Smoking bans cut heart attacks

The latest studies indicate a reduction of up to 26% per year in heart attack rates resulting in smoking bans in public places. This is much more than was anticipated.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8267523.stm

Most smokers (and I was one for a long time) don’t really want to look at articles like this and can easily feel ‘picked on’ by the rest of the world about their smoking. However most also know, really, that it is hugely damaging to smoke - quite aware of the risks they are taking with their own lives.

So why is this? How can we carry on doing something that we know is so harmful and justify it with “I enjoy it” or “it helps me relax”.?  What if you “enjoy” salmon sandwiches but have a fish allergy, would you continue to eat salmon purely because you enjoy it? Probably not. So what is different about smoking? Why can’t we easily quit smoking?

Nicotine has tricked your mind! Over time our minds have started to associate cigarettes with the relief of stress, with the relief of that feeling that we may call withdrawal, which is the feeling caused as nicotine from the previous cigarette starts to leave the body. Your mind has also generalised this feeling - and by that I mean that it starts to think that nicotine can help relieve other similar feelings like fear, anxiety, stress, etc…. This is one big con! If you are stressed by something, then all the nicotine does is temporarily relieve the part of that feeling that was caused by the cigarette in the first place! The rest of the worry is still there.

The crazy thing is that the cigarette causes stress in the first place. Every time you have one, it is like injecting pure adrenalin, the stress hormone. Your body is constantly living with higher than normal levels of the stress hormone, caused by smoking. No wonder we feel anxious and on edge so much of the time. However, in the back of our minds (the unconscious part of your mind), you only think that the cigarette relieves the stress, and therefore the unconscious part of your mind will continue to motivate you to smoke.

All we are doing when we say “I  enjoy it” or “It helps me through difficult times” is coming up with a consicous justification of our unconsciously driven behaviour  - which is entirely natural.

So, how on earth can we get out of this cycle? This is where hypnotherapy comes in. It is a way of accessing the unconscious part of your mind to re-train it, so that it no longer motivates you to smoke. Without that deep down motivation it become so easy to stop smoking. The niggling feelings you get in the couple of days afterwards will be so small that they can easily be beaten, and after that… Freedom for Good and a new life of better health!!!

http://www.hampsteadsmokingclinic.com

http://www.cathysimmons.co.uk

This entry was posted on 22/09/2009 at 01:27 pm and is filed under Stopping Smoking, General Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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