How many people do you know who have quit smoking for a month or a year or and then started up again? What methods did they use to quit smoking: hypnosis, drugs, cold turkey? If they started back up after trying to quit smoking, hypnosis was probably not one of the things they tried. Is that your story, too? Unfortunately, it's really common.



Anyone who has smoked for a number of years comes to a point where they really want to quit. In fact, they're desperate to quit. That's when they find out just how addicted they are. Because even though they have really good reasons, and a lot of motivation to quit, they can't.

Has this already happened to you? Have you already had the experience of wanting to quit because the new baby was on the way? Or your new boyfriend or girlfriend doesn't smoke. So you don't want to anymore either? Or maybe you're just tired of seeing so much of your hard-earned cash literally go up in smoke!

Whatever your reason for wanting to quit smoking, good intentions are usually not enough. Nicotine addiction is so strong, that you'll need all the help he can get. The good news is, there's a lot of help available. You have a lot of good quit smoking methods and products to choose from.

Quitting smoking is really a two-pronged process. You have to deal with both the physical nicotine addiction, and the psychological habits that you have created around smoking. Let's call them your "smoking rituals".

Everyone who has smoked for any number of years has actually built a whole set of smoking rituals that are unique to them. One of the reasons it's so difficult to quit smoking is that the rituals become self reinforcing. What exactly does that mean?

It means that when you first began smoking you developed a set of habits, or actions, that you used every time you lit up your cigarette. And these are things like having a favorite ashtray, preferring a particular brand of cigarettes, using matches instead of a lighter, or always buying a red or a yellow lighter.

Now think about how many cigars or cigarettes you smoke every day. Do you smoke one pack a day? That's 20 cigarettes. So that's 20 times a day that you use your red lighter, or you look at that gold and white cigarette package. And then there are all of the habitual places and times that you smoke. You have a cigarette sitting in your favorite chair, or you light up after every meal.

So after even one year of smoking, do you really wonder why every time you see your cigarette lighter, or you finish a meal, it just feels natural to have a cigarette? In fact, it feels uncomfortable not to have one. And we've only been talking about your behavioral habits.

When you quit smoking cigarettes, you also have to face your nicotine addiction. And the physical addiction to nicotine is as strong or stronger than a physical addiction to heroin. The good news about that is: once you stop putting nicotine into your system, most of it flushes out within a couple of days.

Quit smoking drugs, like patches and pills and nasal sprays, are intended to help you get through the physical withdrawal period. They're supposed to help reduce the nicotine cravings, and you're supposed to gradually taper off from them. They work about 20% to 30% of the time for long-term smoking cessation. But if you talk to people who have successfully quit smoking for 10 or 20 years, you'll probably find that they used self hypnosis at some point to help them stop smoking for good.