Training vs Talent, and, Can Old Dogs Learn New Tricks?

The experts say the same thing about a top sportsperson’s background. They’ll have started young. You don’t often come across someone at the top level who took up their sport later than age 12-14. They’ll have something called “natural talent.” This will make them stand out from their peers. They’ll work incredibly hard, or at least play their sport all of the time they can. In a lot of cases, the parents will have leaned hard on their child or on their children.

Those of us who didn’t start young, who don’t have huge talent, and who, up until now, couldn’t really be bothered to go outdoors, might well ask if this is the only way. The answer is, it’s the only way that’s really been tried.

Natural Talent vs Training

I’ve had one time in my life when I found myself up against a natural talent in something that I was attempting to do. On my first night at Oxford, I tried to break out onto the college roof. I didn’t know the place well enough to know where to try. But I had the company of a couple of girls in the attempt, one of whom became a lifelong friend.

I found out later that she wrote poetry. I’d grown up in the East Midlands, and Oxford was the first place I’d lived where such people allowed such things to be taken seriously, to be considered worthwhile and important. It was the last, too, as I’d discover later. But I could try to write in that atmosphere. I say try.

My friend had just won a university prize for a poem sequence. I loved it: she’d used form well, she’d written in a clear voice and not the cluttered diction of much modern poetry. She’d written something moving and genuinely funny. It impressed me and intimidated me.

I took twenty or so painful drafts to produce the kind of thing that would be handed back to me by my reader with pursed lips and a shake of the head. I’m stubborn, always have been, and kept on, assuming that I’d learn and that it would come in time.

The day came when I heard the rumour that my friend had won the National Poetry Competition before coming up to Oxford. I asked her about this. No, she hadn’t won. She’d come third or thereabouts. It had been her first real attempt at a poem, and she’d shown it to her English teacher. He’d seemed to think it was OK, and implied that she might as well enter it for the Competition.

I’d thought that she’d started much earlier than I had, and worked up to the point where she was as good as she was. Now I had to take on board that this wasn’t so. She hadn’t improved upon her first poems to get here: these were her first poems and the world was her oyster, not least because she’d always have a better metaphor than that on hand. That she’d freshly minted. If you see what I mean.

But what I shouldn’t have done was ask her about her drafts. How many did it take before she was happy, before she called time on a poem? One, with corrections: and then I knew that I would always be a scrabbler in the poetic undergrowth. The news hurt and humiliated me.

Natural talent. But she worked hard too. She would shut herself away for at least one entire day a week, just to write, and that would be on top of the 2-4 daily hours it would also receive from her. She felt that the restrictions on her social life were justified by the satisfaction she drew from it. This has all paid off. Her third book was published a few days ago.

She took the talent road, and I took the training road, and she was in Scotland afore me. By the spring of that year, I’d pushed out more and more dreck, and had more and more shaking heads and pursed lips..oh, those pursed lips. But then it happened: early one afternoon, which found me bunking off what I was meant to be doing in order to write, three perfect lines appeared in my head as though summoned. I wrote them down, then found that the rest of the poem flowed out of them with almost no effort at all. I made some slight corrections, then found myself a reader.

It’s the classic creativity clichee: absorption, concentration, meditation, creation, natch. It didn’t happen often after that, but it did happen from time to time. The results were always better than the poems I wrought through pure sweat. But I had to churn out the waste to have any chance of something better happening.

(Virginia Woolf said that you did your reading at 14-18. I was 22 when I read that, my reading hardly begun, and hated her for it. Always too old, always too late, always playing catch-up).

When I taught myself to draw and to paint in oils it was the same story. If I could create myself the perfect conditions, and cordon off for myself a lot of time, then my results wouldn’t embarrass me. I was happy with this. Then I met the man on the bus. And what a bus, pitching and rolling its way into the pit of South London, belching like a fat man in a dirty public bar and going into spasm whenever the driver changed gear. The man on the bus had propped a bit of scrap paper on the back of his redtop paper, and was drawing on it in biro.

I noticed the rhythm of his pen first. Then I saw the wonderful result. My god, it looked like silverpoint. A landscape, hatched in early renaissance style in two-point perspective. He drew quickly and effortlessly. It looked almost as if he was merely scratching off the foil to reveal the picture beneath.

My uncle is a watercolourist of huge talent. He’s apt to compare himself unfairly. Fifteen years ago, we toured the Royal Academy’s exhibition of British nineteenth century watercolourists. I was inspired by it. He came out enormously depressed, by a gulf he’d seen between them and himself, a gulf quite hidden from my eyes.

I believe that these are typical talent vs training experiences, and I think you can map them directly onto sport.

I am a sporting autodidact. This isn’t because my schools had no opportunity to provide training. Back in the days of Jim Callaghan, my state middle school provided soccer, rugby, hockey, cricket, athletics, tennis, basketball, gymnastics and swimming. But my teachers preferred the natural sportsmen. Either you “got it” with a sport straightaway, or you didn’t.

I learned my football from a cartoon strip on skills, allegedly and probably by Trevor Brooking. Brooking said practice against a wall with a tennis ball. I did. Brooking taught me how to balance, how to strike the ball with follow-through, how to trap the ball, how to head the ball and control the ball on my chest. He taught me everything, just by showing me how and allowing me to copy and to practice.

I did the same with darts, using a book by John Lowe, and became good enough to beat pub players by the time I was old enough to get into the pub.

I did the same with rugby. This time, the book was of 1930s vintage, and it had sat unread in the school library since the 1950s. But it had everything. How to hold and pass the ball accurately even at speed. How to tackle (that was fun the first few times, when no one was expecting me to stop them - I’d lift them slightly so they’d javelin painfully into the icy turf..) and how to sell a dummy. Within months, I’d gone from the bottom group to the 3rd XV reserves. Had my eyesight been better, I’d have gone further.

I learned, above all, that with the right advice, you can improve straightaway, and that practice takes you further still.

But how far? And what if you’re not starting young?

The neurological evidence is clear: you can learn most easily and have muscle memory most easily when you are young. But there is no evidence that you can’t do so later in life. None of us would pass driving tests if that were true. Nor would Larry Nelson have won the US Open - he didn’t pick up a golf club until he was 21, a full 19 years later than Tiger Woods.

The difference is just time. I spent hundreds of hours playing darts as a 12-14 year old: entire summer holidays. But I was academically able, and the time I had available for darts went down. Then I took up cycling; then I fell in love.

As an adult, I’d have at most 2-3 hours per day available outside my work commitments. That’s not enough to master anything. When I was a psychotherapist, I thought and read about the subject all the time. I spent my weekends at seminars, or writing about it, or training with mentors. I worked every hour I could get. My first practice was a three hour journey from my home. I spent the time studying.

How good would I have been at football if I’d devoted 12 hours per day on skills training as an adult? I don’t know, but I suspect fairly good. But football has no structure to deal with late arrivals. I’d have to choose between one Sunday league and another. I’d have come up against the fitness/age barrier: not everyone can be Gary Speed or Teddy Sheringham and keep up with the kids.

What about golf? Golf is a different story. By comparison with football, it’s an ageless sport. And it has handicapping.

Michael Oliff took a year out of his career aged 43 and devoted his time to golf. He trained for 12 hours a day for six months, under the best teachers he could find. He trained eight hours per day for the following six months. In the first six months, he took one day off per week.

He went from a hacker’s handicap of 26 at the start of the year, to scratch. It can be done.

That still doesn’t put him amongst the world’s top golfers, but it means that he is competitive at a very high level. The difference in average score between the top player and the 100th player is only 3 strokes across an entire year. That’s a psychological distance, measured in mental strength, not one of skill or ability.

But no one, to my knowledge, has taken a year, or five years, out of their adult life to begin with football and to discover how good they could become.

The best footballers are also the players who practice the most. Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Eric Cantona, David Beckham, George Best and the goalkeepers Peter Shilton and Gordon Banks were/are renowned trainers. We know that not every naturally talented footballer - and you have to be one to get into the professional game because the training isn’t there in the schools to get you there any other way - is interested in football. For many, it’s just what they happen to be good at. Not every player “misses the buzz” when they retire. Not every player wants to train. Lee Trundle said as much when he was at Swansea City; Robin Friday at Reading might have agreed.

But there are limits to what you can achieve. During a league season, most players will spend a huge amount of time travelling and getting ready to travel. Most of them will have some kind of community work to do on top of that. Then there’s the danger of overtraining. There’s a delicate balance between match fitness/sharpness and fatigue. Extra skills practice and training is still additional physical work.

But in theory, at least, a one-footed player can become as two-footed as makes no difference. A player who can only pass to a team mate who is in three yards of space can learn to find one who is in only one. It’s a matter of finding the time, finding the opportunity within existing structures to do that.

In theory, someone might take up football at 35 and devote themselves to it full-time and become a match for, say, Conference South players. If they have natural talent, higher than that, taking fitness levels into account. “Masters” level, perhaps. It’s all about finding the time to try: and it’s the one thing the kind of adults who might be interested just don’t have.

