For nonsmokers, quitting smoking may seem like a no-brainer. It is bad for your health, can cause heart disease and lung cancer, gives you bad breath, can cause cancer of the throat or mouth, can cause emphysema, accelerates the aging process and causes wrinkles, turns fingernails and teeth yellow, and can lead to a dangerously low birth weight in babies of smoking mothers. With all this evidence to show the reasons to quit, why is it so hard to do it?

Quitting smoking is arguably one of the hardest habits to break. For smokers, quitting is not just a matter of piling up the evidence against the habit. And in most cases willpower is not enough either. This is where most nonsmokers, and many smokers, get confused. They think that you should be able to just control yourself and not pick them up.

To quit smoking, you not only have to break a physical addiction to nicotine, but you also have to break a very strong psychological addiction to the act of smoking and the benefits derived from it. Most people find that these two addictions in combination create a scenario where they try to quit and fail perhaps numerous times.

If this has happened to you, you know the routine. You smoke for a while, increasing your habit up to a pack or maybe two packs a day. Then you decide it's time to quit; you want to take better care of yourself and you are tired of smelling like smoke all the time. So you try to quit cold turkey. Your motivation is there and your intention is strong, so you figure you can do it. But as soon as you have a bad day or find yourself in a group of smokers, you give in and have what you say is only one cigarette. But one turns into two and two turn into a new pack.

So you try the nicotine gum, figuring that with a little help, you can kick the habit. You chew and chew and still feel the overwhelming urge to hold that cigarette in your hand. You may try the patch or even a prescription to help you with your cravings, but nothing seems to work.

The answer does not lie in these outside efforts. The answer lies in changing the way you think about smoking, the way your mind reacts in stressful situations, and what you think when you are confronted with other smokers. A licensed hypnotherapist is your best bet to finding some real success in quitting smoking. With the help of hypnosis, you can change your thinking and put those cigarettes down for good.