OUR SELBY HYPNOTHERAPY 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 Selby hypnosis branch. Here is a taster to get you started.

You can’t break the habit

This is the big one. I’m going to explain to you what habit actually means (because it doesn’t mean what you think it means so you need to know) and then you’re going to use this knowledge not to ‘break’ the habit (whatever that means) but to change it. Habits are things you have control over, and therefore you have control over your smoking habit, which means you have control over when you smoke, which means you can smoke any number you want, which means, as far as we are concerned here, less.

Habit is an odd word to use in connection with drug taking, don’t you think? My dictionary defines it as, ‘a behavioural pattern that has a degree of automatism’. That’s it. Nothing about drugs. And yet it’s the word of choice in connection with drug-taking. First of all, drug-taking has nothing to do with behaviour. Smoking has something to do with behaviour, yes, but that’s the act of smoking itself, by which I mean lighting a cigarette, sticking it in your mouth and sucking on it.

But the reason you do that is not because you forget NOT to do it. You don’t light cigarettes just because, well, it’s a habit, you light them because they give you a fix.