavioral conditioning such as the association outlined between cigarettes and behaviors as described earlier, so the smoker no longer has the desire to smoke when in the locations that used to trigger it.

Male patients appear to have better results with stop smoking hypnosis than female clients do. One positive aspect resulting from self hypnosis stop smoking, however, is that, unlike persons employ nicotine replacement as strategies to quit smoking, there are no adverse side effects.

Another helpful characteristic of hypnotherapy is that it focuses on the nine-tenths facet of the addiction that is psychological, unlike the other methods that just work against the ten percent aspect of the addiction that is physical. This is why hypnosis offers a noticeably greater success rate than the aforementioned approaches to stop smoking treatments. Conventional hypnotherapy techniques can offer a 35% success rate, while Ericksonian hypnotherapy can deliver a 50% or higher success rate.

A more recent, innovative, and certainly more effective method that allows clients to obliterate a smoking dependency is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. This strategy is far more beneficial than traditional forms of quit smoking hypnosis as it does not require users to rely on post-hypnotic suggestions at all. The majority of clients, such as people whose thoughts are analytical in nature, are resistant to post-hypnotic suggestions. Professionals who use NLP coach the client’s unconscious mind to use the same exact thought processes that result in the mental addiction to cigarettes, to overcome it!

A good NLP smoking cessation program created by a certified NLP Practitioner can offer a success rate of up to 70% and higher.

Summary: Most smoking cessation programs try to utilize nicotine replacement therapies as ways to quit smoking. Some strategies, including smoking cessation and cognitive or behavioral treatment sessions, try to coach the mind discover ways to quit smoking.

While hypnotherapy is definitely more effective than other methods, especially with male patients, it is not rated as the most useful way to quit smoking. Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which treats the mental facets of nicotine addiction, actually assists persons to alter their thought processes so that they are able to quit most successfully.

Since nine-tenths of a person's struggle with addiction to cigarettes is psychological, these methods are incomparably more successful than simply replacing the nicotine and treating the ten percent component of the addiction that is physiological.

Conclusion: Many smoking cessation courses, such as nicotine replacement treatments and psychotherapy are available. These methods usually work for fewer than one in five persons. In contrast, hypnotherapy has a markedly higher rate of effectiveness. Neuro-Linguistic Programming offers an even higher degree of effectiveness in helping clients to successfully fight against the psychological nature of their habit and find immeasurably more success in realizing their goal of becoming smoke-free.