Smoking is an addictive behaviour classified by three or more of the following criteria: tolerance, withdrawal, higher consumption than intended, desire or failing efforts to control use, excessive time spent in substance-related activities, reduction in other activities due to substance use, and...

Motivation is generally accepted as a requirement for success. With motivation, we can get from Point A, where we are, to Point B, where we want to be. Without it, change work can be slow and often grind to a halt.  So anything we can do to maintain motivation is of value to all involved. One th...

The statistics show that in Australia someone has a heart attack every 10 minutes and as frequently as high as every 40 seconds in America! When we have a heart attack, i.e., blocked blood flow to the heart usually caused by atherosclerosis, it can cause permanent damage and death to parts of t...

Positive and negative reinforcement   Positive and negative reinforcement both produce a wanted state. One of the positive reinforcement strategies that people adopt when using substances like cigarettes is reliance on them to regulate their cognitive and emotional states (e.g., feel better, th...

How often have you wanted to make a change and thought it wasn't worth the effort and your investment to do it? Perhaps you had good intentions and even had a plan or a vision of how you would implement it but for some reason, that's as far as it gets and the change never happens. When we're co...

There are over 1.1 billion smokers in the world today, with tobacco smoking causing 7.7 million deaths – including 1 in 5 deaths in males worldwide1. There are no hard and fast rules about how or why people decide to quit but some of the common reasons are health, finances, social desirability, r...

Hypnosis is the most effective way of giving up smoking, according to the largest ever scientific comparison of ways of quitting smoking. Willpower or being advised by your GP counts for very little it seems. The study was conducted by Frank Schmidt and research student Chockalingam Viswesvaran,...

Sleep loss can be an incredibly debilitating and frustrating problem that most, if not all, of us will experience in our lifetime. We lose sleep when we're excited, nervous, stressed, pregnant, grieving, angry, upset, unwell, anxious, conflicted, jetlagged, and the list goes on. For some, it's g...

Laural was finding it difficult to quit smoking. He'd tried everything over the years and yet nothing seemed to last more than a day or two. He knew it was causing him some health difficulties e.g., wheezing, easily getting out of breath, and feeling very agitated when he couldn't have one. The c...

Relapses happen all the time, indeed most people will have tried several times and not succeeded at many kinds of things in life, love, leisure, work, and business. The Relapse Prevention model (RP) was originally developed as a behavioural maintenance programme for use in the treatment of addic...