Smoking Groups to Help you Quit
27 Jul
There are many ways to help people stop smoking, from devices containing nicotine, to group and individual counselling, to hypnotherapy and different people will find each one more or less effective.
One of the most common ways to quit is through counselling sessions. Counselling can come in a number of ways, including group counselling where the combined efforts of the group can help each individual to stop, or one to one counselling involving just the smoker and a counsellor. As with other methods mentioned earlier, the effectiveness of these methods can vary from person to person.
Group Counselling
A number of companies run group counselling sessions within the UK with their own trained counsellors, these group counselling sessions are usually held in the workplace by companies to help their employers stop smoking.
One such company is quit.org.uk who runs a number of different programmes to help people quit smoking. Their group counselling sessions usually last 6 weeks at one hour per session and it has been found that those attending group support are more likely to quit than giving up unaided.
One to One Counselling
One to one counselling has also been found to be highly effective and again is run by a number of companies and groups within the UK, including the NHS.
One to one counselling sessions have been found to be increasingly effective and successful. Surprisingly bi-weekly counselling sessions of 30 minutes, were found to be much more effective than weekly counselling sessions of a shorter period.
Statistically with one to one counselling an impressive 25.5% of attendees who attended over 300 minutes of counselling successfully quit smoking and continued to stay smoke free after the sessions ended.
Unaided Quitting
Methods, such as nicotine and counselling, are relatively new and were not largely seen until the 1980s. Before that many people were still able to quit smoking by simply going “cold turkey” and gradual decreased the frequency of their smoking.
Even now, in today’s society, when help with smoking is so common, an exceptionally high number of quitters have credited nothing more than their own will power to giving up smoking. The percentage of people able to give up purely unaided is debated, but has been claimed to be as high as 76% in the US by some experts.
