A total of 240,000 people a year in this country stop smoking, that's an average of 660 people who today will stub out their cigarettes for the last time, and these are people who will never smoke again.

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These statistics are encouraging because all these people can’t stop without a good proportion of them finding it straightforward.

So we have to ask the question; why do most people find it so difficult and can't even count the number of times they stopped in the morning, but by the evening they are back smoking again. Yet so many can find it straightforward to just give up for good.

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To answer this it is important to know how the mind works in relation to smoking, because much to the dismay of public belief, smoking, is a psychological habit much more than a physiological addiction.

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Today smokers are fully aware of the dangers that smoking can cause to their health, they are reminded by advertisements, public health notices, research studies and of course family and friends who care about their well-being.

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However, regardless of all this knowledge smokers continue to smoke as the addiction to smoking remains even when intellectually they know that it is damaging their health and shortening their lifespan.

This constant battle in a smokers mind exists because of two separate areas of the brain producing the pros and cons of their smoking thoughts and habitual behaviours. These two separate areas are known as the Intellectual mind and the primitive emotional mind.

The intellectual mind houses the anti-smoking lobby ( i.e. the capacity to rationalise and understand the dangers of smoking), this resides in pre-frontal cortex of our brain. When we operate from this part of the brain we do not have to smoke. We often say things like “Nobody in their right mind would smoke”

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The pro-smoking lobby operates from our primitive emotional brain area (Limbic System), where all our previously learned emotional responses and behaviours are stored. This primitive emotional mind has the ability to take control of the intellectual mind if it receives sensory information that we are in some sort of crisis or danger.

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Therefore, If we feel tired, stressed, or experience an upsetting event then our primitive emotional brain will take over, activating our stress response and refer to previous patterns of behaviour to see if we have experienced a similar “danger” before to look for “helpful” solutions.

If the primitive mind decides that smoking is helpful it can be a very powerful advocate for arguments that may be familiar to a smokers inner narrative such as : “smoking relieves stress”, “it helps me cope”, “I enjoy life a bit more when I smoke”.

During our 2 hour session we will initially talk about why and how you smoke, and how the mind works in relation to smoking. During this stage, you will learn “Serotonin Solutions” that will support and guide you to reduce the amount of time spent in your primitive mind and allow your intellectual mind to regain control when needed.

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This is a very important part of the process, as it is this learning that will stay with you. At Serotonin Solutions, I am not just interested in you being free of smoking tomorrow, next week or next month. I am interested in 5 years’ time if you have had a really tough day at work, an upsetting row or perhaps settling down to your 5th alcoholic drink when a close friend offers you a cigarette! - it is the understanding of how your mind works that stays with you.

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As part of the session I will also have the advantage of using hypnosis. It isn't magic, nor will it take control of your mind, it is instead a relaxation response reducing unnecessary stress so that you're more able to achieve your goal of not smoking with your intellectual mind (the anti-smoking lobby).

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It also opens up the mind helping you to use it in a fundamentally different way allowing you to rethink some of the misguided patterns of thought and behaviour from the past, in line with what you want to do for your best interests in the future.