Stopping Smoking On Your Own: Tips and Tricks

Smoking was the twentieth century’s badge of adulthood. At one point, three quarters of the population of the United Kingdom were smokers. Now it’s down to a quarter. Cigarettes are going the way of bowler hats and leaded petrol.

It’s happening because people are stopping smoking in droves. Most of them are doing it without any assistance: NHS clinics, hypnotherapists, Allen Carr and co. account for only a small proportion of the ongoing smoking cull.

So the chances are that anyone reading this who is considering moving on from this iconic habit has it in mind to go it alone. Perhaps some of what happens will make life easier - or at least clearer.

If you haven’t done so already, you might want to read my earlier articles on the subject here and here.

Belief and Stopping Smoking
Stopping smokers are liable to experience something akin to a reversal of the placebo effect. Most smokers believe that stopping will be hard to do. That, on its own, clear of any other factors, will make stopping more difficult than it need be.

It’s not a daft thing to believe. If you’ve already had a series of “failed” attempts to stop smoking, or if you’ve watched friends and colleagues climbing walls in the first days after stopping, or if you’ve watched the UK government’s spectacularly unhelpful “don’t give up on giving up” advertising campaign, then “hard” might seem like a fair summary of the situation.

But believing that stopping is hard brings its own baggage.

I can tell you now that stopping smoking does not change the world you live in very much. It’s the same stressful, neurotic, randomly dangerous place, and non-smokers are equally acquainted with grief. Stopping smoking doesn’t lead you to sunlit uplands.

When you stop smoking, you are just going to have to deal with life in a different way. You’re still going to have to deal with it. And in those first few days, life is going to come at you from all directions. What is going on will have nothing to do with whether you’re smoking or not, but the chances are that because you believe stopping smoking is difficult, you are going to attribute every last irritation and loss of temper and low feeling and hunger pang and so forth to the absence of cigarettes in your life. You’ll be looking out for these feelings too. It’s like one of those cognitive exercises: look around the room for something coloured red, only this time, you’re scanning the environment for the things that get your goat.

If you expect to feel bad, and are going to attribute that feeling bad to cigarettes, you’re going to have a worse time than you really need to.

So what I suggest is that you make a deal with yourself before stopping. Take it on board that the lack of cigarettes does not account for all of your mood (let’s agree that it’s partly responsible, just out of respect for common sense). Assume that part of what you’re experiencing is just life. The rest - that part you are attributing to cigarettes - is that grand dark night of the soul that men and women who have never smoked will never get to experience, outstare and outlast, that time under mental and emotional fire that stopping smokers discover that they can endure and never after forget that they can endure.

But is there something you can do to weaken that belief before you start?

You have a lot of people in your life who once smoked and are now non-smokers. I might have met some of them: before I went into practice, I interviewed close on a thousand. When I set out, I had no idea how I myself was ever going to manage to stop smoking, and I was deeply afraid that I would become one of those smokers who’d leave it too late, and suffer both illness, pain and the darker pain of regret and self-recrimination, who’d put that load of grief and anguish on my family and friends.

But the more people I spoke to who’d managed this strange, impossible thing, the more everyday it began to seem, the more it was brought down to size. I discovered that not every smoker goes through agonies - that the experience is heavily dependent upon our essential personalities. If, like me, you are prone to blowing things out of all proportion, it can be useful to gather these role models around yourself. Simply, if they can do it, so can you. And if it took them several attempts (it took me north of thirty) then you have permission not to succeed first time. If you fail this time, you don’t have to be hard on yourself: get up and go again.

So, talk to the non-smokers you know. They’ll have a range of experiences to impart, and perhaps some additional advice or tips that have escaped great minds like mine. And it’ll weaken your belief that it’s hard. And that’ll help.

Get Straight About Your Reasons

By and large, the reasons smokers give for wanting to stop fall into the same few categories. Health, don’t-want-to-be-a-slave, smell/dirt, money, “other people”, smoking’s growing pariah status. The trouble with these reasons is that they are poor sources of motivation. Most of them are too easy to get around - smoking outside turns out to be preferable in the short term (and it’s always the short term where smoking is concerned), breath freshener works, being a slave isn’t that bad really, and smoking still isn’t all that expensive compared to the price of a round of drinks.

Look on these classic smoker’s reasons not as reasons to stop, but as a list of smoking’s little inconveniences. Reasons to fear continuing to smoke. None of them, not even health in the majority of cases, mean that you have something real to show for stopping smoking. I repeat: don’t expect stopping smoking to transform your life. On its own, what stopping smoking does for you is remove a convenient source of stress relief, quick concentration, social connection and style. On its own, stopping smoking is a net loss.

That’s not to say that you won’t succeed in stopping smoking when you’re doing it just for smoking’s sake. I know plenty of people who’ve done just that, and so do you. But this is about making the whole thing more straightforward.

It’s better to have, or to create, something in your life that means a great deal for you that stopping smoking can be just one part of. That’s why pregnant women often find stopping smoking easy (not all - genetic disposition/personality works here too, as my own mother will tell you).

What that might be is absolutely individual. I stopped smoking in order that I could jam the fact of my success up the nose of a close but irritating friend again and again over many years. That’s not a worthy goal, and it makes me look like the way it makes me look. You might prefer the man about to adopt with his wife, who wants to keep up with his new son until the son is at least 14. Or the saxophonist who knows she has the potential to go pro - once her lungs have recovered their capacity after stopping smoking. Or the runner, dreaming of a race along the Andes to raise money for a cause dear to their heart.

If at all possible, don’t stop smoking just for stopping smoking’s sake. Have a greater cause. It’ll make stopping more straightforward, and it’ll keep you interested in stopping if you do that human thing and have a setback.

Consider Deliberately Failing To Stop Smoking

A study - which is now so deeply buried in the BMJ’s archive that I can no longer find it - established some years ago that people who repeatedly fail in successive attempts to stop smoking nevertheless gradually improve their chances of success next time.

The study shouldn’t have been necessary. Of course repeated attempts get you closer to eventual success.

For one thing, you get used to the idea of trying to stop. The next attempt is not such a big deal as the first. The pressure upon you lessens with each attempt, and, perhaps counterintuitively, perhaps not, that increases your chances of success. If you can fail and not start hitting yourself with blame and recrimination, then the stakes for your next attempt are lower, and the whole experience will be better.

For another, you get to know what to expect. You grow to know and recognize your own reactions to the stopping smoking situation, and begin to learn your own workarounds.

You get used to the idea of going days without smoking simply because you’ve done it. And although it might not have “caught” with you first time, the prospect is less frightening.

I’ve met many people who decided to “give up” for a fixed period, but who then simply failed to begin again. After a while, you forget those experiences of psychological advantage from smoking. That’s the point when you walk past the tobacco counter in the supermarket and the display - once so colourful, now, in the UK, a sea of white warning and panic - and find that it means nothing to you. It inspires all the appetite and pangs of the catfood aisle.

If your first attempt at stopping smoking was traumatic, you can learn through other attempts that it need not always be so.

Choosing and Making Your Time To Stop

With many habits, such as excessive drinking, or Class A drugs, choosing a special moment at which to quit them is largely futile, if you are working alone. Not so with smoking.

That’s one reason why that although many New Year Resolution stopping smokers fail, a fair few make it through the net and out to the other side. January 1 is a date like few others, and it’s a strong peg to hang something like stopping smoking on.

I’d recommend augmenting the peg, however. As per becoming clear about your reasons, it can be good to roll stopping smoking in with a raft of other minor changes. Stop smoking at the same time as starting the novel, or setting up a GTD sytem, or losing a pound or two.

And, in private, mark the occasion. I say in private because I’m sceptical that having a load of people aware that you’re stopping smoking is a great idea. I’ve never found that terribly motivational - if I’ve been in that situation, more often than not I’ve merely “gone underground” with whatever it was I was allegedly stopping doing.

Smoking was this great twentieth century thing, something you have in common with writers, film stars, leaders and politicians, soldiers in the trenches and heroic doctors on insane shifts, miners and airmen. What an army of pathetic addicts that had so many in its ranks of brilliance, courage, humour and self-sacrifice.

Go and find a high view, smoke your last cigarette there, and enjoy it. Then, quietly, put it out, and walk away into the rest of your life. Buy a special pack if you like - my grandfather smoked Camels, my stepfather B&H Gold - why not a pack from your past? Or pay a visit to Davidoff in London and go for something unusual. Smoke your last and then begin the rest of your life with a meal at a new restaurant, or with a run in the dawn sunlight.

What Not To Try

“Cutting Down.” Really not worth the bother. There really isn’t any proper evidence that you can wean yourself off nicotine slowly, let alone any evidence that doing so produces a more tolerable experience than going cold turkey. In the years immediately after the Second World War, rationing and low incomes made it worthwhile for many British smokers to attempt to play out their limited cigarette supply over a longer period than they would otherwise have done. Almost invariably, cigarettes earmarked for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow were smoked “today”. Anyway, you deserve to treat yourself with more respect than this.

