“Many smokers are too stressed by the hard economic times to attempt to give up their habit, research suggests.”

This BBC News article caught my eye, today. [1] Full article here.

It seems that people are putting off their plans to stop smoking because they are too stressed in the current economic climate.

The relationship between stress and smoking is a really interesting one and something that I explain to all clients who come to me to help them stop smoking permanently.

Cigarettes are powerful stimulants. Because they are stimulants, they keep your heart rate up 10-15% higher than normal. Each smoker is living with a constant artificially high levels of adrenalin and cortisol in their system – you may as well inject adrenalin directly every time you have a cigarette!

I’m sure most people are aware that adrenalin and cortisol are STRESS hormones. These are really useful when you need to run away from that rhino that is charging at you, as the stress response diverts your body’s resources away from clear, rational thinking and away from the replenishing and repair functions of the body, towards making your body ready to run or fight. Every smoker spends more of their time in this state. In other words it is the cigarettes that cause stress. They can never relieve it.

The good news, therefore, is that without cigarettes we are all so much more able to cope with the other stresses in our lives.

The unconscious workings of our minds are really quite amazing. Whirring around in the background to keep us safe, guiding our behaviours towards pleasure and away from pain and harm. In order to be able to do this, the unconscious part of our minds has to ‘learn’ what is good for us - from the moment we are born it is evaluating things around us and within us in order to learn what behaviours are good for us.  Behaviours become automatic after a while (consider driving, for example, or playing the piano). After a while of consciously doing something, we are able to do it unconsciously, which is just as well in a lot of cases, especially when we are driving.

When a smoker gets that niggling feeling as the nicotine starts to leave the body, we think that having a cigarette temporarily relieves it. Every time this happens, the unconscious mind is ‘learning’ that that the cigarette relieves stress. However, this learning is incorrect. All it is doing is temporarily relieving the niggling feeling caused by the previous cigarette. It cannot possibly help with any other stress around us. After a very short while, this response becomes automatic, leading to us reaching for a cigarette in times of stress. Now here’s the thing – smoking does not relieve stress, it CAUSES it.

So firstly, if you smoke, in some ways it is not your fault! Your unconscious mind is motivating you towards doing this because it mistakenly thinks it is doing something good for you. We just need to break the cycle.

Realising this can be the first step in becoming free of smoking for good. Cognitive Hypnotherapy is an approach which works with the unconscious part of your mind, helping you to let go of those unconscious beliefs which motivate you to smoke, and take on new unconscious learnings which can enable you to become a happy non-smoker permanently, so much better able to cope with all those other things that life throws at you.

[2] Clicking here could be the first step in becoming smoke-free.