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Side effects to stopping smoking by willpower alone - Restlessness

What to expect if you stop smoking by willpower alone

Someone who tries to stop smoking by willpower alone, may find it hard to sit for a long time in one place.. they feel fidgety, and want to move about, feeling like there is something else they should be doing.

When to expect it

If someone has tried to stop smoking by willpower alone, they may find that this affects them mostly for the first week or so, but at any time until the habit has diminished.

Why does it happen?

Over their years of smoking, their mind has formed a link between some particular activity, and smoking. 

When the conscious mind tries to abstain from smoking, the subconscious mind often devises many ways to try to get the person smoking again...  So when they are in this particular situation, the link triggers a desire to smoke.

It’s the feeling that something is not quite right, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it…  it’s called ‘cognitive dissonance’, and it’s caused by the conscious mind trying to concentrate on one thing, but the unconscious mind is tying to tell you that you should be doing something else… that feeling of ‘something’s not quite right, but I’m not sure what’ is caused by the discrepancy between these two parts of your mind. 

To give an analogy, it’s a bit like sea-sickness when inside a ship… your eyes (looking at the room you’re in), tell you that you’re in a stationery room, while your ears (where your sense of balance come from), tell you that you’re moving… the two disagree, and the brain can’t understand this, and that’s why people feel seasick. 

What you can do to help yourself

Like in the sea-sickness analogy above the only way to help with cognitive dissonance, is to bring the two parts of the mind into balance.  With sea-sickness, it’s just a matter or looking out of a port-hole.  Once your eyes see that the horizon is moving from side to side, just the way the balance receptors in the ears are saying that it is, the two inputs to the brain match… the brain likes it that way, and many of the feeling of sea-sickness will disappear.  When stopping smoking, it’s not quite that simple to bring the two parts of the mind back together… the conscious mind determined not to smoke, the unconscious mind saying that that’s not quite right, because the habit of smoking is so ingrained. 

There are two main ways of bringing the two parts of the mind (the conscious and the unconscious) back together

• Over time, the unconscious mind will realise that there is a new pattern of behaviours to be learned… that of the non-smoker… the phrase to emphasise here is ‘over time’… because the behaviour of smoking is often learned maybe 20-30 times a day, every day, for many years, and it can take the unconscious mind a long time to relearn the correct behaviour.
   
• You could consider a session of stop smoking hypnotherapy with me! - See below for an explanation.

Why my clients find it easier

The 'need' to smoke comes from the individual's subconscious mind, weighing up the benefits of smoking, against the benefits of not smoking. 

The stop smoking hypnotherapy session sets about to change the subconscious balance, so that the person has no desire to smoke, because their subconscious mind finds that the benefits of not smoking, greatly outweigh the 'benefits' of smoking.

When this process happens, the mechanisms supporting these 'withdrawal symptoms' are no longer there.

	Your Name Your Location E-Mail Age Reason for contact Book an Initial consultation Changing Limiting Beliefs Stop Smoking Other (please specify)     Which practice? Cambridgeshire (Chatteris) Essex (Takeley) North London I am looking to find a hypnotherapist in my local area. (UK Only. Person named must be 18 or over) Telephone Further details