Stopping Smoking On Holiday. It spoils your holiday, and then the real world comes rushing in all at once and overwhelms you. Do it whilst you’re at work. Mark stopping with a special occasion, sure, but not a two-week type of one.

Putting the money you save into a special jar. Non-smokers don’t do this. All it will serve to do is remind you of smoking. And, do you plan to give yourself change out of a note? Or put money in the jar using your switch card? Remember that you’ll still be making all the other real-world transactions which once would have included cigarettes anyway. Again, either be smoking or not smoking: there is nothing between the two save dangerous no-man’s land.

Asking other people to step in if they see you smoking. Your friends and relatives don’t deserve that kind of burden, and you don’t deserve the damage this can do to your relationships. Either fully own your smoking or become a non-smoker. If you need to consider doing this, you need to do some further thinking about stopping before you embark on it. Reread my articles, or for a different opinion on all of this, try this series by Gillian Riley.

Avoiding situations where you expect to smoke. I stopped drinking, but I didn’t avoid my friends or the pub. If you try to avoid places of temptation, you will find there are so many of them that your life is mangled and you will, quite rightly, resent what has brought that about. My advice is, go out, enjoy yourself, see people, do things, have your life. The rewards of stopping smoking are too slight to be worth changing your life upside down for - that’s not rhetorical, just the plain fact of the matter. Stopping smoking does not lead to nirvana: it leaves you in the same neurotic world you were in before.

Stopping Smoking - A Review of Methods

As a preliminary follow-up to my previous article, I thought it would be useful to review some of the existing smoking cessation approaches from the point of view of someone who has worked extensively with smokers. I’m going to touch upon NRT (nicotine replacement therapy), group counselling, hypnotherapy, and acupuncture. There are others out there, of course.

NRT - Nicotine Replacement Therapy

When I was still myself a smoker, NRT was just emerging and beginning to obtain the acceptance it has now. The idea behind it is a simple one: people get addicted to nicotine rather than to smoking, so let’s give them an alternative source of the nicotine and wean them off it. It’s assumed that gradually reducing nicotine intake will be accompanied by a lessening dependence upon it, which assumes in turn that a dependence upon nicotine was present in the first place. When NRT first came onto the scene, the second of these assumptions had some decent evidence behind it - it was established that nicotine was psychoactive, although only since the advent of superior brain scanners of different kinds have we understood some aspects of how nicotine acts in the brain and body. The first assumption remains just that, an assumption, a hope to cling to.

In the United Kingdom, advertising for NRT claims, correctly, that it more than doubles your success at quitting. I’m afraid that doesn’t say very much. The most favourable peer-reviewed NRT research I’ve been able to find is this from the British Medical Journal - the researchers chose a laudably long reference period, giving follow-up results after six years. The study was concerned with comparing success rates between a group of smokers using nicotine patches only and a group using both patches and nicotine inhalators:

After 6 years, 1 out of 6 participants was still abstinent in the treatment group compared with 1 out of 12 in the patch only group.

I’m assuming that people looking to stop smoking are interested in stopping for more than six years. In these circumstances, the figures are deeply depressing. More depressing still is that the figures obtained by this study are actually higher than those obtained by practically every other (and there are hundreds of properly run studies of this kind going on all the time - try Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group Specialized Register and the databases MEDLINE, EMBASE, AMED, SCI, SSCI and CISCOM for starters).

And more depressing still is that no one seems to notice how terrible these figures actually are. Given that nicotine is a dangerous substance in its own right, over and above any tendency to create dependence, given NRT’s proneness to side-effects, and given the sheer demand from smokers for effective cessation methods, I would have hoped to come across at least one researcher’s comment expressing regret at the enormous failure rates experienced by NRT patients.

My hunch is that NRT is driven largely by people who have themselves never smoked and who are therefore looking from the outside in. There’s long been a desperate desire for “drugs to fight drug addiction”, especially given that psychotherapy has, by and large, failed to provide any breakthroughs.

I reflect on one thing. I must have spoken to thousands of people who have succeeded in stopping smoking, the majority of them with no assistance whatsoever from an outside source. In every case, I was the first person with a serious professional interest in their success to have asked. I’d like to see a series of studies that interview, in-depth, 10,000+ successfully stopped smokers to see if the same patterns emerge as emerged for me when I undertook my own, more limited and subjective, interview research.

Group Counselling

NHS Smoking Cessation services keep reasonably good statistics, albeit in the short term. Here is a summary of the state of play as of mid-2001. 48% of participants were still abstinent after four weeks. The same document assumes that only 60-65% of that 48% will relapse by the end of the year, without giving any grounds for that assumption. If that were true, NHS clinics would be managing a success rate of one-third, which would be headline news if true - that’s the sort of figure we can start to get to work with, after all. But the true story is almost certainly sadder and darker.

Eugene Mill’s BMJ paper looked at Tyne and Wear. He says:

In 2003-4, 20 103 people in the region used smoking cessation services, of whom 9910 had still quit after four weeks (49.3%). Of these, I estimated 35-40% would still have quit after a year,2 a long term figure of 3500-4000.

Again, there are no reasons given for that estimate, and I think it’s too high. One reason is the sheer scale of drop-out from these services, as seen in the Scottish experience.

Of the 46,466 quit attempts made between 1st January and 31
st December 2006, there were 45,641 for which one month follow-up
data was available. Of these, 15,471 were recorded as successful
quits. This figure is based on client self-reported ‘not smoked, even a
puff, in the last two weeks’. Follow-up may have been undertaken ‘face to
face’, by telephone or by letter/written questionnaire. Of the remaining
30,170 cases, 15,384 had smoked in the last two weeks and
14,786 were ‘lost to follow-up’/unknown.

Information on exactly what kind of support is given in NHS clinics is relatively hard to come by, not for any sinister reason but because practice varies from place to place, there are pilot schemes to take account of and so forth.

Nevertheless, these are still depressing figures.

Whenever NHS attempts to improve matters in these areas are concerned, funding is always an issue - one quarter of the British population smoke, of whom a substantial number not only want to stop but actively try. There are not enough NHS clinics around to dent the numbers, and if I find the figures depressing, I hope that’s not taken as criticism of the people working in that system and doing their best to achieve the impossible with the minimum.

Hypnotherapy

As a qualified hypnotherapist, let me give a word of warning. Two, in fact. If you are thinking about “trying” hypnotherapy, here is what to avoid.

Avoid any therapist who cites, without source, studies “indicating” that their “new methods” are achieving a 95% success rate. Where they exist, and quite often they don’t, these “studies” are not what I mean by study i.e. properly conducted, peer-reviewed research. One hypnotherapist I know contacts 100 or so of his smoking clients after a year and takes his success rate from that - which strikes me as a reasonable approach in the circumstances. Most won’t.

Avoid anyone claiming that a “new combination of NLP and hypnosis/hypnotherapy” is bringing home the goods. NLP is a marrying of some ideas from CBT and hypnosis, so the statement is tautologous and merely displays that the advertiser is ignorant of their own field.

There is an almost complete lack of smoking cessation studies in relation to hypnosis. In fact, there is an almost complete lack of any studies whatsoever outside of NRT and behavioural therapy (whether individually or in groups). This is a consequence of the lack of a standard hypnotherapy procedure for smoking cessation, the lack of a single governing body for the field, and the sheer difficulty of excluding certain variables from study. It’s also the result of contemporary hypnotherapy’s deliberate positioning of itself outside the medical mainstream, for all that the BMA has accepted it as a valid approach since the 1950s and the existence of the British Society of Clinical and Academic Hypnosis.

At root, hypnotherapy’s approach to smoking cessation is entirely psychological, and there are two principal approaches. On the one hand, some practitioners will attempt to take and magnify your anti-smoking feelings and magnify them to the point where the iidea of smoking is too disgusting to contemplate. On the other, some practitioners will attempt to replace your smoking habits and the benefits you gain from smoking with more helpful habits and feelings - to replace the psychological experience of smoking with a superior experience or set of experiences.

Few studies, and not a lot worth reading. There’s this, from the New Scientist in 1992, which cites a metaanalysis undertaken on behalf of ASH (which I can’t find a confirmatory source for - I’d like to know how they overcame the heterogeneity of existing studies that other attempted analyses complain about) and also this more general article from Scientific American, but it’s not much to lean on.

My gut feeling from my own practice is that I achieved between 40% and 60% success rates over 12 months. I receive the occasional email from people years on who are still smoke-free. But I suspect that a significant number of my former clients who did go back to smoking simply didn’t blame me or the therapy for it.

You’ll excuse me if I leave the placebo effect out of it for now. We are going to know what that is, in measurable terms, in the not too distant future, and I’ll discuss it then. It’s no more than a phrase describing something we don’t understand for now.

Acupuncture

Again, practices vary: the word of mouth accounts I’ve had are black and white, either instantly and effortlessly successful or not at all.

The impression I gain is that it works better for the type As amongst us.

I suspect that the Cochrane Review Summary here - which complains about the paucity of studies - has it about right.

