Smoking Cessation: Meditation for smoking cessation and for mindful living

Improve your life and health: This audio recording includes two full meditation sessions and is designed to teach you how to get the life you want through meditation: Specifically how to stop smoking and achieve mindfulness in your daily life.

First, Smoking Cessation: Smoking cessation (colloquially quitting smoking) is the process of discontinuing tobacco smoking. Tobacco contains nicotine, which is addictive, making the process of quitting often very prolonged and difficult.

Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death worldwide, and quitting smoking significantly reduces the risk of dying from tobacco-related diseases such as heart disease and lung cancer. Seventy per cent of smokers would like to quit smoking, and 50 percent report attempting to quit within the past year. Many different strategies can be used for smoking cessation, including quitting without assistance ("cold turkey" or cut down then quit), medications such as nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), and behavioural counselling. The majority of smokers who try to quit do so without assistance, though only 3 to 6% of quit attempts without assistance are successful. Use of medications and behavioural counselling both increase success rates, and a combination of both medication and behavioural interventions has been shown to be even more effective.

Because nicotine is addictive, quitting smoking leads to symptoms of nicotine withdrawal such as craving, anxiety and irritability, depression, and weight gain. Professional smoking cessation support methods generally endeavour to address both nicotine addiction and nicotine withdrawal symptoms.

This short meditation is designed to help you to achieve smoking cessation through exercises to relax the body and the mind while focusing on your breathing and receiving reassuring and reinforcing instruction with the use of visualisation. This audio is not hypnotism simply the use of effective positive affirmation while in a relaxed state. Results will be better if used in association with other interventions mentioned above.

The intention of the second guided meditation is that you will learn to bring mindfulness into your daily life which will help you to feel less stressed, more at ease within your body and mind.