Product Description

Everyone knows how bad smoking is for them: about half of all regular cigarette smokers will be killed by their habit, but they just can't seem to give up. If you're really serious about giving up smoking then this is the book that will not only help you to stop, but to stay stopped for good. Gillian Riley's techniques allow you to understand your addiction, take control and break your habit. There is a step-by-step giving up programme that is easy to follow and really works. Even in stressful situations, or when boredom sets in, you'll soon realise that even though the freedom and opportunity to smoke is there you have chosen not to. "How to Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good" will even help you to give up smoking without gaining weight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13367 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

From the Publisher
A new edition of the bestselling programme to stop smoking and stay stopped for good, published to tie-in with the complete smoking ban planned for 2007

About the Author
A former smoker and overeater, Gillian Riley has been teaching her successful techniques for stopping smoking and eating less since 1982. Her work has at its focus the thinking that drives addictive behaviour and the practical techniques needed to achieve control. A highly articulate teacher, she brings to her seminars and personal counselling a practical approach which confronts the psychological barriers that make the difference between failure and success in the long term. Gillian lives in Leicestershire and leads weekend seminars in London on taking control of overeating. She also offers telephone counselling for smoking wanting support with her approach. She is the author of Eating Less and Willpower! Visit Gillian's website: www.eatingless.com

Excerpted from How to Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good (Positive Health) by Gillian Riley. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PART ONE
UNDERSTANDING ADDICTION
1 HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
‘Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven.’
William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
The technique that this book describes is radically different from any other you will have come across. Although the message may at times seem obvious, in practice it requires a change in your mental approach which needs to be worked at. It will challenge the way you have been thinking about smoking and will require you to question and absorb completely new ideas. This takes time, and the most valuable thing you can do is to make stopping smoking the number one priority in your life while you are going through this major change.
The way to learn this technique is to read this book thoroughly, frequently and, most important of all, privately. As far as possible, tell no-one that you are thinking about stopping smoking, don’t discuss what you are doing in the process of stopping, and try to keep quiet for as long as you can about having stopped, when you do. This may seem unusual, but there are some very good reasons for doing it this way. It’s not that your smoking doesn’t affect other people, because it does. And it’s not that other people aren’t entitled to their opinion about your smoking, because they are. The reason it’s best to keep it to yourself is because the first step for you in taking control of your smoking is to recognize that your smoking is a problem you have created, and it’s your problem to solve.
If you keep this technique private, you will learn to rely completely on yourself, and therefore you will be able to stay stopped, no matter who is or isn’t with you. It can make the difference between success and failure if you can remember that whether you smoke or not is entirely up to you. It will also help you to stop smoking – and stay stopped – because you want to, and not to please others.
If friends or family know you are reading this book, tell them you don’t want to discuss it. The whole process of stopping smoking will be, and needs to be, on your mind a lot to begin with, so it can be very tempting to keep talking about it. But if you do, you will invite their comments, and encouragement and advice from other people can so easily end up feeling like pressure or nagging.
I think that you will understand more clearly the value of keeping this private as you read on, but it’s important to put this into practice from the beginning.
If you and your partner both want to stop, my advice is not to stop smoking at the same time. You can get competitive, resentful of each other’s failure or success, and your own motivation can get tied up with wanting the other to succeed. If you do stop smoking at the same time as a partner or friend, at least don’t discuss it at all during the first few weeks.
You might believe it’s impossible for you to stop smoking unless your partner or friend stops as well. But you will find, as many others have, that one of the best things about this technique is that you will have no difficulty spending time with other smokers after you have stopped.
You might, however, want to create or join a support group, or have one person, a counsellor for example, to talk things through with. This won’t counteract the benefit of keeping the process private if you make sure you discuss stopping smoking only with that group or person, and only at specific times. This is entirely different from talking about stopping at home, during work or on social occasions with anyone who will listen.
If you do use a group or support person, make sure they don’t have a vested interest in you stopping smoking. In other words, if someone in your life has been pushing you to stop smoking, they are not the person to ask for support.
And it’s going to be very important for the person or people who are supporting you to be familiar with this technique. Otherwise, they will inevitably advise you in ways that are contrary to this approach.
How much time you spend reading and at what point you stop smoking is entirely up to you. You might read this book through once and become inspired to stop immediately. Or it may be that it won’t start to make any real sense until you have read it through a number of times.
This has very little to do with how intelligent you are and a great deal to do with how addicted you are. Because the central ideas require a complete revision of your habitual way of thinking, it might take a while for you to get used to and really understand them.
If you think that a particular chapter has just clicked something vital into place in your mind, whether it’s on your first reading or your twentieth, by all means go ahead and stop smoking there and then. If you decide to stop during your first read, make sure that you are able to finish the whole book as soon as possible, because there will almost certainly be some crucial information for you in each chapter.
If, however, you get to the end and still don’t feel ready to stop, then I suggest that you read and re-read, and then set a target date for stopping. Write it down, with a specific time, so that you don’t conveniently ‘forget’ it; and keep working with the technique to overcome your resistance to making this change.