Allen Carr’s Easyway

I’d say worth a try, because the Allen Carr Clinic approach is both an actual process you can go through, but it respects your intellgence and invites your dissent and argument. That makes it highly unusual in the therapy field to put it mildly.

No other approach has created quite the wave of enthusiasm, yet there are no proper studies to add to it. That’s a shame; I’d be fascinated to see them.

The core idea, for what it’s worth, is that nicotine sets up a chain reaction - the relief afforded you by a cigarette is not genuine relief but merely temporary respite from the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. A host of psychological consequences follow. Frankly, the outcome thus far of research in brain scanners bears Allen Carr out more than it bears out the wean-them-off ideas of the NRT adherents, but there are problems involving the relationship between the interval between cigarettes and the active life of nicotine in the brain. Nevertheless, it’s an idea worth pursuing further than it has been.

Stopping Smoking - A Sport Psychology View

The truth is - many top sportsmen do smoke. They always have done. And not the nearly men, either. Zinedine Zidane, Johann Cruyff, Diego Maradona, Shane Warne, the Charlton Brothers and Dino Zoff are all inarguable top achievers and all inarguable smokers. There’s a pretty talented British Division to add to the list: Paul Gascoigne, Freddie Flintoff, Jimmy Greaves.

Tiger Woods smokes.

So did I, and lists like these made me seethe with rage at having to stop. Why should I, when… but I knew why. Dark thoughts at the back of the mind: I didn’t want to shorten my precious life unavoidably. But still, to be leaving this kind of company! It’s something to have in common with men who I then saw as heroes, something to chalk up when other things like skill, tenacity and courage were lacking.

I had a bad time stopping. I didn’t really want to, for one thing. At that time, I owned a bound volume of back numbers from a 1930s 35mm photography magazine. It was clear from the ads in that that my grandparents didn’t have to worry about smoking. Everyone did it, and no one knew it was harmful. (I’ve learned since from talking to people who were alive and smoking at that time that they did suspect it was bad for them, but that they didn’t think they’d live long enough for it to make any real difference. If they’d known they were going to live so long, they’d have taken better care of themselves, etc..) Ready for your trip, 1930s man? Got your cigarettes, your lighter, your 35mm camera, your car keys, your hip flask? In that order? How I envied the dead their peace of mind, if not their World Wars. If Kingsley Amis’s letters are anything to go by, getting good tobacco in 39-45 was an absolute pain. To say nothing of beer.

I suppose fortunately, smoking was the third thing in the whole of my life about which I managed to be stubborn. (The first was first love and the second Oxford University). It took me 30+ attempts to stop, and led to a change in career. Smoking got me into psychology, professionally, in the same way as financial idiocy got me out of it again this year. I’ve already told the story of how an afternoon’s smoking whilst poring over Allen Carr’s Easyway To Stop Smoking Permanently put the idea of a business into my head, and how I then spent many months reading my way through the scientific literature and interviewing everyone who’d talk on the subject. This eventually led to my success in stopping, and in helping other people in time to stop too.

From a sport psychology point of view, stopping smoking is a good example of something really ruddy awkward. At this time of year, when people are writing New Year’s Resolutions, it points up the main differences between resolutions - which largely fail and make their owner feel bad - and goals, which have some chance of making it through.

“Resolutions” tend to be negative (stop smoking, lose weight), punitive (stop being so lazy/negative/nagging/depressed), not personally meaningful (they’ll be things, like stopping smoking, that we don’t want to do but which sound in principle like what a “proper person” would do or want), hard to envisage (smoking looks like.. that, but what does “not smoking” look like, or not eating, or not drinking, other than a great white nothing?) and above all, we generally won’t have a clear idea of how we mean to bring them about or how we intend them to fit into our lives as a whole, our social milieu.

Done properly, goals are quite different, and I’m going to be talking about them a great deal here over the next few weeks. They are different, at least in the way I do them, not only in that they are positive, meaningful and visible to you, not only in that there is at least some measure of planning involved to bring them down to specific actions you can take, but in that they obey certain rules. Here are the rules:

• You must screw up, get things wrong, fail from time to time, to stay within the rules. This is human behaviour, and non-human behaviour just isn’t cricket where this is concerned.
• You must forget to pursue your goals, you must drop them accidentally from time to time and find them again months or years later. Again, this is human behaviour, and non-human behaviour isn’t cricket.
• Your goals are subsidiary to your life. This is a fact - life being what happens while you have other plans. But it’s an attitude, too - your goals must serve you, and the process of going after them must make your experience of life more rewarding in some way or it’s probably not worth it. Effort and suffering can be rewarding and meaningful, but be ready to court martial your goals if they start to work against you. This is about life becoming better, not about punishing you because you’re bad.

There are others, but all in good time.

Sports psychology splits goals into three main types, and knowing what these are helps a great deal in stopping smoking.

1. Outcome Goals. If you are an athlete, this means winning - winning a signficant competition. Stopping smoking could be an outcome goal, but at this point take my word for it that it’s better off as one of the other two kinds.
2. Performance Goals. If you are an athlete, a performance goal might be to achieve a certain time, or a certain distance, or a certain weight lifted. A performance goal is something your opponent can’t influence. You are in control. Performance goals overlap to some extent with the third type:
3. Process Goals. Process goals are about technique. For a swimmer, the outcome goal might be an Olympic medal, the performance goal a certain time achieved, and a process goal perfecting a certain type of kick in the turn. I would put footballer’s Opta stats under process goals - so many passes completed, so many shots on target as a percentage.

The problem with doing the obvious thing, and taking “stopping smoking” as an outcome goal, is that stopping smoking in of itself is rarely meaningful enough on its own to work well. You’ll have to lean on my experience in working with smokers in this - we spend (spent, now that I’m off piste for the time being) more time searching for what would make it meaningful, and making that real, than anything else.

Why isn’t it meaningful? Why can’t it be a nice, simple outcome goal?

Look at the reasons smokers give for wanting to stop. Health - I don’t want to get ill. Money - it’s expensive. Social - it’s a dirty habit, and fewer people do it; I feel like a pariah. The smell, the mess. Not wanting to be a slave to it anymore. Not wanting to feel stupid. And so forth.

If your reasons for stopping have not been enough to actually stop you in the past, they are not going to do it now. They are not going to acquire superstrength overnight and begin to work where once they failed. All of these reasons are very good - but they just aren’t strong enough. Aside from health: if your doctor has told you that you are going to die in a few months’ time from smoking unless you stop (and there are few circumstances in which that might happen; smoking diseases, once underway, are very bad news and once the death sentence is passed, that’s generally it) and you believe him, that is sometimes strong enough. Pregnancy is very often strong enough.

They aren’t meaningful because there is very little in it for you. If you stop smoking “cold turkey” on New Years’ Day, you will wait twenty years to find out whether or not you have saved your health. In the meantime, the improvement in your general health will be imperfect and glacially slow. What have you got to show for stopping smoking? A long wait - in my experience. The money you save will just vanish in some other way, most likely. What seems like a lot totted up over a year is actually just the equivalent of a round of drinks, or a joint of meat, or less than a cinema ticket or paperback book. And if you put the money into a tin on the mantlepiece.. you are doing better than most. I’d forget to do it after a few days. As for the smell, a promise: after you’ve stopped smoking, the smell of tobacco smoke will become far more disgusting to you and more headache-provoking than it ever was before you started. You will be worse off in that respect. (There are some people who find themselves eagerly sniffing the air for the smell - which goes to show that rules aren’t absolute. These people are going to have a job staying “stopped” - not because they’re weak or stupid, but because that difficulty goes with that experience).

In short, the classic reasons for stopping smoking do not leave you better off in a way you can enjoy now. Not in a significant way. Outcome goals do leave you better off, so long as they are properly formed. Outcome goals have to make you, personally, feel better. We can’t always predict what will make us feel better, and indeed we are famously bad at such predictions. Stopping smoking does not transform the rest of life.

But it can become part of something that does transform the rest of life. For me, stopping smoking became part of the wider goal of building my business and having the experiences that went with that. Helping others; ending up in unexpected places; meeting extraordinary people; finding that I was capable of more than I’d thought.

For me, stopping smoking was a process goal. Or, rather, it was a series of process goals. Let me explain what I mean.

As I’ve said, “stopping smoking” is a negative. You can see yourself washing up; you can see yourself not washing up (think of a sink full of pans and dishes). But thinking of an empty hand is unspecific. Your hands are empty much of the time. An empty hand doesn’t directly refer to “not smoking”.

Fortunately, smoking is not a futile thing to do, and we can break it down into what it is actually doing for us - and then find a means of fulfilling those needs in better ways. Often, there’s a “universal” way of fulfilling those needs - by fulfilling greater needs that have a prevailing imperative over the ones smoking fulfils.

Smoking does different things for different people living in their respective contexts and milieus. But these are what appear to be the most general benefits people gain from smoking:

Smoking helps you to relax.

