Many people go through their lives accepting negative behaviour patterns and habits they ultimately want to change. Be it quitting smoking, over-eating or maybe just wanting to gain more confidence in their lives. They spend most of their adult life wishing they could change a certain type of behaviour but they fail to change that behaviour on numerous occasions because they simply think they don't have enough willpower.
I am a clinical hypnotherapist based at Harley Street and I used to smoke. But with the aid of just one hypnotherapy session I packed the habit in for good. And now I love saying that I used to smoke! It brings a huge smile to my face. I have finally become the person I wanted to be: a non-smoker. I smoked for fifteen years and I always wanted to stop smoking. But I would convince myself that smoking wasn't THAT bad. I mean, everyone else was smoking and I felt safe, so what's the problem? Even my Father died of lung cancer thirteen years previously but I still continued to smoke. I used to say..... I'll give up when I have kids.... Yeah right. Who was I trying to kid.
So you get the picture. I continued to smoke. And I really liked to smoke. Even though I knew that if I continued to smoke it would eventually kill me. (God forbid, just like my Dad who sadly died a terribly painful death because of smoking and I would not wish that kind of suffering upon anyone.) And to me smoking was like this: I absolutely loved smoking and I absolutely hated smoking at the same time. A clear juxtaposition I know, but if you ask any smoker who wants to give up smoking they will say exactly the same thing.
To explain my apparent irrational behaviour I am going to take the words 'love' and 'hate' and use them as metaphors. The 'love' is my subconscious mind. And boy did my subconscious mind love cigarettes! After a meal? Absolutely! With a drink? You've got it! And if I were ever to lose or forget my cigarettes, well... it was like I had lost the love of my life!
Conversely, the other part of my mind, let's call it the 'hate' for cigarettes (otherwise known as the conscious or analytical, rational part of my mind) detested cigarettes. I absolutely hated the smell and the taste. My conscious mind knew that smoking might kill me one day if I continued to smoke. It knew that I wanted to give up smoking but that love and that urge for cigarettes kept pulling me in another direction. Two parts of the mind at polar opposites. Fighting to win the game. It was almost like survival of the fittest. But the love for cigarettes gave in every time. It was the easily teased, the easily convinced, very vunerable part of the mind that gave in to that next drag of my beloved cigarette.
The reason it was so difficult for me to give up smoking was because my subconscious mind had taken a habit on board which provided an 'urge' or a 'trigger'. That 'urge' or 'trigger' would occur when a situation arose in which I asscosciated smoking with. So be it with an alcoholic drink, after a meal, in a stressful situation, or perhaps when somebody else would light up - these were the times when the urge would occur and I would crave cigarettes. Hypnotherapy changed all that for me. It broke away the urges and triggers which made me want to smoke a cigarette. The emotional longing, love and apparent addiction to cigarettes had vanished. Diminished. Hypnotherapy made my subconscious mind come into agreement with my conscious mind and the love/hate polar opposites had made peace and the war was finally over.
My passion for helping people to quit smoking has risen so much I have decided to hold discounted smoking cessation sessions at my clinic at Harley Street on 21st August 2011, with all proceeds going to Cancer Research. If you are interested please contact me on 07584 658 555 or at my clinic on 020 7205 2225.
Sarah Dales is the Director at S.M. Dales Hypnotherapy Centre. No. 1 Harley Street, who specialise in hypnotherapy for all types of problems including smoking cessation, weight loss, confidence issues, phobias and much more. Please visit Sarah's website for more details at http://www.sarahdales.co.uk/
