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The Secret Failure Rate of Smoking Cessation Programs

Written by: Christine Sutherland

Article Overview: Few people realise that over the last decade, despite an abundance of stop smoking programs, the real success rate is absolutely dismal, all because program designers don't fully understand the addiction they're working with!

The Secret Failure Rate of Smoking Cessation Programs

Few people realise that over the last 2 decades, despite an abundance of smoking cessation programs, almost no progress has been made in designing programs that work. However the small but steady decline in smoking rates has been attributed almost solely to government education drives, and not to smoking cessation programs.

McGill University really put the boot into smoking cessation programs with the release of data combed from a wide range of methods. Just look at these shocking figures!

Context or Method of Smoking Cessation, with Success Rate

1.0 Doctor Prescribed – 3%
2.0 With support of family/friends – 5%
3.0 With support groups – 0%
4.0 In smokers in different risk situations:
- During pregnancy – 3%
- Men at risk of heart attack – 8%
- Men who have survived a heart attack – 36%
5.0 Behaviour modification techniques:
- Unspecified – 2%
-Aversion therapy – 0%
- Hypnosis – 0%
6.0 Pharmacology
6.1 NRT (Nicotine Replacement)
- Prescribed by the doctor – 3.4%
- Self prescribed – 11.13%
6.2 Clonidine – 0%
6.3 Tranquillizers – NEGATIVE 10%
7.0 Acupuncture – 3%

NB: People who are prescribed tranquillizers as part of their smoking cessation program, actually increase their smoking by 10%!

Now, in case you’re saying, but I know someone who had hypnosis for smoking and they gave up, or I know someone who had aversion therapy and they gave up, remember that these figures were collated from many thousands of data. The fact is that when you look at the success stories amongst the overwhelming failure, the overall success is so close to zero that you could say the method was completely irrelevant.

What these figures do demonstrate is that about the only thing smokers fear more than giving up smoking, is death. (Notice the jump in success rate with smoking cessation attempted AFTER the heart attack rather than before it.) And it’s important that people make up their own minds. (Notice that self-prescribed NRT has a success rate over 3 times higher than when NRT is prescribed by a doctor.)

But the overall success rate of all these programs together is appallingly low. And the answer to this should be obvious. Not one of these programs has fully understood the power of unconscious conditioning to drive behaviour, above and beyond anything that willpower or discipline is capable of!

And yet the techniques to identify and deal with exactly this type of unconscious conditioning at the base of addiction has been available for over a decade.

How Addictive Feelings Arise

It should have become very clear to any serious researcher in the field of addiction that addictive or compulsive feelings arise in the brain, and just like any other conditioned response, involve primarily 3 brain organs, the thalamus, hippocampus and amygdala. Most people need to practice the smoking habit for at least a short time before a pattern sets in. (Just like practising the times tables! It takes a little while before these things become automatic.)
That's why we call these addictive or compulsive feelings "addiction patterns" and the key to effortlessly knocking them out is to trigger them at the same time as we trigger a bundle of other stimuli that are outside the pattern.

Here’s an Example of Knocking Out an Addictive Urge

Here is a simple example of what it can be like to eliminate an addiction pattern. Let's say Jake is a smoker and like most smokers he has a multitude of addiction patterns, some of which relate to the smell, taste, feel and thought of the cigarette itself, and some of which relate to behaviours or situations that inevitably give rise to feelings of addiction -- those "must have" feelings.

We'll take just one of those for now, and we'll call it the "beer pattern" because every time Jake has a beer, he has an irresistible urge to smoke. We trigger the beer pattern (using various imaginary scenarios) and get Jake to really concentrate on that, but at the same time we might get him to:

• Imagine he is eating a nice meal
• Imagine he is talking on the phone
• Tap briskly over his head and chest
• Do some quick arithmetical calculations
• Move about in various ways
• Smell different perfumes
• Listen to unfamiliar music

These are not things Jake has done previously when experiencing the "beer pattern". Of course! They are unfamiliar and "out of synch" with his pattern. Effectively, they interrupt the pattern, but not just for now. The pattern is permanently changed, and if we do this precisely enough and thoroughly enough for all of Jake's patterns, along with other smoking cessation education and strategies, we can be highly confident of an excellent result.

www.realhelp2stopsmoking.com

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