Smoking helps you to concentrate

Smoking gives you something to do when bored

Smoking can keep you company when you’re lonely

Smoking gives you something to do with your hands

Smoking gives you social confidence, perhaps an air of “street”

Smoking looks elegant, even sexy

Smoking can mark special moments - after dinner, after sex

Smoking makes drinking better, and goes well with tea/coffee

Smoking is a powerful de-stresser

Smokers are the sociable ones

Smoking gives you a way to break the ice (”cigarette?” - proffers packet)

Smoking “scratches the big itch of life” (ht: Rob Kelly)

Not all of those will be true for everyone, and some of them will be controversial to people with other ideas about the nature of smoking. The steady social dismissal of smoking makes many people reluctant to admit that there is anything at all to gain from smoking.

But I’d argue that there are good reasons to break smoking down this way. For one thing, it explains smoking. Cigarettes went around the world at lightning speed - in sixty years changing from bizarre Ottoman Turk practice to that thing two thirds of the population did without thinking. Cigarettes did more for people, more easily, than any product ever known before or since. The Ipod isn’t the perfect product (and just you wait for the deafness epidemic..); a pack of Woodbines is. Smoking doesn’t stop you driving, flying, working machinery, making love, watching TV, shopping, eating; you can buy cigarettes anywhere 24/7 (only of petrol and junk food can the same be said) and they are, in the QVC phrase, so easy to use.

For another, it restores the smoker’s sense of control. This is important. I found my own smoking infuriating, inexplicable. I could give up rowing, or concert-going. But not this. Why not? Because although the individual benefits I was getting from smoking were relatively small, they were cumulative (20 a day) and universal, amounting to a very large overall psychological benefit. What that means is that it’s an enormous tragedy that smoking should be so bad for health. It’s so good in so many other ways.

For another, it should be apparent that these benefits can be obtained in other ways, from other things.

Some people do go down the road of taking each benefit, each need, in turn and seeing how they can supply themselves with it in alternative ways from smoking. Others - and I count myself here - find more universal ways of doing it.

Here’s where outcome goals do come in. If your outcome goal is deeply meaningful to you, and smoking is in the way of its achievement, then stopping smoking automatically becomes a process goal. What’s more, the psychological benefits of smoking recede. Because of your outcome goal, the benefits are now having to compensate you for not achieving this huge meaningful thing. And they, like the classic “reasons to stop smoking” are ultimately limited in their strength. They are not strong enough to compensate for disabling your outcome goal.

For instance? I have had clients who were runners, and wanted to reach the next level. One I remember in particular, who had a race in mind, along the top of the Andes. We worked together to make it possible for them to see and feel that outcome - the spectacular scenery, the air in the lungs, the legs in that mode where it feels as though they can run forever.. we made every part of that outcome real. The feeling of being there, of actually having made it, the pride and satisfaction. And the steps to get there, the plan, the what-do-I-do-absolutely-next. At a certain point, the whole thing becomes clear; the person begins to trust themselves that they will take those specific steps, and thus they begin to believe, absolutely, that they will be there in the Andes. At that point, the achievement of making it there begins to work for them, in advance. They begin to enjoy the psychological benefits of the achievement, because of that element of self-trust. And the benefits of something that meaningful outweigh entirely what lies in the way - smoking. And when that happens, the habit just becomes an irrelevance, a left-over, and it crumples.

Another example. A talented musician, whose dream was to become a professional, playing on stage. Hers was a wind instrument, and her tutor was aware of the depth of her ability. But because she smoked, her breathing was impaired, and her lung capacity reduced. Her tutor told her that she could make it - if only she stopped smoking! We worked together to make that prospect feel real and doable for her - every aspect of what it would really be like (including the mundane and the downsides, as unrealistic visions have no real power in them). She realised that smoking was in fact all that stood between her and her dream - and, once again, the benefits of the dream being realised more than compensated for the loss of the benefits of smoking. Smoking became an irrelevance, an outdated thing, and she stopped, effortlessly. She’s in Paris now, playing live with famous names.

And then… there’s my story. Ahem. Not so glamorous or glorious, but the same principles apply. I began planning my business in the mid-90s, and one day I was having a drink with this bloke. We’re old friends, and as is sometimes the way with old friends, most of our conversations sound like all-out arguments. I’d been “sharing my plans” with him - the new techniques I’d pioneer, the consultancy I’d build, and would have built had I not been such a fool with money. He kind of listened, and then said something I’ll never forget:

You’ll never stop smoking, James. You have an addictive personality.

I thought, “I’ll show you, you *****”. That cigarette was my last. The prospect of an exciting new life (and it turned out to be that, for quite a lot of the time, at least at first) and of shoving his words back up his nose in perpetuity (and I do, unlovely as it is) outweighed the benefits of smoking and made them irrelevant to me. I haven’t smoked since.

A word about “addiction”. There is no doubt at all that cigarettes, largely through the medium of nicotine, is highly psychoactive. It makes you feel different. Of course it is - otherwise, no benefits. Some people are in greater need of those benefits than others - especially sufferers from the various anxiety disorders and depressive conditions. It is clear to me that the task of stopping smoking is genuinely a great deal harder for such people, many of whom are undiagnosed or who, for the perfectly good reasons of protecting their own dignity and sense of self, would find diagnosis distasteful. It’s harder, and it’s not their fault it’s harder - no one brings such conditions upon themselves as these things are subject to fate and luck.

Our understanding of the action of nicotine in the brain is far greater now than it was five years ago, and the growth of that understanding is accelerating. In my opinion, one result has been to utterly undermine the claims of most existing smoking cessation programmes but especially nicotine replacement therapy or NRT. Television adverts are accurate when they claim that NRT more than doubles your chances of success. It does, from about 2-4% to as high as between 10 and 16 percent. I leave you to decide if that amounts to abuse of statistics.

In terms of addiction, I do not like most attempts to ram cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, skunk, gambling, sex-lines and the rest in together under that heading - I don’t see how it helps our understanding or our attempts to provide effective treatments. Lance Dodes’ theory that “addiction” is a subset of more generally obsessive behaviour looks more promising than a thousand articles whittering on about dopamine. Luckily, what I think, or what anyone else thinks, isn’t crucial. Neuroscientific research has a habit of rendering old jargon, old concepts and old thinking irrelevant in spite of the personal biases of those involved.

But if you accept that nicotine is essential - and I do - it’s worth considering that it’s essential, not in of itself, but what its effects mean to you personally, and where that meaning stacks up in your overall scheme of things. If your outcome goal is good enough, stopping smoking won’t be the most challenging process goal you’ll ever face.

Of course, the Zinedanes and Cruyffs pose a problem. If fags don’t stop you making the World Cup Final… shhh…

What Will Remain Of Us Are Blogs

When I first came across his blog, Damian Counsell was a research scientist in Cambridge. Then, in August 2005, it all changed. The Rosalind Franklin Centre closed down, and he moved to a new career in a totally different field, and to a different home, in Brighton. Damian is now regarded by discerning people as amongst the very best photographers in the south of England, producing images full of warmth and proper humour. He has also worked for the EU, and was a founder member of the blogosphere’s best known Oxford University alumnus group.

But ever since Cambridge, there’s been a link on his blog pointing back to those days. It reads, “I used to be Damian Counsell”, and it’s a nonserious reminder of just how much our identity and our job can coincide. It’s always brought to mind for me a dusty Italian hillside, Roman soldiers, and hundreds of slaves in chains, who, threatened and challenged, one by one rise to their feet and cry “No! I used to be Damian Counsell!”

Now it’s my turn to investigate that self-and-job concept. A mix of eighty percent personal incompetence and twenty percent Northern Rock crisis has brought my psychotherapy practice crashing down. A future, long in the planning and the subject of a decade’s work, is gone. As you read this, I, too, used to be Damien Counsell.

It could be so much worse, of course. It’s only a job, and I could be Rachel From North London or Gary Farber or one of the many bloggers I read and benefit from whose lives have been a great deal less blessed than my own. (See if you can’t help Gary out while you’re there).

Barriers to entry were what brought me to it initially. My generation left university in the middle of the last Tory recession, and the traditional graduate recruitment drive had closed for the duration. None of my friends entered their career of choice, or have made it there since. I ended up working in a series of London public libraries, in one of life’s “hidden jobs” which outsiders know nothing of beyond their own inaccurate clichees. I loved it, to tell the truth: no money, even less status, but it was a people job, and my colleagues were the best people in the world. Some later made names for themselves – the poet Paul Farley, for instance, or Film4’s correspondent Ali Catterall.

My family had a tradition in business, however, and it was one I wanted to follow. But I had no capital – less than none after my first startup went for a burton in its first six weeks.

Neuroscience and psychology were just hobby interests then. One sunny afternoon, I was sitting up on the mezzanine of my Earls Court flat, dragging on a cigarette and paging through Allen Carr’s Easyway to Stop Smoking when it struck me, in true entrepeneurial fashion, that here was a problem that lots of people had. If I could find an answer to it, then I’d have a business on my hands, and one moreover requiring only minimal funds to get going. Who knew – I might even be able to stop smoking myself.

