According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 45 million people in the United States are currently smokers. While this is 19.3% of all adults, with the exception of Asians, smoking rates tend to be higher for African-Americans and Hispanics. Every day more than 3,800 people under the age of 18 smoke their first cigarette. About a quarter of them begin smoking regularly. In my experience working with people who are trying to stop their smoking habits, all of them started before the age of 18. While some of them remember being forced to start smoking, the typical reason they give for starting the habit is fitting in with their friends. Again according to the CDC, approximate 69% of smokers would like to quit completely at about half of all smokers attempt to quit each year. So how does one quit smoking? All some people use nicotine replacement products,...

What is smoking, why should I care, and how do I quit?

Smoking includes the inhalation of burning tobacco into your airways – to include your lungs. It is done as an addictive habit. Once a non-smoker gets past the initial awkwardness of the act of smoking, the social benefits and simultaneous calming and stimulus benefits lead to a frequent repetition. Unfortunately, this seemingly harmless act both stimulates the release of various pleasure-related chemicals in the brain and become a learned habit, which eventually becomes deeply ingrained in their brain. The fact that the act of smoking is perceived as a need by the tobacco addict is illogical once you consider the health effects. The inhaled smoke contains numerous poisons such as nicotine, arsenic, methane, ammonia, cadmium, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, butane, and hydrogen cyanide. If a sane person was asked to...

The people I’ve encountered claiming to have shyness problems usually have it all wrong. Typically there concern is that they are afraid that everybody is talking or thinking about them. Therefore, when they are in a crowd they have the overwhelming concern that they are the center of attraction. This means that every fear and concern that they have about themselves tends to come to mind immediately. This is too much for them to handle. So they suddenly have the desire to crawl into their shell and avoid people – or at least crowds.

What I’ve noticed is that these people – who psychologists normally diagnose as having what is called Social Affect Disorder – are powerful empaths, who have not yet learned to appreciate or control their remarkable genius. As empaths they have a rather uncanny ability to sense the emotions of others. The truth is that most people are not...