How To Quit Smoking For Good
If you make a choice to quit smoking for good, how long does that choice last? You might want it to last for at least a day. You might want it to last for a few days. But life doesn’t work that way.
The truth is that you can only make a choice as to whether you smoke or not when you actually make it, right in that moment, in the here and now. If you make a choice to quit smoking now at 12.30, then even before 12.31 you have a whole new choice to make. Because you’ve got free will, you could choose to smoke at 12.31! Or you could make another choice not to smoke. To quit smoking for good you have lots of choices to make during the short term future.
When you quit smoking today, you don’t start out by making a commitment to never smoke again. You start out by making a choice not to smoke only for that moment. And you bear in mind that you will be making many more choices as you go towards your goal to quit smoking for good.
At first, this may sound unbearable, even impossible. It seems a lot easier to make one resolution quit smoking for good and convince yourself that you ‘have to’ stick to it But remember, in fact, this is a much more difficult route. Once you have truly accepted this principle, making choices only for the present time to quit smoking now will become simple, obvious, more positive and much easier.
Remember also that the desire to smoke, and therefore the process of making choices, becomes much less frequent as time goes on.
When you stop smoking by declaring ‘I’ve smoked my last cigarette – I’ll never smoke again!’ you deny your freedom to smoke, and put yourself straight into the cell of deprivation. Even if you predict that you won’t smoke for the next hour, then for that hour you are going to feel deprived.
By all means have the goal of staying stopped. By all means have a clear intention not to smoke again. But as you do this, remember that you can only reach that goal by making real choices in the here and now. This means you acknowledge that you have the option of going back to smoking and there’s always the possibility that you could do that.
Knowing this makes the crucial difference between feeling miserably deprived and feeling free and in control and much better able to quit smoking for good.