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 NLP
Article 9 - The Smoking Ostrich
What Every
Smoker Knows, But Tries to Ignore or Deny
Smoking is an expensive habit, with the average smoker forking out
around $12 a day ($1330 per annum) for the privilege. It is
also a dangerous habit, with the ensuing damage hitting the public
purse hard – around $12.7 billion per annum in
Australia.
The dangers of smoking are well known and unquestioned, including child
deaths and ongoing damage to future offspring in the smoker’s
family line due to deformity and disease caused by exposure to
cigarette smoke and residue. We know that smoke residue in
clothes and other fabrics is extremely dangerous for babies and
children with allergies or respiratory illnesses.
So why do people continue to smoke? And HOW is it that people
can smoke, knowing all these things?
In this article I plan to show that while the dangers of smoking are
well-known, that all smokers, to a lesser or greater extent, put their
heads in the sand and try to convince themselves and others that
it’s not that bad.
It’s
Not Just About the Smoker
“I’m not hurting anyone but myself” is
the single biggest lie spoken by almost 100% of smokers.
Although smokers are 15 times more likely to die from lung
disease than non-smokers, most smokers continue to kid themselves that
they’re not hurting anyone but themselves. But we
now know that the offspring of smokers (including even their
grandchildren and great-grandchildren) have double, quintuple and even
higher rates of cancers, immune diseases, heart disease and lung
disease than non-smokers.
“We all have to die of something” is a truth that
attempts to bury the fact that smokers die much younger than the rest
of the population, and die from deaths involving the worst kinds of
human suffering imaginable.
And the cost of all this death and disease from smoking, at $12.7
billion per annum in Australia, has crippled our health system and
prevented many thousands of people from getting crucial health care.
These devastating effects of smoking are so well-known and so
solidly-proven, that most countries in the world consider smoking to be
such a threat to public health that radical measures, including
prohibition, have been introduced in order to try to minimize the
shocking damage.
Why are these facts not enough to wipe out smoking overnight?
Education Is
Not Enough
Government education campaigns have had a minimal effect on smoking
rates, and in fact smoking rates amongst children (who receive the
greatest attention from anti-smoking education programs) are
increasing!
Pregnant women are comprehensively informed about the dangers of
smoking and in particular the damaging effects on their babies, both
before and after birth. Ultrasound shows the appalling effect
on babies in the womb of every intake of smoke-laden breath by mother,
whether from her own cigarette, or from second-hand smoke in the room.
However research indicates that many expectant mothers continue to
smoke, even lying about the amount of smoking they do.
Clearly, the physical and psychological addictive qualities of
cigarette smoking are only marginally affected by education
programs. What could be so strong that a mother would kill or
harm her baby in preference to stopping smoking?
Current
Treatments Are Failing
The need to smoke is so strong that all current treatments for smoking
fail for nearly 100% of people. That’s right, the
effectiveness of the most well-known treatments that aim to help people
become non-smokers is so low that the enormous majority of smokers who
try those treatments fail in their attempt, as shown by the McGill
University research results outlined in the table below:
Context or Method of Smoking Cessation, with
Success Rate
1.0 Doctor prescribed
3%
2.0 With support of family/friends
5%
3.0 With support groups
0%
4.0 Risk factors
During Pregancy 3%
Men at risk of heart attack 8%
Men who have survived heart attack 36%
5.0 Behaviour modification techniques
Unspecified 2%
Aversion therapy 0%
Hypnosis 0%
6.0 Using drugs
6.1 Nicotine replacement (patches, gum, sprays etc)
If prescribed by a doctor 3.4%
If self prescribed 11.13%
6.2 Clonadine 0%
6.3 Tranquilisers -10% (Yes, this means what you think it means, people smoke MORE if treated with tranquilisers)
7.0 Acupuncture
3%
But I Know
Someone Who Had Hypnosis and Quit!
I have no doubt that you know someone who’s used one of the
methods shown above and successfully quit, even though there may be a
zero success rating in the table. Remember that these figures
are assessing results for many thousands of people and go to 2 decimal
points only. If less than 1 in a thousand people successfully
quits using a particular method, that will show as 0%. This
is a result that is no better than if the person used no method at all,
and just tried to stop cold turkey.