I spent the next year wading through bluejacketed BMJ and Lancet archives, and their multifarious rivals, reading every peer-reviewed paper on the subject of smoking that I could find and get access to. No Google Scholar back then. And I talked to smokers, and stopped smokers, ad nauseam, more than a thousand of them in the end. Patterns emerged, which I used in half-day seminars in a West Kensington hotel. These were hard to fill, and those who came kept asking me if I was a hypnotherapist. I found that insulting at first.

Barriers to entry, you see: had the resources been there, I’d have gone back into education and done a Raj Persaud double of qualifying both as a psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist. Instead, I crept into the psychotherapy world by the back door, with a diploma in hypnotherapy. That’s not to cause offence to friends and colleagues, but it was how it felt and how it was. Once in, I intended to do my own thing anyway.

That diploma was enough to set me up in professional practice.. How long ago it feels. And how wrong I was about so much. Private psychotherapy – for that’s what it became – is not a low-capital start-up. That was my fantasy, pure and simple, maintained because I wanted it to be true.

I’d joined a clinic in Botley, west of Oxford. On my first day, Osney Island flooded and then froze. I waded it: there was radiator time for my suit trousers and shoes before my client arrived. Elsewhere in England, those hypnotherapists daft enough to turn out early on a wet, cold Sunday morning had either started with sufficient capital or else saw the job as a nice part-time hobby alongside their main income. Or else they were deluding themselves, as I was. The money in therapy is not in therapy itself, but in training, in seminars, in the provision of services to therapists. I know that now.

The enjoyment in therapy isn’t in therapy, either. Daniel Gilbert’s written a minor bestseller about how askew our predictions are about what we will and won’t enjoy. I imagined a pleasant, book-lined room, confidence in what I was doing, satisfaction in the results I would help people to achieve. I saw myself broadcasting and using the gaps between client sessions to write books and articles on a walnut-cased laptop. (I know..)

The reality has been a series of poorly-decorated rooms, along with my own perpetual and petulant dissatisfaction with the state of human knowledge about abnormal psychology – along with my obsession not with successes, but with the people whom, with the best will in the world, I was unable to help. The pleasures were elsewhere: planning student services in the Magdalen SCR as spring sunshine leapt through the coloured windows, or talking football with Jim White on camera, or lecturing in panelled rooms in London and Surrey, or spotting my byline in the Times. Whatever the reality and wherever the pleasures, the bottom line was always red.

No one tells you what a solitary business it is. I have never spent so much time alone as I have in the last few years. In part, this is because of lack of funds. Invitations are refused, holidays not taken – nothing more than a weekend away in six years, and those all on tick. I don’t mind my own company, but…

So I don’t think I’ll miss it all that much.

I wonder how different it would have been had psychotherapy been a British invention.

Therapy is the product of thought experiments conducted by a series of foreign men with a penchant for bow ties. In the time of Freud and Kraepelin, thought experiment was - almost - all you could do. Even in more recent times, significant numbers of the major psychiatric drugs, drugs which have saved the lives of millions, have been accidental discoveries.

The foreign background matters. Mental health, for those of you who don’t follow the subject, is heavily culturally determined. Disorders that Freud saw every week are now rare birds, even in Vienna. Gone are the fugues, the glove anaesthesias, the hysterias. But they still crop up in the Far East and the Indian subcontinent, along with a host of uniquely local variations.

I suspect on anecdotal evidence alone that there are even regional variations between places as close and connected as London and Surrey.

Just as the problem is culturally determined, so is the solution. A solution devised to fit wealthy Viennese, or middle Americans, is one not devised with the British in mind. It’s always going to be a bendy bus, for all that it longs to be a Routemaster. It might just get you where you want to go, but it won’t be much of a ride, and half the time, you’ll get off in disgust and dive onto the tube instead.

Little wonder there’s so much scepticism and suspicion of psychotherapy in Britain.

It makes me wonder what kind of beast a British psychotherapy would be. I know one thing: it wouldn’t be called “psychotherapy.” Ugly word. All people want to do is feel better. I think it would be thoroughly peer-reviewed. It might have positive things to say about restrained emotional display. It would be unambitious but effective within its scope. It would be something your local doctor could take with him in his bag, or feel able to refer to without misgiving.

It would be something Ben Goldacre might approve of. But the very existence of Ben’s column and website is a straw in the wind. For all his efforts, and those of the likes of Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, for all that it’s a stunning golden age of popular science writing, the wind’s in the east. I suspect that just my qualifying as a hypnotherapist helped that wind; if so, it’s something I regret.

In the past, I’ve leaned to some extent on the knowledge that hypnotherapy has has a place in the NHS since the early 1950s, and that it’s recognized by the BMA. These things are still true. It’s just that I’ve come to question how much all that means. Homeopathy too is available on the NHS.

Homeopathy has a deservedly bad reputation for obfuscating the research issue. Psychotherapy might do too. CBT, it’s true, has a host of research studies behind it, but until recently those studies had been made possible only by the discounting of hard-to-measure things like the relationship of therapist and client, which CBT practitioners are coming to regard as more important than they once did. (The likes of the impressive Professor Paul Salkovkis and certain of his peers are completely exempt from this - and I don’t want to make general aspersions anyway).

There’s also something of a gulf between psychotherapy and neuroscience. (Less of one between psychiatry and neuroscience, as you might expect). For instance, the consequences of this paper for the basic theory behind CBT are surely devastating

(https://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/extract/340/19/1476 Well worth registering for, by the way.)

There is very little serious research on hypnosis or hypnotherapy in existence or underway. Nor is there much in the way of thinking what such research might consist of, or what questions it might seek to explore. Hypnosis and hypnotherapy roll on just outside the aegis of proper science, recipients of enthusiasm or disgust depending on the individual. As a therapist, when I heard my clients utter phrases such as “I’ve got a very open mind” or “I do believe in this sort of thing” I felt nothing but dread and pessimism. The placebo effect exists, but who would want to build a career on it? And, given that the placebo effect boils down to physical expression, chemically and electrically within the brain and body, neuroscience will overtake it sooner or later, with who knows what results. Pace Dawkins, but placebo might be one rainbow likely to be unwoven in time.

Whatever the status or not of the relevant research, the fact remains that for an ever-increasing number of people, complementary and alternative medicine are very attractive ideas. Of course, cognitions have aesthetic as well as logical sides to them.

I realize now that my Anglican faith was entirely a matter of aesthetics: I preferred the look and atmosphere of the Church of England to the ’70s pop culture on offer to my friends and myself. It had a more serious feel, an underpinning, a permanence and a point. I felt, only vaguely consciously, that there had to be something to an organizational tradition that had so much beautiful architecture, so much stunning music, painting, poetry and the loyalty of so many brilliant men and women through the ages. I loved the hole for the doughnut, in short. What the hole consisted of didn’t worry me very much, and yet it was the hole my non-Christian friends wanted to take issue with me over. I felt then that they were missing the point. We’d both missed different points, and that’s something I see happening time and time again as that debate moves into the media mainstream. I missed the logic and grammar; my opponents missed the aesthetics.

But that’s how people work – I still function in this way over a myriad of things, and so do you. And the aesthetics of an idea have the prevailing imperative over the idea’s logical and grammatical integrity. What’s more, it can be hard to divide the parts up, often impossible. Western political discourse is strewn across with this. So’s political blogging.

I consider myself fortunate to find beauty, awe and wonder in science. As I’ve said, I’ve lived through an era of fabulous science writing. At school, it looked dry, dull and limited; it won’t do again for me, but that impression remains with many or most people.

In that context, alternative and complementary medicine look welcoming, colourful, warm, optimistic, kindly and alternately exciting and down to earth. Famously, it has time for you. It’s the pseudomedical equivalent of “Cheers.” These aesthetics provide a swift, elegant means to assess the personal validity of a thing, and, as with all aesthetic issues, different people take them in different ways.

If we like something, if we’re attracted to it, then it’s human nature to defend it. How many people feel constrained from making comment on a religion or a therapy because they know and like and respect someone involved in it? To me, that can feel like attacking the man for all that I know I’m only going for the ball.

Unless, of course, one wants to go for the “man”. Aesthetics can help you out when logic and grammar do not. There are, out there, somewhere, substantial criticisms of Richard Dawkins, but they are hard to find in among the swarm of aesthetic ones, the “shrill”, “dogmatic,”, “fundamentalist,” “arrogant” (that last is especially British, don’t you think?) “neo-Atheist” (gosh! Does that mean they’re something like those…. neo-cons you told me about?) and so wearily forth. Martin Amis has been getting much the same lately. In relation to homeopathy, so has Ben Goldacre, and in that case, something that is ordinarily done unconsciously and as a matter of course was done rather more deliberately; he took it with enormous humour and patience.

I have wanted things to be true, and so behaved as though they were true, and in much of my life that’s served as a convenient compression codec: I live my life as though Yellowstone won’t erupt during it or the comet strike Earth. But there’s a difference between wanting, or being inclined towards, and what can turn out to be the case. I thought I was stubborn, a sticker, one who persevered against the odds, when all I was was a fool with money.

