OUR HARROGATE HYPNOTHERAPY AND ACUPUNCTURE AFTERCARE

Sometimes, people come to us not to stop smoking but for smoking reduction. It’s a choice they make, and we publish a book on reduction. ‘No, You Don’t Have to Stop Smoking’ will be of interest even if you do want to stop completely. Why not take a look at it before you visit our Harrogate hypnotist or acupuncturist. This is a taster to get you started.

You need to smoke to cope with your stressful life

And therefore you need to smoke more when you are more stressed. That seems logical, except that smoking doesn’t reduce stress, it increases it. The belief that smoking makes you less stressed has made you smoke more, perhaps not only when you are stressed either.

It is important that you understand about smoking and stress, so bear with me while I explain. First, we need to see whether tobacco smoke contains anything that can relax you. The answer to this is that it doesn’t. The way tobacco appears to relax you is by making you stressed first, then relieving the stress, so you come to believe that what relaxes you is smoking. It does this through the mechanism of addiction. When you are in subliminal nicotine deprivation (SND) this is inevitably interpreted by your body as a stressor, just as are hunger and thirst. When you relieve hunger you appear to relieve stress, but what you are doing is relieving the stress that eating and then not eating caused in the first place. Now obviously you have to eat, but you don’t have to smoke, so the cycle of stress and stress relief which makes so much sense with eating makes no sense at all with smoking. In other words, if you never smoked you would never have SND and you wouldn’t need to smoke to relieve it. So smoking is self-defeating. The problem is that it makes you believe that it’s doing something which it can’t – relieving stress.