How To Quit Smoking Tips

Nicotine Addiction – Putting blame in the right place

Although nicotine addiction is ostensibly a physical condition, it is important psychologically who you ‘blame’, especially when feeling irritable in the days after you quit smoking. If you place the blame on anything or anybody other than the drug, you will turn to a cigarette like an old friend at the first weak moment to gain the relief you perceive – however misguidedly – it provides.

On the other hand, if you place the blame squarely on the cigarette you will not be inclined to turn to it when your defenses are down. It is now rightly the villain – the enemy. Hence the need to come to the point at which you are not ‘giving up’ anything whatsoever of benefit or value – just the many harmful effects of smoking.

This requires a whole change of attitude and beliefs about yourself and the smoking habit. Fortunately this change can happen imperceptibly and effortlessly. You can also do special exercises to ensure the old program based around your nicotine addiction is fully replaced.

In a previous post I compared nicotine addiction with physical hunger. The body gets all sorts of signals that it wants food, even before we really need it. For example when we see a tempting, color photo of a favorite dessert in a restaurant, or on a busy morning we notice the time and realize it is almost lunchtime.

True hunger pain doesn’t come for a long time. Even the headaches we get when fasting are more likely due to withdrawal from coffee and junk food additives rather than lack of food.

In practice most westerners overeat anyway, and dieting can actually prevent disease and extend life. The analogy with nicotine withdrawal is useful in several ways:

• Neither case involves serious physical pain.
• Both are affected by habits – we do them without thinking.
• In neither case are we robbed of our free will to act as we wish. We choose to eat and we choose to smoke.

We need food but certainly not harmful drugs to survive. Even when hunger involves pain it is a welcome survival warning, as it prevents us from not eating and eventually dying. In other words, food is life-enhancing rather than life-shortening, which is the case with nicotine. The longer we go without eating, the harder it gets, whereas the longer we go without smoking the easier it gets, as the beneficial life functions quickly start to replace the harmful effects of the nicotine poison.

Breaking habits

Because nicotine addiction is inextricably linked to the habits we associate with smoking behavior – habits we also need to break – the true nicotine withdrawal symptoms are misunderstood and usually grossly overstated. Giving up smoking is certainly a problem, but any problem becomes easier when you can break it down into smaller, achievable parts. Treated in this way, you can keep nicotine addiction in proportion. Thousands of one-time smokers look back on kicking their habit as a brief, painless non-event that was not worth the fuss.

The method for treating nicotine addiction is simple: don’t smoke for three days. More importantly, don’t stop until you understand the effect of smoking habits and how you treat these.

Psychological addiction and not just nicotine addiction, and the habits surrounding it, is by far the most important aspect of giving up.

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