When you were three years old you ran, bouncing up and down with arms and legs flailing. Movement is joyous to a small child. Around age six you were admonished repeatedly to sit still, stop squirming, sit up straight and behave like a little grownup.

Your parents trained you to be accepted in any social venue, to be the social and professional equal of anyone regardless of class so you learned manners. Being “polite” doesn’t encourage stretching, skipping or waving your arms about.

Your company hired you to keep your nose to the grindstone and your butt in the chair for eight hours with only a couple of pee-breaks and a short lunch. Unless you have a job as a telephone lineman, a mail-delivery person or a basketball coach, you don’t stray far from your assigned seat. Your supervisor wants his or her department to shine and will replace you in the blink of an eye if you don’t march in lock-step to the corporate drum de-dum dum.

Mother Nature, on the other hand, had only one thing in mind . . YOUR SURVIVAL! The basic blueprint for your body and your mind includes fairly constant MOVEMENT.

Mother Nature spent tens of thousands of years designing a human body and mind that either moves or sleeps. You are designed to endure for a very long time and be productive until you cease to exist. In our hunter/gatherer history (which is most of the timeline for our species) every person had to keep up and share in the workload and therefore humans evolved to do just that.

In a thousand years we will perhaps evolve into creatures with reeeeeally skinny fingers that work digital keyboards more easily, large buttocks to pad our vulnerable sciatic nerves when we sit for days and our eyes will be closer together for better screen focus. We probably won’t need peripheral vision by then anyway. But as of today, WE ARE NOT DESIGNED TO SIT IN A CHAIR. . . . NOT EVEN AN ERGONOMICALLY CORRECT ONE!

The human blueprint has evolved as the result of tens of thousands of years as hunter/gatherer. You could say that we are stuck in a challenging transition with a beautifully designed hunter’s body that hasn’t had time to adjust to our life in a corporate “cage.” Your body is “making do” and it pays a very high price for this new lifestyle. As if that weren’t enough of a burden, we are living almost twice as long as our predecessors. A small mistake (like sitting in a chair) takes a very big toll when you repeat it thousands of times over 80 years!

Since it is unlikely that you will decide to return to your hunter/gatherer or agrarian roots, the challenge becomes: HOW CAN YOU THRIVE IN CIRCUMSTANCES THAT ARE DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT FROM THE WAY YOU WERE DESIGNED TO FUNCTION? We could explore this dilemma for at least 100 pages but for now let’s try to distill the problem down to a few easy suggestions.

Moving big CORE MUSCLES for a couple minutes every hour will move along your blood and lymph fluid effectively even though you are stuck at your desk or airline seat. Relatively tiny muscles are not up to the task (like wiggling toes and circling ankles).

Core muscles are the big THIGH MUSCLES, BUTTOCKS, ABS and DIAPHRAGM (the floor of your lungs). Alternating sides while remaining in your seat, raise one KNEE at a time as if you are marching in place. Each foot will leave the floor a couple inches. Keep your upper body straight and still. Then tighten your BUTTOCKS, alternating sides, as if you are marching with your bottom. Then, as you exhale, draw in your BELLY BUTTON as if it can touch the back of your chair. Relax as you inhale. Then press your SHOULDER BLADES into the chair back. Of course, KEEP YOUR BREATHING SMOOTH AND EVEN DURING ALL EXERCISES! Next, blow out all your stale air and BREATHE in evenly through your nose.

Unfortunately you will do these exercises ONCE after you read them. Then, in spite of good intentions, you will be so engrossed in your work that you will forget in spite of the fact that you feel much better after you do them. Me too. Use your computer, your watch or your iPhone to SET AN ALARM FOR ONCE AN HOUR. The quick and easy exercises are guaranteed to give you more energy, to refresh your mind as well as your body. This is good for you AND your boss.

Not only will believing in the addictiveness of smoking impact upon how easy you find it to stop smoking, it can also create a justification for remaining a smoker. It becomes easy to say to yourself “I’m addicted now so I can’t stop smoking” and then not even try. Also, if you think that smoking is an addiction, it is easier to fool yourself into the belief that continuing to smoke is not your fault – that you cannot help yourself because you are the victim of an addiction. This thought pattern is anything but empowering!

To stop smoking easily you have to get your mind around this subject. It is important to ask yourself why you assume that smoking is an addiction. We know that innumerable chemicals are produced as you smoke even a single cigarette and this may lead one to believe that smoking must therefore be addictive. But we also know of many people who have decided to stop smoking and have done exactly that; they stopped smoking and didn’t get withdrawal symptoms, not a single symptom. We know others who tried to stop and didn’t manage it. We know people who got angry when they stopped or put on a lot of weight.

Everyone is different, and the different experiences will always reflect one’s expectations. If you want to stop smoking easily, it’s important to work upon your expectations and in this way you pave a pathway to success. One thing which is undeniable is that smoking is indeed a habit. Each individual has their own associations with smoking; some people only smoke socially, others never smoke socially. Some people don’t smoke until after breakfast, others smoke before they even get out of bed. Some smoke when they are happy, others when they are sad.

Smoking is a habit which can be associated with feelings and emotions, places and times of the day, events and circumstances; smoking can be linked in your mind to anything and everything, and as a matter of habit, whenever that situation or circumstance pops up, out pops the cigarette, and you are smoking before you’ve even had time to think about it. It’s as automatic as brushing your teeth or tying your shoe laces.

It can take time to train your brain to change a habit, no matter what that habit is. If you decided that from tomorrow you were always going to put your right shoe on before your left, or vice-versa, you would probably have to put a post-it note on your shoes to remind yourself that this is what you plan to do. Otherwise you would have your shoes on your feet before you had time to think about it! Habitual behaviors are ones which you just do, they just happen. You do not consciously think about doing them, they are part of a “sequence” and they are driven by your subconscious mind. Therefore to change a habit you need to somehow get into your subconscious mind to “unpick” that sequence.

It is for this very reason that hypnosis is such a successful method of stopping smoking. Hypnosis is a state of relaxation which is both normal and natural. You pass through hypnosis every night as you fall asleep. In hypnosis you have access to your subconscious mind, where these habitual beliefs and behaviors are stored. In hypnosis you can truly get your mind around your smoking habit and you can change your beliefs and expectations. With the help of hypnosis downloads, you can see smoking from a different angle, seeing it as purely a habit as opposed to an addiction, and train your mind to expect it to be easy to stop smoking.

If you expect it to be easy to stop smoking this is what you will experience. Hypnosis really does make it easy to stop smoking. By using hypnosis, you can learn to imagine yourself as you want to be, and this is very important. Whatever you imagine you create, and so it is vital that the pictures you see in your mind’s eye reflect your new expectations of quitting easily. Hypnosis allows you to get your conscious and subconscious minds in alignment, so that both parts of your mind expect the same results. You therefore get away from those old feelings of knowing that you shouldn’t smoke but at the same time wanting to smoke. With the use of hypnosis you will no longer be “in two minds” about stopping smoking.

If you want to stop smoking hypnosis downloads can be used to truly get your mind around this habit and therefore make it a whole lot easier for you to quit.

Roseanna Leaton, specialist in stop smoking hypnosis downloads.