Quitting Smoking – Dealing With Withdrawal Symptoms
You Only Experience Quitting Smoking Withdrawal Symptoms Once
Withdrawal is the essential first step to stopping smoking. For most smokers it is quite a challenge and it’s helpful to have realistic expectations about it. If you think that it will be, or that it should be, effortless and easy, then you may very well be in for a nasty surprise. But if you prepare yourself for a challenge, and if you are prepared to deal with all the deceptions your addicted mind will produce, then you will emerge from the withdrawal phase successfully, and find staying stopped easier and easier to cope with.
Be encouraged by the fact that, if it is dealt with correctly, withdrawal is a temporary, one-off event. As soon as the changes have been made, both physically and mentally, they are over and done with and you will never need to go through anything like that again.
‘I do have the freedom to smoke and am smoking.’
Many smokers think that when they stop smoking, that will be it – they will never smoke again. This once-and-for-all decision would make them feel deprived, as if they had lost their freedom to smoke, so they continue to smoke in order to feel free.
The more a smoker believes ‘I have got to stop smoking’, the more stopping will seem like deprivation and the more they look for excuses to continue.
‘I don’t have the freedom to smoke.’
If, after you have stopped smoking, you deny that you could return to smoking, you will experience feelings of deprivation. This feels as if someone had locked you up and taken your cigarettes away (so you really wouldn’t have a choice). You may feel resentful, angry, apathetic and/or martyred, but mostly you just want to get free.
The feelings of deprivation are very difficult to live with, so you either get free by smoking or by changing your thinking. The exercise on how to quit smoking for good will help you with this scenario.
‘I have the freedom to smoke, and am not smoking.’
It is possible to stop smoking and not feel deprived at all, even though you remember times when smoking was enjoyable and seemed helpful. Keep cigarettes with you so you can really believe you have the choice to smoke. Don’t tell people that you have stopped smoking and if they ask, let them see that you have cigarettes and say something vague, like, ‘I may have one later.’ This keeps you in touch with your freedom to return to smoking, which means you won’t feel deprived.
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