I won’t miss it – not the clinical side. But I have something related coming up that I will enjoy and which I think other people will enjoy too. And this site will go on, but more as a hobby than any expression of my erstwhile job. Of course it will; as he who used to be Damian Counsell showed, what will remain of us are blogs.

Can Changing Your Food Transform Your Emotions? 2

The emotions in question right now are those engendered by what has so far been a cack-handed performance by Scotland against Italy. I turned Radio 5 off in the car just after kick-off, sickened by all the “rain in their faces, cold air on their skin” comments from the BBC team. A pity: the Italian goal in the second minute must have shut them up quite superbly.

Well? Can it transform your emotions?

Thus far, two days out of five and three away from my trip to the White Bear… almost embarrassingly so, yes. But with side-effects.

The first impact came shortly after lunchtime on day one. I was halfway through the miserable, soul-destroying journey to my Surrey clinic, when I suddenly began to feel much better, without any particular reason for doing so. The daylight - grey from the wash these days - brightened, my vision sharpened. The latter was only so much of a good thing. My eyes have felt as if they’re trying to focus for a couple of days now, and it’s giving me a headache.

In an obscure way, things have begun to feel that bit more possible. I’m coming into this brief experiment on the back of a benighted year in which little has gone right and much disastrously wrong, and this is a welcome shift. It doesn’t have to be much to dispel a considerable amount of gloom.

Later that afternoon, I fell abruptly asleep in my office in an interval between clients. I am feeling alternately energetic and in-a-good-way sleepy. I fell asleep again today, but around that put in what might be my best day’s work for a year.

I’ve been feeling damned hungry before dinner, but that is really down to dinner having been very late (10.45, owing to work commitments), not any imbalance in what I’m eating.

I was up extremely early this morning, but despite a disturbed night, felt extremely refreshed. I’m curious as to how tomorrow morning will feel.

So far, my feelings are that I’d recommend some parts of the regime and not others. A breakfast of fruit in yoghurt and honey with some nuts tossed on top is no time to prepare, delicious, and there is the whole world of fruit and yoghurt flavours to play with to keep things varied. My family have had the same two slices of toast and coffee for breakfast for half a century. All that’s ever changed is the spread (1991, from St Ivel Gold to Anchor Spreadable..)

At this time of year, salad for lunch is fine for five days. I work with people who have the same Boots sandwich for lunch as they have had for five years, ever since they stopped making Chicken Tikka .. But over a longer period, I’d think about taking other routes to the same destination. Proper vegetable soup with home-made bread; Italian ways with roast vegetables and pasta; stews and salsas.

My gut instinct is to have the evening meal as the diet-free zone, a time, as I mentioned in the first post, for conversation, wine, flavour and warmth, life rather than attempts at life. But my steamed vegetables will be OK for five days.

Still 1-0. I think Britain will be sitting out Euro 2008, don’t you? But if it stays that way at Hampden, I hope the press and fans will remember a truly brave effort in an horrendous group. I know I will, and I’ll remember the delighted disbelief after victory in Paris. Happiness from quite unexpected places..

UPDATE: Israel appear to be winning. That’s really rather cruel of them, don’t you think?

UPDATE 2: Good for Scotland. Although it looks like defeat, it’s the right kind.

Can Changing Your Food Transform Your Emotions?

Of course it can: eat nothing but crisps and drink nothing but cheap lager for only one week, and you’ll see the world in an entirely new way.

I’m interested in the opposite direction, of course. And I’m turning myself into a guinea pig for five days to see how far I can go in that short space of time.

My consulting room experience has been that certain conditions - especially Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Panic - can be brought right to heel by a couple of weeks’ worth of fruit and fresh vegetables. Not in every case, and anyway, when you are lumbered with either of those, you don’t have very much mental space free to plan your way out of it food-wise. And many people don’t have the freedom - they have family and children to think of.

The experiment will last for five days and will be just food: no filling in of CBT forms, or self-hypnosis CDs or guided meditations or inspirational speakers or Happiness Projects. I’ll be taking no exercise beyond my usual.

And it’s purely for interest’s sake. I don’t really like the idea of using food as medicine: it’s to be enjoyed, preferably with friends and with wine and with variety and love and music and candles and late nights. I won’t have much variety over the next few days. (My hunch is that most people’s diets are surprisingly restricted, but habit hides awareness.)

My daily diet will consist of:

Breakfast: fruit broken up into plain yoghurt, with a dash of honey, sprinkled with flax seed and walnut pieces.
Lunch: Lettuce, spring onion, avocado, sweetcorn, tuna, cucumber, radish, with lemon/oil dressing.
Dinner: (I eat late most evenings, so this is always light) Steamed or boiled vegetables, emphasising broccoli and carrots.

It’s not aimed at specific nutritional balance, although it’s probably not too bad on that front. This is all about morale.

I’ll let you know what happens. And I’ll end it with a huge roast meal and an evening in the White Bear, like any sensible person would.

Why Playing Away From Home Is Hard

I was reading some newspaper or other on a late train home last week when I came across the opinion, expressed by an established football journalist, that all football pitches were the same and that home/away advantage was a mystery.

Of course, it isn’t so, and all the reasons why it isn’t so are fairly obvious. Here they are.

Travel

You have to get to the game. This is more tiring than not travelling. And home games usually mean not staying in a strange hotel away from everything familiar. There’s a lot of travelling in football at most professional and semi-professional levels, but top managers still regard it as sapping.

All Football Pitches Are Not The Same

The rules of football specify a range of pitch sizes, not an absolute standard, which is why a club will, for instance, widen or narrow their pitch to suit their style of play. Off the top of my head, I believe Goodison Park is currently the largest pitch.

What’s more, what surrounds the pitch - stands, running tracks, advertising bits and pieces - are all different. Footballers have to know exactly where they are on the pitch in relation to their team mates moment by moment. One way they do this is via the pitch markings, but familiarity with a ground enables them to use pitchside gubbins to place themselves more accurately. When Arsenal first moved to Ashburton Grove, Thierry Henry pointed out that the home team were every bit as unfamiliar with their surroundings as the visitors, and that he was having to work hard on his pitch navigation.

Fans

It goes without saying that you play more easily with support in the stands than with opposition. But the unwritten rule in football is that abuse from supporters is “water off a duck’s back”. Don’t you believe it. Even the most experienced and skilled of public speakers prefer an attentive and interested audience over a crowd of yawners and texters. Multiply that to a crowd of 40,000 and allow them to shout and swear at you, even to throw things at you, and see how you feel. Some players undoubtedly tune the crowd out - but it won’t be all.

There are other factors, but those will do for now. Here is a beautiful example of a stadium which, big when built, can only have become ever more intimidating over the years. It scarcely looks like a place for playing games these days. Some people will rise to the occasion of playing here - others will feel crushed and try to hide. Wait till we get them back to our place:

Passion and Commitment

Thanks to Gary for pointing this one out to me - it’s another half-time team talk of the Churchillian variety.

Watch the faces of the players.

(You’ll have to follow the link, but it’s well worth it..)

Boothroyd, Keane, and 3 Levels of Sport Psychology

At the start of the 06-07 season, I made two predictions that proved completely wrong. According to my crystal ball, Aidy Boothroyd, a manager for the future, would keep Watford up, and Keane, another manager for the future, would prove to have chosen the wrong level of club for his first job and would be struggling.

My views on the Watford situation were based on the fact that Boothroyd had taken over a club deep in playing and financial troubles, and won them promotion in his first season as a manager. Boothroyd was very aware of his newness in the role, and was keen to learn everything he could. Stories abound of his buttonholing this or that experienced and successful coach at this or that event and bleeding them of information. He is, relatively speaking, widely read, his reading also being a source of information and inspiration. He takes a deep interest in what goes on in other sports - he is friendly with Sir Clive Woodward, for instance.

My thinking about Keane was not about whether he’d make a good manager. Keane’s autobiography is famous for really being an autobiography, rather than a book about a footballer. Moreover, it is replete with reflections on the job of football management, and these reflections are a world away from the tabloid stereotypes of the “inspirational leader” kind. Keane was thinking deeply about the role long before he ceased playing. The same can be said for most effective managers. My doubts about Keane were all centred on his choice of first club.

Other than the legendary internal promotions at Liverpool that saw Paisley, Fagin and Dalglish step up to success, practically all of the truly great managers began their career at an utterly minor club, before taking over a never-quite-great-club-in-despair. Think Shankly at Carlisle, Grimsby, and Huddersfield - before taking over at Liverpool when they were very much the city’s second club. Think Clough and Taylor at Hartlepools, before Derby and then (with some odd stops in between) Forest. Think Alex Ferguson at East Stirlingshire, then Aberdeen. Think O’Neill at Wycombe, then Leicester, then Celtic, now (a decision of genius) Villa.

