Chapter 10
What Happens When You
Stop Smoking?
In 2015, BP Magazine wrote about how ACT can work to get individuals to stop smoking (tobacco). It referred to a new study that examined the effects of ACT for treating Bipolar Disorder customers to get them to quit smoking. The article provided some background data: Persons with Bipolar Disorder are two or three times more likely to smoke, yet half as likely to leave as persons in the universal population.
The scheme registered persons with slight bipolar signs who smoked. One collection of these persons sported nicotine coverings while getting ten ACT sessions over the phone during a 30-day period. Another group had face-to-face meetings. By the close of the month, 30 percent of members who had experienced therapy in person testified they had not smoked for seven days. Only 17 percent of those who had completed therapy via phone calls were no longer smoking. In addition, the receivers of the phone call therapy meetings did not follow to the nicotine patch treatment at all. In contrast, 62 percent of the group who went through in-person meetings kept using the patch. Fifty-five percent of both groups said they had started tolerating their cigarette cravings.
E. Gifford et al. showed a pilot development applying a “hypothetically resultant model of acceptance-based treatment procedure to smoking end” and compared it with a medical necessity model of pharmaceutical treatment (2004). They detected 76 members with a nicotine addiction. They exposed half to a Nicotine Replacement Treatment (NRT) and the other half to a “smoking absorbed version of ACT.” (2004, 689) Females totaled 59 percent of these subjects and males 41 percent. The subjects were of diverse cultural backgrounds. Over half had post-secondary education, and 39 percent had incomes beyond $29,999. All the members smoked an average of 21.4 cigarettes a day and said they had struggled to leave for at least one whole day four times in the past two years.
Consequences were superlative for the last group, as understood at the one-year follow-up study.
Conduct therapy to treat smoking was used during the 1960s and 70s, during which time numerous technologies aiming at helping people quit smoking end sprung up (Gifford et al. 2004, 690). The growth of behavioral therapy tapered off, and a wide variety of methods was practiced going onward. They have not been so operative, write Gifford and company, because success would need the understanding of the procedure’s primary for the indications. Missing is the hypothesis of the bond between evasion and maladaptive policies for managing.
This Gifford et al. study is founded on a contextual reasoning and behavior philosophy. This model undertakes that smokers are skilled in replying contrarily in the existence of problematic inside experience. It struggles to improve acceptance skills, alleviate evasion, and enlarge mental and behavior flexibility.
With the objective of nurturing self-control, Gifford and company draft out the four mechanisms of the healing model used for this learning:
  1. A relational setting
  2. Intellectual, emotional and physical self-discrimination skills to get the customer to point out experience features that have brought about bad conduct
  3. Directed contact to the undesirable individual experience with deterrence of undesired answers
  4. Productive behavior initiation challenging unwelcome individual experiences
The learning likened this method with Nicotine Replacement Treatment (NRT), which offers another method of beating nicotine addiction that hypothetically dismisses withdrawal indications normally understood when persons try to quit smoking nicotine (ibid., 690). The practical procedure model, on the other hand, is proposed to address the customer’s worries of extraction and other incentives that trigger evasion behavior. By lessening practical evasion, litheness is amplified to let the customer to select a diverse pathway.
The NRT group received consideration from a specialized therapist and a psychotherapy occupant, with the former on call 24-hours a day during the treatment period. All these members got nicotine patches and were told not to smoke while wearing the patch, and they joined a 1.5-hour informative meeting, which comprised a 30-minute Q & A period. Everyone went to the clinic once a week to substitute used patches with new ones.
The ACT group saw a counsellor seven times for individual meetings lasting 50 minutes each and seven group meetings of 90 minutes each for seven weeks. They had an exhaustive experimental training program to help the patients notice their inner prompts and agree to take what they could not alter, but still modify other actions, opinions, and feelings. They practiced some helpful activities.
The ACT etiquette highlighted the following:
  1. Inner versus outside causes
  2. Problems with control energies
  3. Standards, goals, and blocks
  4. Acceptance and preparedness
  5. Mindfulness skills
  6. Advanced contact – Subjects experienced progressively severe withdrawl symptoms and hostile internal experiences.
  7. Planned smoking – Time intervals grew between the smoking-inducing stimuli and the smoking replies; the late reply permitted the individual to try identifying and replying in a novel way to remove internal prompts after the treatment meetings.
  8. Dispersion skills
  9. Behavior initiation and obligation