Time magazine reported this week that one billion people will die from smoking by the end of this century. According to the World Health Organisation, smoking related illness already kills a person every six seconds (that's 100 million people in the 20th century alone).

As stop smoking experts, we help people quit smoking every day. But there is a limit to the number of people that we can physically see each week, which is why we created a FREE stop smoking programme - '5 top tips to Quit Smoking'. This programme is delivered by email over a month and is designed to follow your progress as you quit.

Please let us know how you get on with it!

Today is National No Smoking Day, and to celebrate we have launched our new FREE stop smoking programme - '5 top tips to Quit Smoking'. This programme is delivered by email over a month and is designed to follow your progress as you quit.

Our FREE email tips could help you quit smoking in 30 days.

Name:

Email:

Your privacy is respected and your information is NEVER shared with anyone.

Please let us know how you get on with it!

Wednesday 14th March is National No Smoking Day, which this year holds a special significance to many smokers faced with the reality of a total ban on smoking in public places coming later this year.

The Smoking in the Workplace Ban, which has already been implemented in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, comes into force in England on 1st July 2007. From that date all offices, factories, shops, pubs, bars, restaurants, clubs, public transport and work vehicles that are used by more than one person will be required to be smoke free by Law.

The good news is, if you really want to stop smoking, hypnotherapy could make it up to five times easier for you to quit!

Research comparing many different studies of hypnotherapy has shown that on average, smokers are over five times more likely to break the habit with hypnosis than by willpower alone. Hypnotherapy in general is also proven to be more than twice as effective compared with nicotine gum.

To mark National No Smoking Day, and help those smokers who want to beat the ban and quit before July, we are launching our new '5 Top Tips to Quit Smoking' programme which can help you quit all by yourself! Why are we doing this? Because although we are specialists in helping people to stop smoking, there are only so many people we can physically see in a day, and many smokers who are just too far away to come see us.

For those who prefer one-to-one help, find out how we could help you stop smoking in just 2 hours. Or if you are out of our area - why not visit your local ASDA supermarket on National No Smoking Day, as Hypnotherapists registered by the National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH) will be on hand in most stores to help and advise you.

As NCH registered Hypnotherapists, we will be at ASDA Gravesend from 10am to 6pm on Wednesday 14th March (National No Smoking Day), so if you have any questions on how we can help you to be 'smoke free' or 'get unhooked', please feel free to come down and see us.

According to an article in New Scientist, smokers with lung cancer who continue smoking may prevent the chemotherapy treament from working. Nor are patches the answer, as it turns out it is nicotine that causes the effect.

Srikumar Chellappan and colleagues at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, Florida, looked at how nicotine affected the performance of three anti-cancer drugs - gemcitabine, cisplatin and Taxol.

Nicotine protected the cancer cells by activating two genes called XIAP and survivin, which prevent the cell suicide normally induced by the drugs (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0509313103).

"Patients who continue to smoke have worse survival profiles than those who quit before treatment," says Chellappan. "Of course they have to be treated, but they should be undergoing smoking cessation programmes."

(Issue 2546 of New Scientist magazine, 08 April 2006, page 20)

Hypnotherapy is a safe, natural way to quit smoking, and is up to three times more effective than Nicotine Replacement Therapy (patches, gum etc). Please contact us for more information on how we can help you to quit.

For many smokers wanting to kick the habit, National Stop Smoking Day on 8th March comes as a mixed blessing. For some, it acts as an encouragement to continue the good work they started at New Year; for others, it is a painful reminder that the "season of good willpower" is well and truly over.

Many smokers will be contemplating quitting now that the pressure of New Years is over, whilst others are vowing to stay at home and smoke twice as many cigarettes on the 8th as a mark of defiance...

The Gravesham and surrounding boroughs are organising a number of events to help smokers - according to Gravesend News Shopper, Carbon Monoxide tests and stop smoking advice will be available to the general public at Dartford Priory Centre from 10am - 4pm, all day at Asda in London Road Swanley, and at lunchtime for students and staff at North West Kent College's Dartford campus.

Gravesend's Town Crier will be telling (or is that yelling?) people about stop smoking stands at the Thames Way Asda store, The Grand on the High Street, and the North West Kent College's Gravesend campus.

As we mentioned in our previous blog, Hypnotherapy is three times more effective than patches or gum, so we want to do our bit to help local smokers quit this Stop Smoking Day.

According to Scotland Today, there are calls for hypnosis treatment for smokers to be funded by the NHS ahead of the public smoking ban.

According to research into the most effective methods to stop smoking, hypnosis was found to be three times more effective than Nicotine Replacement Therapy (i.e nicotine patches or gum). A New Scientist article (vol 136 issue 1845 page 6) confirms:

"To find the most effective method to stop smoking Frank Schmidt and research student Chockalingham Viswesvaran from the university of Iowa used a meta-analysis, utilising the results of more than 600 studies totalling nearly 72,000 people.

The results, which were published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and included 48 studies of hypnosis covering 6000 smokers, clearly showed that hypnosis, to use the same terminology as the quit counsellor, was three times more effective than NRT."

Smokers find it so hard to quit because their unconscious mind has a faulty program which believes smoking is serving a positive purpose. And because the unconscious mind is responsible for keeping you safe, it has many ways to override your conscious will. The combination of hypnosis and NLP is so sucessful in helping people to quit smoking because it effectively re-programs your unconscious mind to work with you to achieve your goal.

If you are trying to make that New Years resolution stick, but are finding the 'season of good will-power' is coming to an end, why not contact us to find out how we can help you stop smoking today.

An article in this week's Sunday Times highlights the benefits of NLP in helping people overcome habits and negative behaviours. As Anita Chaudhuri reports, NLP is a way of reprogramming the mind in order to change negative behaviour.

It works by identifying subconscious pessimistic patterns, then zaps them by replacing them with new thoughts and images. A typical example would be the habitual smoker who is prone to lighting up when sipping a morning espresso or a glass of wine at the end of the day. An NLP therapist would program their brain to desire something other than a cigarette at those trigger moments.

NLP is just high-tech hypnosis says, Paul McKenna. Your brain is like a computer, and it?s as if you are installing new software to overwrite programs that no longer work. The key programs of human behaviour are habit and imagination, and they are far more powerful than logic or willpower. I?ve seen people make astounding changes in their thoughts and behaviour quickly.

(Sunday Times - 5th February 2006)

With Christmas fast approaching, many smokers are mentally gearing themselves up to quit - once the festivities have finished, of course - determined to make sure that this year the New Years resolution will stick.

Certainly, as hypnotherapists, we see a marked increase in the numbers of clients wanting help to stop smoking around the end of February, once the "season-of-good-will-power" has ended.

We couldn't find any major new research on hypnosis this week, but there was an interesting news report on the internet, which said that Ben Affleck has been given strict orders by his wife, Jennifer Garner, to quit smoking before the birth of their baby.