Sunderland and Keane didn’t seem to match this pattern. They weren’t yet humbled enough by events - a club who call their ground the Stadium of Light might be accused of hubris on that account alone. They took the attitude that they “belonged” in the Premiership. If every club that thought that way were in the top league, the season would last for three years.

Nevertheless, whatever my grounds for thinking the way I did, I was wrong and wrong. But the contrasting seasons had by Boothroyd and Keane do reflect something I’ve been thinking lately about sport psychology in this country, and it’s this: in the UK, there are three levels to sport psychology, where there should be only one. Two of those levels simply do not work.

Level One: No Nonsense”.

Level One is the habitat of football journalists, Sky Sports presenters, callers to 6-0-6 and the kind of middle class white-collar professional who thinks that he thinks that footballers are overpaid prima-donnas. Level One’s tools are (a) shouting at people (b) threatening people and (c) Churchillian rhetoric, this to be provided by someone else other than the Level One character who’d be rather hard pushed to come up with it themselves.

Level One is also the home of many managers, not necessarily Premiership ones, who were once players and therefore assume that they are in a unique position to understand the lads. In other words, they think that what worked on themselves will work on everyone, and indeed, that there are things that will “work on people”. The tricks and the tips are out there somewhere, but have to be approved by all right-thinking mockney more-working-class-than-thou blokes.

Level Two: Tips and Tricks.

Level Two is home to those people who think that there might be something to all this psychobabble after all. But because it’s not that prevalent in football, they’ll turn for inspiration to the one area of British lower middle class life where it is central - sales. This is the world of the inspirational poster, the affirmations repeated under the breath, the seminar speaker egging his crowd on to jump, shout and wave their arms in the air. It’s the place where “confidence” is brash and loud, where lessons are learned from Napoleon, Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes, where you can do something called Achieving Success.

I’ve a dreadful feeling that these characters have their claws in Boothroyd at the moment. At some point, everything he’s taking on board will come together for him, internalized and combined with his own native wit and determination, and then he’ll be free of it. It can’t come soon enough. Levels One and Two are characterized by the same two things: (a) bluster and (b) they don’t actually work.

I wonder if Bill Beswick is in these parts, too. Those reports that he “went beserk” at Middlesborough with posters etc. in the wake of the 2003 Rugby World Cup, if true, make me despair. So does the “Cathedrals” story.

“I was in the Manchester United dressing room one day and told the players the story about three men who were laying bricks.

“Each of them was asked what he was doing. ‘Laying bricks,’ said the first. ‘Earning £10 per hour,’ said the second.

“The third one said. ‘I’m building a cathedral and, one day, I’ll bring my kids back here and tell them that their dad had contributed to this magnificent building.’

Apparently David Beckham, following that talk, went out onto the training pitch, scored an incredible goal and ran off shouting “Cathedral 1 Bricklayers 0.”

I agree that good communications demand that you present your ideas in a way that your audience can understand and connect with, but if the ideas are shallow, banal and irrelevant to begin with… (I like the £10 per hour man - he’ll go far, you mark my words).

The British are all too keen on tips and tricks. My own colleagues, if I can call other hypnotherapists that, tend to be out of this box and enthusiastic at having others climb into it with them. It’s not quite the problem-solving attitude that it seems. The problem has to be solved in a particular way - it mustn’t be intellectual, it mustn’t take long, it mustn’t mention sex and it mustn’t talk posh. And it must make money..

Much British sport psychology still works at this level to some extent, which might deepen the problems of a Boothroyd, someone who is genuinely interested in finding what works and finding how best to apply it. There are still such things as “team building exercises” which, on closer examination, seem to be all about merely chucking a group of people together in the hope that at random they’ll become keen to suppress their own wants and needs in the interests of the group.

Level Three: Real Knowledge. I’m struggling slightly for a good name for this level, but it is meant to encompass both instinctive knowledge, of the Ferguson/Stein/Paisley variety, and learned knowledge from a proper source - Jose Mourinho’s reading list isn’t so well publicized as Boothroyd’s, but it’s at an altogether different level, and is designed to gel with everything else he’s learned over the years.

Some people just know. Ferguson said recently that over the years he’s had to become “more of a psychologist,” but the newspaper stereotyping of him was always largely a work of fiction, and he has been headhunted by corporations outside football who know a genuinely skilled man manager when they see one. He learned from Stein, but didn’t try to become Stein. Peter Taylor learned from Harry Storer, ruining a ’60s Spanish holiday for Storer and his wife in the process, but didn’t try to become Storer. O’Neill, and now Keane, knew Clough, but haven’t tried to manage like him.

And some people can learn. David Moyes has changed his style of management substantially while he has been at Everton. And it wasn’t the result of a sales conference or the visit of a speaker. It was the acknowledgement that people are different, want different things from life, for different reasons, and that this isn’t going to be altered by dressing room discipline: these conflicting views and desires were precisely the material that he would have to work alongside in order to build his team. Everton were fighting relegation every year when he arrived. This year, with a cut-price squad, they qualified for Europe. This might be as good as it gets - the next step up did what it did to Leeds, and the warning signs have now been erected.

There is real information out there in reading form about human beings, their character, temperament and world views, but there’s a job there for someone who wants it: translate it for sport. Possession of it won’t necessarily make you into a good manager, but it could make you into a successful number two.

There’s a dark side to management that lives at level three, which levels one and two wot not of. I don’t think the best managers are especially well-balanced people. Shankly was a lost child away from his job. Busby and Paisley took rather too much pleasure in having other mens’ careers in the palm of their hand, to feed or destroy. Some top current managers enjoy dominating others, bullying them on occasions - for its own sake, not for the benefit of the club or team, whatever they may say. Top football managers are not men who really put family and friends first: Ferguson’s interests outside football are unusual, not shared by Wenger or Mourinho, and he didn’t always have them.

That’s the reality of the situation. Success in football coaching, a brief and fleeting thing at the best of times, is not the animal portrayed on inspirational posters. Top former managers do not have tips or tricks which, if applied to your life, will make it better or more satisfying. Top sportsmen are often the nastiest, most selfish, most cruel, most ruthless, least developed personalities you come across. When you see 2012 being used to “inspire” children, that’s worth reflecting on.

At level 3, you won’t necessarily find yourself working with the finest aspects of what it means to be human. This fact occasionally slips out - perhaps in a comment about how as a manager you can go home most days “feeling filthy” - but on the whole, it’s not something the general sports fan cares to think about too much. It’s nicer, and easier, to imagine sport as the practical application of all the good old English virtues. When Maradona was interviewed by Gary Lineker about his “hand of God” goal, his scorn at English claims to fair play was moot: if Shilton cleared the ball after it had crossed the line for a goal, and the goal wasn’t given because the referee was unsighted, would he complain then?

It’s the same unspoken, unacknowledged, unaccounted for thing that’s in level 2’s sales seminars. Sales people are keen on the idea that they provide a service - helping people to buy the goods and services that will improve their lives in ways that might be obscure to them when just browsing. It’s true in some cases. But that “some” is the exception that proves the rule. Professional selling is often grubby and exploitative. And the latest sales recruitment posters on the London Underground promise a lifestyle of champagne, birds and stretch limos, the plastic success we saw so brilliantly unravelled by Benedictine monks in The Monastery in 2005.

All of which brings me back to Roy Keane and his autobiography. Football, according to Keane, is not the repository of everything that’s good about being British. It’s home to a lot of people who are prone to complain when they are at their most fortunate, who are prone to laziness and sloppiness (both players and managers), liable to abuse their position, rest on their laurels etc. It’s a dark picture, but one that acknowledges part of the truth that much sport psychology completely ignores. (I list two sport psychology books in my reading list, neither of which have anything to say on this subject at all). What Keane’s book didn’t display was his curiosity about people. Accounts of his first year at Sunderland include several of what might at first sight appear to be “team building exercises” - Sunderland players have been taken mountain biking, white water rafting, paintballing and on an army assault course. But Keane explains this in two ways: it’s about variety, keeping people interested and engaged, and it’s about what novel situations reveal in people. British football is in love with its roaring boys, its Terrys and Lampards, but roaring boys have a habit of going very quiet when out of their comfort zone. Stuart Pearce, a “roaring lion” in his playing days, turned out to be a quiet manager, accused by his players of not taking a strong enough stand with them. Take the roaring boy away from his “manor” and see how he gets on seems to be the Keane philosophy.

Boothroyd’s season was not about him failing psychologically as a manager - it was about injuries to his strikers, lack of funds, the sale of Ashley Young. He, and they, will be back, that’s certain. By then, what he’s learning now with so much enthusiasm and open-mindedness will be his own knowledge, and he’ll be applying it in his way. He’ll be a level three manager, no longer a level two. Keane seems to have used his long thinking time as a player well, better than he gave us reason to believe. His first season in the Premiership will be fascinating. Of course, it’ll all be reported in terms of his being a protegee of Ferguson and Clough, so Sunderland’s games with United and Villa will be unusually tiresomely written-up. I predict a Reading-style season, and a narrow, silently-fortuitous, failure to qualify for Europe.