Eight family deaths inspire stop-smoking workbook

Eight tobacco-related deaths in their families and their own experiences helped bring a tobacco cessation book to life for ex-smokers David and Carole Johnson.

The Springfield couple believe the self-help workbook they've written will be an important tool for helping people stop smoking or chewing tobacco. They say it's a recipe for success for individuals who read and follow the instructions, and it also can be a key resource for businesses and employers who want to encourage employees to stop using tobacco.

The workbook, titled "Stop Smoking and Chewing Tobacco for Life Changes," was published last December. It grew in part from what Johnson, a retired health psychologist/trainer with a PhD in sociology and psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia, said were his many years of success in counseling people seeking to lose weight or quit smoking.

Carole Johnson owns All Through the House Interiors. She also has developed, packaged and marketed health-and-wellness program materials and is experienced in clerical and administrative work in the legal profession.

Although David Johnson's counseling work and the couple's own history as smokers were factors in doing the book, their major inspiration was the loss of family members to smoking-related illnesses.

Smoking parents

Both of David Johnson's parents smoked, he said, and as a child they frequently asked him to dispose of the finished cigarettes for them. "I used to wonder what in the world they got out of smoking." He said his father was experiencing hacking coughs and spitting by the time he was in his late 20s, which Johnson attributes to smoking.

Although the habit disgusted him at the time, the power of nicotine eventually found David Johnson. He took up smoking in 1961 as an adult working in social psychology and counseling. He believes it started primarily as a result of job stress at the mental health institution where he worked. "Here I was, helping people quit addiction, and here I am wanting these cigarettes," he said. In time he graduated to a pipe, which seemed more distinguished and appropriate for his occupation. He finally kicked the habit in 1963.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Johnson had found there were no formal intervention programs for tobacco cessation. He became interested in hypnosis, aversion therapy and substitute activity techniques for quitting. In the early 1970s, in his private counseling practice in Albuquerque, N.M., he started using those techniques for clients who wanted to lose weight or stop smoking. He continued counseling after he and his wife moved to Springfield in 1987 and said that so far about 90 percent of his clients got the results they wanted.

Anti-smoking movement

With the rise of the anti-smoking and wellness movements, along with positive results in his own work, David Johnson believed he had "something special" going in the field. But a personal experience further propelled his passion for promoting tobacco cessation.

"Eventually, family members started dying" from tobacco-related illnesses, he said. "My father died in 1978."

Carole Johnson also saw people in her family die from the effects of tobacco. "That was one of the big reasons I wanted David to go through with this," she said. She also was motivated by a "clean environment" urge that came from seeing in her interior design work the effects of tobacco-smoke stains on home walls and furnishings.

David Johnson started on the workbook in 1994, tailoring it, he said, to not only teach how to quit tobacco and stay free of it, but to provide ways for those who stop to channel newly released energy into positive activities that could amount to significant life changes.

He supplied the data and other material from his professional background and experience, and Carole helped write, rewrite and edit. The self-instructional workbook, complete with worksheets, is based on tried-and-true self-help principles, Johnson said. It has more than 120 various exercises gleaned and developed from many existing sources.

Three principles

The Johnsons based their program on three major principles:

"Tobacco is the problem, not yourself";

"Nurture, protect and care about yourself more than tobacco";

"Set a date and quit tobacco for life changes."

According to the workbook, the life skills a former user needs to build in order to "quit and stay quit of tobacco life," are "commitment, confidence, competence, creativity." In addition, key elements that Johnson believes provide the program's high success potential are its aversion, substitute activity and self-hypnosis exercises.

The aversion exercises are written images designed to promote disgust with tobacco, even to the point of the self-learner becoming physically ill while reading. Aversion therapy has been controversial in the past because of concern about harmful side effects, Johnson said; but, he added, he has found no evidence of any physical damage. "I figured that if I could get people really disgusted with their habit, that would be a good start."

Substitute activity exercises urge the self-learner to adapt to positive, mental and physical behavior. The Johnsons have also put together a model hypnosis audiotape to go with the workbook.

After two years of work, the book was nearly finished. At the same time, the Johnsons after a lengthy search found a publisher, Infinity Publishing.com, of Haverford, Pa.

"What we have done makes it so people don't have to go to meetings," he said.

"They can do it themselves. This gives them a core base for working on skills to quit and stay tobacco-free. And they don't have to do all the exercises in the book. They can pick and choose."

By not only quitting, but also developing positive lifestyles, even positive addictions, people make a dramatic healthful switch in their lives, he said.

"That's why we called this Life Changes. It gets people onto an entirely different pathway."

David Johnson believes businesses and employers have an important stake in en-couraging employees to stop smoking.

He cited a recent study published in the September issue of the quarterly journal Tobacco Control. This study asserts that smokers call in sick an average of 4 days over a three-month period, compared with 2.4 days called in sick by former smokers.

People who never smoked called in 1.3 times over the same period, the study said.

The study, conducted by Charles River Associates in Washington, DC, was funded by GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company that makes the anti-smoking drug, Zyban.