smoking

You hate smoking. It stinks, it is costly and quite frankly you are tired of Big Tobacco putting their claws into your wallet. So, what comes next? If you are like so many people I see, you have tried numerous ways in the past, just to end up picking them (cigarettes) back up again. I have heard tales of people spending days at a smoke cessation seminar, only to buy a pack on their way home again. Yet, I have so many clients who stop smoking in only one session!

We review when you started smoking, how much you smoke and what triggers your desire for a cigarette. I ask lots and lots of questions, really wanting to understand everything about your habit. I understand that no two smokers are the same, so how we work together is bound to be different. I also have some suggestions that are offered to all.

Here are seven tips that may help you stop smoking:

1. Replace old tired habits with healthy new habits. Times when you used to smoke, brush your teeth, shower, exercise, change activities.  Remember…. the intensity, frequency & length of cravings diminish daily.  You can outlast a craving.  A thought of a cigarette is not a true craving!
2. Drink plenty of water, up to 6 – 8 glasses per day. Water helps to flush out toxins and the 7000 chemicals that cigarettes introduce into your body in slow, lethal doses.
3. Do Not Skip Meals – Each puff of the stimulant nicotine was your spoon releasing stored fats and sugars into your bloodstream via your body’s fight or flight pathways. It allowed you to skip meals without experiencing wild blood-sugar swing symptoms, such as an inability to concentrate or hunger related anxieties. Why add needless symptoms to withdrawal? Instead, learn to spread your normal daily calorie intake out more evenly over the entire day. Try hard not to skip breakfast or lunch. It’s not about eating more food but less food more frequently.
4. If you smoke when drinking, cut down on alcohol, to avoid weakening your promise to yourself.
5. The Smoking Dream – Be prepared for an extremely vivid smoking dream as tobacco odors released by horizontal healing lungs are swept up bronchial tubes by rapidly healing cilia and come in contact with a vastly enhanced sense of smell. See it as the wonderful sign of healing it reflects and nothing more.
6. Exercise! In addition to providing a distraction, “exercise may help reduce the craving because exercise helps reduce stress. It’s also useful for minor anxiety or depression — both of which can influence people to smoke. Along with cardiovascular exercise, include lifting weights. Lifting weights has shown some evidence of helping people quit smoking, although this data comes from smaller studies. It may help to keep free weights by your office desk, because they could also provide a distraction from a craving.
7. Relapse – Remember that there are only two good reasons to take a puff once you quit. You decide that you want to go back to your old level of consumption until smoking cripples and then kills you, or you decide you really enjoy withdrawal and you want to make it last forever. As long as neither of these options appeals to you the solution is as simple as … no nicotine just one day at a time, to stick to your original commitment to … Never Take Another Puff!

What if you have some cravings? Well, it is important to remember that cravings are time limited; usually lasting three minutes, so reducing a craving is often a matter of finding something else to do for that short time. If you sit in a chair and wait for the craving to go away, that’s going to make it much harder instead, change activities such as take a short walk.  Studies show that nicotine cessation causes significant time distortion. Although no subconsciously triggered crave episode will last longer than three minutes, to a quitter the minutes can feel like hours, especially if they panic. Keep a clock handy to maintain honest perspective.

So call me today with your questions and you can become a clean air breather! (727) 781-8483

As a hypnotist I know many reasons NOT to smoke. I think we all know the devastating effects on a smoker’s health, and even on the non-smoking spouse of a smoker. Among them are: lung cancer, heart disease, strokes, throat cancer, breast cancer, and so many other potentially fatal conditions.

 So today I am wondering not about why Quit smoking, but why smoke?

 Most people start in their teens. The statistics say 80%. Just try to imagine a 50 year old person sitting at their desk at work, thinking. Why don’t I start smoking? How about a 30 year old who has just completed running in the park, Hmmmm, maybe I should have a cigarette. Or a 40 year-old at a convenience store having the impulse to buy a carton of cigarettes on sale. I just have trouble imagining how one would get the inspiration to light up after being a teen.

Teens start for social reasons. They want to be like their friends, they want to be liked, they think it makes them grown up as it is illegal for minors but not for adults. How bad could it be? They know many smokers, may even live with one. Sometimes they think they can do it temporarily, so they can hang out with their friends now and when they graduate college, it will be easy to stop. No teenager I ever spoke to admitted they were addicted.

But what is an addiction? There are choices all along the way. I don’t know anyone who was forced to take up smoking. After 30 years, it doesn’t seem like a choice, but during the first few years, you have to force yourself to continue, you have to persist or it won’t become a habit.

But it’s easy to quit smoking. Mark Twain said, 

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I have done it thousands of times!

He was trying to be humorous, BUT the fact is, people quit every day. Some use hypnosis. Some use other methods. The statistics say that 15 million people attempt to quit smoking every day, yet less than 3 percent of these people succeed. That means less than 5 million. So let me assert that 4 million people quit permanently every day!


Gloria D. Constantas M.A. has been a certified hypnotist for over 10 years. She earned a Master’s Degree in Counseling, Human Services, and Guidance in 1995, and then became certified by the National Guild of Hypnotists in 1996. She is also certified as an instructor of professional hypnotists since 2006. She has guided her clients to overcome many barriers to success, including phobias, anxiety, poor self-image, and low motivation, using hypnosis. She is the president of the Tampa Bay Chapter of NGH and on the adjunct faculty of the annual NGH convention.