However apart from the shocking evidence that treatment involving
tranquilisers actually dramatically increases the amount of cigarettes
smoked, and the disastrously-low success rates overall, these figures
lead us to some very important conclusions.
First it seems that the fear of going without cigarettes is second only
to the fear of imminent death – notice that the only
significant success rate was for men who had just survived a heart
attack (although even that was still very low!).
Secondly it is clear that cigarette programs work best where the smoker
him/herself had selected the program – notice that nicotine
patches have more than 3 times the chance of working for someone if
they choose to try by themselves than if their doctor prescribes them.
Thirdly despite the smoker’s strong wish to give up the
habit, there are obviously major forces, both chemical and
psychological that in most cases prevent success.
We should also remember that drugs and nicotine patches in no way
address the psychological reasons for smoking that every smoker has!
The Key to
Successful Smoking Cessation is Conditioning
Let’s examine an incredibly common situation that many
“ex” smokers find themselves in.
“Mary” can be our example of a typical person who
has gone through a stop smoking program. Some months after
completing her smoking cessation program, and following some stress at
work, Mary “discovers” herself at the supermarket
checkout taking the change from a packet of cigarettes she only vaguely
remembers asking for. She made no conscious
decision to purchase cigarettes. Rather it was unconscious
and automatic behavior.
Believe it or not this astounding occurrence is quite common!
Our automatic behavior (known as conditioned responses) is very good at
producing just this kind of situation. If Mary has had a
habit of purchasing cigarettes from the checkout, then the checkout is
now linked to smoking.
If Mary has had a habit of having a cigarette with a cup of coffee,
then coffee is now linked to smoking. If Mary has had a habit
of having a cigarette while reading the newspaper, then newspapers are
now linked with smoking.
Indeed, if Mary has smoked through the day, it would be difficult to
think of objects or situations which ARE NOT linked to smoking!
These automatic links are generally not susceptible to willpower
because there are just too many of them, and because the conscious mind
isn’t fast enough to keep up with them – operating
at a speed of just 7 bits of information a second, versus the
unconscious mind’s giant processing speed of 2 million bits
of information a second.
The Answer to
the Problem of Program Failure
Clearly, to properly address the reasons why smokers continue to smoke,
we must eliminate the unconscious links between objects and situations,
and smoking. Up until fairly recently in the history of
psychology this has been regarded as a difficult if not impossible
task, but with advances in neuro-psycho-physiology, we now have
highly-effective tools to firstly identify and secondly eliminate
conditioning, including the conditioning of addiction.
It turns out that conditioned responses aren’t nearly as
robust as people had thought, because they rely on uninterrupted
replay. If we can present the smoker with the precise trigger
which is associated with smoking, at the same time as introducing a
variety of other unrelated triggers, we get excellent interruption of
the response, and thereby achieve destruction of the smoking link,
quite quickly, and usually permanently.
The name for this approach is BMSA, or Brief, Multi-Sensory Activation,
and it is based soundly on consensus scientific principles in
neuro-psycho-physiology. Unlike other programs, it
doesn’t require the smoker to throw out cigarettes or
ashtrays, and instead works to delink these things from smoking
behavior, breaking the bonds that used to kick-start smoking and cause
the old programs to fail.
Success depends on just 1 factor: the smoker must self-select
the program in order for the best results to be obtained. How
fast a smoker becomes a non-smoker depends not on the strength of the
addictive feelings, but on the number and variety of links which need
to be addressed.
Are you a smoker? Do you know people who are still
smoking? Now that you understand the powerful role of
conditioning in continued smoking, you have in your hands the power to
truly become a non-smoker, and to play your part in reversing the
damage done not only to you, but to our species.
You can read more about our very inexpensive stop smoking program "Becoming a Non-Smoker" by clicking HERE.
About
the
Author: Christine
Sutherland is the
founder of The Lifeworks Group Pty Ltd.
She is a behavioural therapist, clinical
researcher, and
internationally-published author of a range of reference texts for
health
professionals, corporate managers, and the general public.
You
can contact Christine on christine@lifeworks-group.com.au.
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