Do You Really Need A Stop Smoking Program
Before you start paying out money on any of the well known (and heavily advertised) stop smoking programs, you need to understand how your body has been managing your desire to smoke, and how you can use this information to your benefit.
I also recommend that you check the statistics of the stop smoking program that you may have in mind, to find out how many people actually stop smoking using that program, and more importantly, how long they stay stopped for. The main reason being that most stop smoking programs focus on replacing the nicotine you get from smoking cigarettes, with an alternative method. Nicotine isn’t really the problem – you’re smoking habits and desires are.
Whenever a thought crosses your mind that leads to the lighting of a cigarette, you have experienced your desire to smoke. Sometimes it feels like an urge, a craving or a compulsion. Sometimes you just think to yourself that you fancy a cigarette, or that smoking would help you in some way. So you light one. As a smoker, you are continuously feeding and satisfying that desire by smoking cigarette after cigarette after cigarette – so any stop smoking program has to address these habits, rather than simply offering a nicotine replacement option.
A Part of Your Life
The desire to smoke may be associated with virtually any situation or circumstance in your life. This is a feature of all addictions: the conditioned response that the scientist Ivan Pavlov first demonstrated with his dogs. Pavlov rang a bell every time he fed the dogs, and after a while the dogs would salivate whenever they heard the bell, thinking food was on the way.
Just like Pavlov’s dogs, some smokers actually salivate for a cigarette on hearing the telephone ring. You train yourself, over and over, to expect a cigarette (a nicotine buzz), especially on certain cues.
I’m sure you would have no difficulty in identifying all kinds of things you associate with smoking. This is why smoking is thought of as a habit, because it’s so integrated into your life. For a stop smoking program to be effective and successful, it needs to help you address these habits and help you work out how to break them and re-condition your mind. Just think of all the situations: taking a break, finishing a meal, making a decision, concentrating on a demanding task or just completing one, answering the phone, sitting in a traffic jam, drinking coffee, having a beer, seeing another smoker light a cigarette and smelling the smoke.
You will also have conditioned yourself to expect to smoke whenever you feel particular emotions: especially anger and frustration, but also sadness, boredom, anxiety, embarrassment, and even triumph, joy and excitement.
The list is endless. Just about anything that happens, or doesn’t happen, in a smoker’s life can result in the idea of smoking a cigarette.
Fortunately, it is not essential to identify all these cues, especially since it could be quite an insignificant thought or simply a shift in your thinking, like: ‘What shall I do now?"
(Answer "I’ll have a cigarette!’). To be successful, a stop smoking program must help you come up with alternative answer. The main point here is that the desire to smoke, the expectation of smoking, is triggered repeatedly. Something happens and you think, automatically, that smoking a cigarette would be helpful and/or enjoyable. So you light a cigarette.
If you’ve been smoking regularly for a number of years, this thought will be so familiar to you that it can often go unnoticed, such as when you suddenly realize you have a half-smoked cigarette in your hand, with absolutely no recollection of having lit it.
But even though you may not be aware of it, there is always something that initiates the lighting of a cigarette. There has to be some impulse that tells your hand to pick up a cigarette and light it. This is your desire to smoke: you just aren’t conscious of it at times.
And if you’ve used any of the stop smoking programs in the past and have managed to stop smoking for any length of time, the reason you went back to smoking was because you had that same old desire to light a cigarette, and you did so.
Often people say they went back to smoking because of certain circumstances, such as an argument, an accident or a party. But what actually happened was this: the situation triggered a conditioned response - your desire to smoke - which you then satisfied. This may seem obvious, but it’s important to see the whole sequence of events: first the cue, then the desire, then the action of smoking.
If you smoke 40 cigarettes a day, then at least 40 times a day you are experiencing - and satisfying - your desire to smoke. Sometimes you enjoy them and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes they seem helpful and sometimes they are little more than a nuisance. Always, you are smoking not because events somehow magically make you reach out and light up a cigarette, but because they act as a trigger to your addictive desire.
Why do you have this desire to smoke? The answer is simply and entirely because of all the smoking you have done in the past. Smoking is ‘learned behavior’ (something that nearly all stop smoking programs fail to address). And you have reinforced your desire to smoke with every cigarette you ever smoked. You satisfy the desire, and you reinforce it at the same time.
If you had only ever smoked ten cigarettes, then your desire to smoke would only have been reinforced ten times. Unfortunately, people who have only smoked ten cigarettes usually aren’t motivated to stop smoking or fully understand how smoking effects your lungs. So they go on reinforcing the desire until they have smoked as many as a quarter of a million cigarettes before they really get serious about trying to stop.
Some smokers set up boundaries for themselves, or go along with boundaries set up by others, and don’t smoke in certain circumstances – this is something you can and should do regardless of what if any stop smoking program you get involved with. For instance, some people never, ever smoke in certain rooms, such as the bedroom. Others never smoke during breakfast or in their cars, and many never smoke during work situations, such as while teaching, in an office or interviewing people.
In these situations, the desire to smoke doesn’t usually get triggered because the association either has never been made in the first place or has already been broken. But you are certainly smoking as habitually and addictively at other times.
A desire to smoke is a thought that comes to your mind, regardless of how much nicotine there happens to be in your body at the time. Your body doesn’t need more nicotine just because you’re on a coffee break. Your body’s nicotine level doesn’t fall dangerously low the moment a friend comes to visit and lights up in your kitchen. What happens is that you are reminded of smoking when break-time comes along, or the smoking friend shows up, and you anticipate another opportunity to get your nicotine buzz. So before you pay out good money for one of the stop smoking programs, spend some time and think about your habits and how you can change or break them, and recondition your mind to come up with new answers to what you should do instead of lighting up.
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Tags: how to stop smoking, stop smoking programs, tips on stopping smoking