Little Star Homeschool

John is a great fan of hypnosis and spotted this rather garish book with its red and yellow cover while shopping in WHSmith. It was a rare impulse purchase and one which has changed his life. He was a 20 - 30 a day smoker who had made many attempts over 30 years to give up the habit. He tried patches, gum, willpower, herbal cigarettes, Skoll Bandits (remember them), snuff and even Fishermans Friends (throat lozenges).

The book is 123 pages long and divided into two parts with a hypnosis CD. The idea is you read the first part of the book, listen to the hypnosis CD then read the rest of the book. The first part makes sobering reading, it is full of facts and figures of what smoking does to the body and the mind. Statistics abound on the number of people who die horribly from the dreaded weed and also for good measure includes a nice statistic on the number of people who need to have limbs amputated as well. Pretty shocking and the old smokers addage "it won't happen to me" is exploded once and for all. Susan Hepburn does insist that you really must want to give up smoking. This is the most important point of the book. Without this commitment you will not stop smoking. The CD follows a pattern which is common to many hypnosis CDs that is the "talk down induction" where the subject is put into a deep state of relaxation which calms the conscious mind thus allowing the hypnotic commands to be delivered straight to the subconscious where they will be acted upon without question. After this the induction is reversed to bring the subject back to full awareness. I should mention that whilst under hypnosis one is still aware of what is going on around them and should an emergency arise one can wake up instantly. This is mentioned on the CD and is one of the things one must look for when purchasing, although it is fair to say that any professionally created hypnosis CD will have these instructions.Suprisingly on first using the CD John wasn't impressed, it seemed to simple. He had previously given up smoking for two years using Paul McKenna's method but obviously lapsed. Pretty soon however he began to realise that the beauty of this CD lies in its simplicity. No jargon or age regression which in effect takes you back to before you smoked, just the author telling you that you will not smoke again. He used the CD late at night and read the rest of the book before going to bed. He woke next morning with no desire to smoke and hasn't smoked since. After two days he picked up a cigarette put it in his mouth then put the cigarette back in the packet and said "what is the point of that, I don't know why I ever smoked in the first place." Its been 4 weeks now since he quit and he is quite happy to sit with smokers, never feeling the urge to ask for a cigarette and has no desire to 'borrow' cigarettes if they are left lying around. He has not compensated by snacking, munching on mints or any other habit replacement 'therapy.' The second part of the book reinforces the first, continuing in a similar vein. It is now two weeks on and he has not had a single craving for a cigarette, cigar, pipe, nicotine gum or patch.

He says that he has forgotten how to smoke. I guess its my turn next.