You're nearing the end of January - how are you faring on your New Year Resolutions? Did you promise to quit smoking? Clinical hypnotist Georgia Foster offers her wisdom to help you stay on track.

If you're a smoker or there are colleagues who smoke and you have some concerns about it, there are a number of important aspects to understand and respect about giving up explains clinical hypnotist Georgia Foster:

• It's important to understand why it's often difficult for people to stop. If the desire to stop smoking was as easy as getting up on a Monday morning and saying to yourself consciously: "I have made the decision not to smoke another cigarette" then you would have stopped smoking a long time ago with great success the first time round. 
  
• So why is it so difficult to stop smoking when actually it's not? The unconscious mind is like a library. For every cigarette that you have smoked, prior to you taking that action of smoking there would have been a trigger. The trigger could have been having a cup of coffee, or perhaps waiting for the bus or that first glass of wine in the evening. It could be that you were angry or bored or tired or hungry. All of these experiences then become attached to smoking.
• If you would like to stop smoking, you need to train the deeper part of the mind where all your habits are stored. The best, safest and easiest method of doing this is with hypnosis. By using hypnosis you can re-train the deeper part of your mind where all of these emotional habits are stored, so that drinking that glass of wine becomes smoke-free, irrelevant of the stress that you are experiencing at the time or the party that you are attending.