Customer Reviews

Forget patches... doctors should prescribe this book
If you are a smoker, invest in this book. (Make sure you keep your own copy... others will want to borrow it, but you need to keep your own to reread occasionally.) I had given up smoking a couple of times... the 1st time for 6 weeks, the 2nd time I cut down, then gave up for 3 months. I had a stressful day at work and took a wee drag of someone else's cigarette... not long afterwards I was back to 20 a day. "That's it" I thought, "I'm destined to be a smoker." I was really annoyed with myself. Anyway, later that year, in November, I picked up this book in my mother's and started to read it - after a couple of pages I couldn't put it down. She explained so many things about my addiction I hadn't understood. I frequently found myself thinking "That's SO true... but I would have never worked it out for myself in 100 years!" This book is great because you read it, practice what it preaches, and you KNOW when you are ready to give up and are totally confident from day one - which for me was January 2nd. There are no battles with your willpower, no jealousy of your friends who are still smoking... you will be able to go out and have a drink and cope with people smoking all around you without wanting to grab the cigarette out of their hand. You will welcome cravings and be able to deal with them! (Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?) You will not need patches, or to substitute cigarettes with food (when I was off them for 3 months I did put on weight, but not this time). It totally takes the difficulty out of the process. The beauty of it is that you can also use this method to give up other things too, eg alcohol or cannabis etc.
So how does this book achieve all this? Well, it explains the nature of the psychological addiction, for example why it's normal to have a strong craving for a cigarette maybe 10 years after you've given up! Secondly, it teaches you a different way of thinking. You don't think "I can never have a cigarette again!"... this gives you that familiar feeling of being deprived of your cigarettes... setting you up for failure, as you jealously watch others smoking, and eventually like I did, you crack and "reward" yourself with a cigarette. Instead you are aware that of course you can have a cigarette - you can have a cigarette any time you like, if you want to! When you have a craving, you acknowledge the craving and picture succumbing to it. You have the choice to smoke if you want to. But at this point you realise that if you take even one puff, you will start smoking again... and you always choose not to have that puff. Because you are only choosing to refuse one craving at a time - and, crucially, you will have practiced this so often BEFORE you give up that you'll know you can do it- it is actually easy, with no feelings of deprivation.
I've been off cigarettes for 5 years now and I can honestly say it was easy... and yet I never understood before I read this book exactly how addicted I was to cigarettes! I've bought this book for several people and recommended it to many. Some people said they'd prefer to give up using patches/willpower than read this book... I say read it and save yourself a lot of hassle. I look at people who've been smoking all of their lives and think "If only they knew!"

JUST DO IT!
If you're the sort of person who thinks that your life depends on cigarettes and without them, there would be no fun in your life and you'd be....well, LESS than you are now and if you didn't smoke then you wouldn't be YOU....if you know what I mean - then this book is your key to freedom!

I smoked 40 a day for 25 years.....sometimes more if I was drinking or having a good time.....I LOVED everything about smoking. I never wanted to stop at all. I smoked through colds and coughs, I stood outside buildings in the rain, puffing away. I hated going to friends houses where I couldn't smoke. I never went anywhere without a packet of fags, money to buy another packet just in case I should run out, plus a lighter AND matches (after all - there's nothing worse than a fag you can't light!) Yet, deep down, I despised myself for wanting and needing to smoke and although I didn't want to give up - I sometimes dreamt about that elusive day in the future when I would wake up one morning and not want to smoke anymore!

My sister bought me this book for Xmas one year - she'd sucessfully given up using the unique method Gillian Riley teaches in this book. I stuffed it on the bookshelf and it took me over THREE YEARS to open it up, let alone read it. When I finally did read it, it made such perfect sense - I decided to give Gillian Riley's method of stopping smoking a go. One fag at a time.......

I've not smoked for almost ten years now and I never thought I would be able to get through even a couple of hours without my beloved fags. I'm amazed at myself and eternally grateful to Gillian Riley for showing me the way to smoke-free-dom.

Stopping smoking was THE most important thing I've ever done. It wasn't easy - but without this fantastic book - I firmly believe I would still be puffing away. I can't praise this book enough. If there's was ever a book that deserves every smoker in the country's attention - it's this one.
You wanna be FREE? Then get this book - read it - and as they say - JUST DO IT!

This works - I know
Came back to look for this book as I am recommending it to a friend. After 10 years of smoking and numerous attempts to stop I read an earlier edition of this book, and once I applied its techniques I have not smoked another cigarette since. It has now been nearly 10 years off the weed. It really works. Deals with the psychology of addiction in a brilliant straightforward manner. Thinking about it I really owe Gillian Riley a lot of thanks. The best money I ever spent was on buying this book.