Stop Smoking Cigarettes By Applying

Mindfulness Meditation As A Strategy

Mindfulness is a powerful aid for anyone who wants to stop smoking cigarettes or any other
compulsive habit. Although challenging, it's profoundly simple and has a huge positive payoff.

For anyone who is a long-time habitual smoker, the challenge to stop smoking cigarettes is
usually overwhelmingly difficult. As is well known, even for smokers who are successful in
quitting, relapse rates are very high. In order to be successful, therefore, it's essential to
utilize the most powerful long-range strategy that's available.

There's a strong argument to be made for including mindfulness meditation as one part of
such a strategy. It can be very helpful in two distinct ways.

On the one hand, it can provide an effective means of coping with the intense symptoms of
nicotine withdrawal and craving that inevitably arise with smoking cessation. There is now
abundant evidence that this particular application, which is commonly called mindfulness-
based stress reduction, provides a highly effective way to cope with all forms of physical
pain, discomfort, or distress.

Secondly there's growing evidence that mindfulness, when applied consistently over time,
can help weaken the subtle but powerful mental habits that underlie all compulsive forms of
behavior and which make them so strongly resistant to change. There is now also solid
neuroscience evidence that the consistent practice of mindfulness can actually alter the
structure of the brain in measurable and seemingly positive ways, giving rise to increased
equanimity and positive affect.

So what is mindfulness? Most basically, it consists in simply paying careful, moment-to-

moment attention to all internal and external experience while simultaneously accepting it
and allowing it to be just as it is, without judging or trying to change it in any way whatever.
It is, in other words, a means of living fully, consciously, and non-reactively in the present
moment, instead of reacting negatively, or getting attached, to current experience and/or
getting lost in thoughts about the past or the future.

This tendency to get "lost in thought" is strongly habitual for most people. At the very least, it
tends to deprive us of "capturing our moments"--i.e., of living fully in the present. Even
worse, however, since much of our thinking is negative, it's a major root cause of what we
commonly call "stress."

Some initial research studies have utilized mindfulness meditation in helping people stop
smoking cigarettes. In one of these studies, 56% of the subjects showed biologically-
confirmed smoking abstinence six weeks after quitting. It was also found that "compliance
with meditation was positively associated with smoking abstinence and decreases in stress

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and affective distress."

Complete information about this strategy, along with two free mp3's providing guidance in
mindfulness meditation, is available at the website below.

* This news post was submitted by George Shears

http://tinyurl.com/34s89a

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