Deciding to quit smoking is not ever a punishment. Doing that for yourself is showing
that you love yourself and when you put that new frame around it, in NLP we call this
reframing, when you put that new frame around it, it makes it so much more palatable
to be able to take on that kind of a challenge. Actually, suddenly starts to seem
appealing to realise that when you do this, you’re doing yourself a massive favour. That
you are showing how much you care for yourself, by taking care of yourself in the best
possible way.

So that’s a really important thing to do too and for those of you who are can’t quite get
your head round that way of thinking yet and need a little bit more leverage so a bit
more of a push. Then the best thing I can suggest to you is this – if you think about
cigarettes and start to reduce the quality of the way in which you remember them,
because the chances are the way that you remember the taste of cigarette smoke is
much tastier than the way it tastes in real life. You have a much better memory of it
than how it actually tastes when you come to experience it. Think about the memory of
cigarettes and just start to reduce the quality of that memory and you can do this very
simply by distorting the colour, so perhaps draining the colour out and changing it to
black and white. You can do it by moving the image further away from you, by shrinking
that image down, by putting a frame around the image, by moving the image to a
different location within your field of vision so whatever it is that your eyes stare out to,
to imagine that image just move your eyes somewhere else and put the image over
there and you’ll notice that you start to feel very differently about it.

Now it might not mean that you absolutely hate it but it will certainly start to
reduce the power that the memory of cigarettes, such that you don’t feel quite as
compelled in the future to be drawn towards them.

Imagine yourself smoking a cigarette and realising that there isn’t just tobacco inside it,
but it is also stuffed with someones pubic hair. Just imagine that right now.

Imagine that cigarette that you loved. Not only has it got bits of the tobacco you used to
enjoy, but it’s also got somebody’s dirty hair in and you’ve been putting it in your
mouth, not knowing quite where it came from. Then it’s got wedged in one of your back
teeth and you cannot get it out and so you try to swallow to get rid of it, but only half
the hair goes down your throat and the other half is still in your mouth. How awful, so
you put your fingers in to try and reach for it to try and take that bit of hair out and try
and salvage whatever you can from the cigarette but as soon as you stick your fingers in
your mouth, it makes you start to gag.

Can you imagine that happening?

And I wonder how many of you now are thinking about the cigarettes that you used to
absolutely love and are not feeling quite as drawn to it as you used to? All that took was
just a couple of minutes and using your imagination. Imagine what a session of
hypnotherapy could do for you!

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk