BECOME A SMOKE FREE ZONE
Hypnosis for Change
You smoke to nurture yourself. You wake up in the morning feeling a bit dull, and your work day looms before you
with no reward in sight. You light up and get a quick fix, a slight elevation of mood, and feel better prepared for your day.
Or maybe you're home alone most of the time. You feel cut off from interaction with the outside world. You may
even feel ignored. The companionship of your cigarettes lessens those feelings of isolation and loneliness. If your
children have just gone off to school, or you are experiencing some sort of separation or transition in your life,
your dependency on these "friends" becomes even stronger. In the absence of any other support group, they are there.
You smoke to relieve stress or provide a break in your activity. The pressure at work builds all day. There does not seem to be a way for you to let off steam or to seek calm territory, so you have a cigarette.
The act of stopping what you are doing, lighting up and inhaling deeply, does several things.
(1) The cigarette allows you to take a miniscule physical break from whatever you may be doing. If you are actually lighting a cigarette you cannot be expected to be doing something else at that same moment.
(2) Taking a deep breath to inhale the cigarette is, in itself, a relaxing exercise.
(3) If only for an instant, smoking puts you in an anticipatory frame of mind. When you light up, you look
forward to a few moments of pleasure. Stress is briefly put away as you renew your spirit and bolster yourself to continue the activity which has caused the stress.
You smoke because you may find social situations uncomfortable. You feel awkward with other people whom you
do not know well. You don't know what to say to them, and you don't know what to do with your hands as you attempt conversation. You feel alone, a floater in a room of people, so you use the cigarette as a prop for your
hands or even as a kind of anchor for making you feel more secure in social situations in which you would otherwise be very ill-at-ease.
At a party, cigarettes can serve as a kind of bond, pulling you into a group of smokers as you offer or accept a
cigarette. You may use smoking as a vehicle for meeting other people, as your shared habit provides the opportunity for some safe, ice-breaking dialogue.
Finally, your self-image may be enhanced because you feel that smoking makes you appear more confident and
outgoing. You may have a lot of admiration for someone who smokes, and duplicating the other person's habit allows you some form of identification with him or her.
You smoke to control your weight. Cigarettes do suppress the appetite. You may be using your habit to try to take
the edge off a normal appetite, or to control another habit-overeating. If you have a cigarette and coffee for breakfast, a cup of soup and two cigarettes for lunch, then you can enjoy a larger dinner-even if you can't really
taste it.
Taking away any one of these habits would cause personal distress and create severe disruption. Each of them seems permanent. And if you're a smoker, you know how permanent a habit can seem to be. You may have
forgotten the original reason you began your habit, or perhaps you just found yourself smoking one day, without any apparent reason. Though you now want to end the habit, you have always felt that stopping was next to
impossible. All the medical data and scare tactics in the world can't seem to influence you to quit. And the reason
for this is simple: The habit has not been established by the logical, intellectual part of your mind; instead, the
habit's cause lies in your subconscious. If you want to change your behaviour, you must first recognize the reason or reasons you smoke. Below are some of the key reasons anyone smokes.
Meeting the Need While Dismissing the Habit
Think about the above reasons. Each of them has a positive function; that is, it isn't wrong to be nurtured, to feel
less stressed, to feel more comfortable in social situations, or to control your weight. What you are accomplishing
with cigarettes has value. It's just that the habit that has been established to meet the need is one that ultimately destroys, rather than supports.
You know there is nothing that can be said about the ill effects of cigarettes that you have not already heard more
than once. Further, the suggestion that you can meet the same needs while employing a new behaviour or a new habit may seem outright preposterous. But it isn't, if you're willing to rely on the power of your subconscious.
Your subconscious can provide you with specific, constructive alternatives to smoking that will be genuinely desirable.
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