Failure is something people would rather forget. Let's look at it for a moment instead. To pretend bitter moments of failure never existed prevents one realizing that what bobs in the wake of failed attempts to quit smoking is the conviction that quitting smoking is impossible to do. There is no logic in it. Nevertheless, who hopes to quit smoking but instead of doing it experiences the let-down of failure must view the dream of living a smokeless life as a disappointment. Who is disappointed loses trust. If you cannot trust yourself to quit smoking, who can you trust? The reason you think you cannot quit smoking relates to the fact that you have tried a number of times and have failed.
Is nicotine addiction stronger than you are? If you rely on your past experience of wanting to quit and not doing it, the answer is yes! The statistics concerning nicotine addiction are downright depressing. Experts, matching the number of attempts to quit smoking against the number of successes, have concluded that addiction to nicotine is worse than heroin addiction is! This is grist for the fear that you cannot stop smoking. Why make a fool of yourself all over again? Your self-esteem is on the line, now isn't it?
No! Since you are a burned child, in every sense of the word, burned by the smoke that stings you and by your failed attempts to quit, efforts to distance yourself from a commitment to quitting smoking is a natural reaction. Rather than tell yourself, "I'm quitting today," you entertain thoughts of what the best ways to quit smoking are. After all, you can go on living with a wrinkled face, now can't you? There are stop smoking shots to consider. There are stop smoking cigarettes, ones you can puff on without really smoking. There is nicotine gum, stop smoking patches, hypnotherapy to stop smoking -- you name it, it is out there.
Psst! Want a hot smoking tip? Why not stop smoking naturally? What does this mean? To stop smoking naturally means to be a nonsmoker like you were before you started! Today you smoke; you have smoked now for quite some time. Things have changed in your life during that time. For example, there are many things, many interests you have let fall since you started smoking. Many of them are sporty things, active things, interests you developed in the days before you smoked -- things you did. The acceleration of your smoking habit modified your needs; things you loved doing before you smoked gradually gave way to sitting around smoking, drinking coffee and chatting with your friends. It is easier for someone who has difficulty breathing freely through both nostrils to smoke cigarettes while trading jokes and gossip with your pals. It is less demanding than it is to shower and dress for a tennis match.
None of this alters the fact that you are the same person you were before you smoked. Smoking has replaced some of the things you did before your nicotine addiction took hold of you; but what this means is that the changes smoking has introduced into your life are not traceable to you but to your smoking. The difference, in short, between the you who smokes and the you who did not smoke is your continually smoking cigarettes! What this means is the minute you kick the smoking habit, the you who lived and breathed before you smoked will begin to return to you. The interests you let drop in favor of having another cigarette will, like little lambs, all start flocking home the moment you stop smoking.
Let me note here that anyone who inhales tobacco smoke, whether from a pipe, cigars or cigarettes, suffers pretty much the same effects. Thus, the phrase 'smoking cigarettes' is meant to include anyone who inhales tobacco smoke.
What force moved the past efforts you made to stop smoking onto the failure list? Probably the most popular excuse people give for failing to quit is that their willpower broke down in the decisive moment. Did you will yourself to smoke? The answer is no. Willpower has nothing to do with your smoking. Therefore it has nothing to do with stopping smoking. What keeps you smoking is the fact that the body very quicly rids itself of the nicotine you take in. When the pleasure centers in your brain stem, "the brain's brain" notice a decline in the level of nicotine in your blood, it sends a neural message out, to which you intellectually respond with an incredible outpouring of excuses to redress the discovered imbalance in the levels of nicotine your pleasure centers crave since the replenishment of nicotine is what they have become used to.
In practice, this means when you have not inhaled any smoke for a while, a galaxy of sensations communicate the fact that should re-supply the nicotine that has gone missing. When people intentionally stop themselves from reaching out for their habitual next cigarette, the feeling steals over them, a shrill, insistent, "Time for another one!" feeling. To defy this call for action centers new nonsmokers' attention on the current sensations they are perceiving. "Hm-mm, my throat is dry. Oops, Isn't that a wee headache I'm feeling? What's that sensation in my lungs?" All the minutiae smoking has created in a smoker's body suddenly spring to attention like soldiers on parade, commanding every inch of a new nonsmoker's idle attention. Smokers attribute the creaks, the wheezing, the aches and pains, the cravings they feel when they stop to not having smoked for a while, when in fact what is happening is that they are coming to notice, with a new-timer's intense accuracy, the sensations smoking causes them to feel now that they are turning down new calls for a cigarette. Continual inhalation of fresh smoke masks the sensations your smoking through the years has caused. New nonsmokers notice the damage smoking has done them; but instead of calling their sensations of pain by their right names call them "withdrawal symptoms" instead.
The psychology of tobacco addiction is a tracery of evasions: smokers will do almost anything to stop themselves from realizing the extent to which their addiction has done them in; their rationalizations are the direct result of physical changes their bodies have sustained. The addicts, meanwhile, fastidiously deny every scrap of evidence of this, avoiding every thought of why smoking is bad. Why not quit smoking forever? Without anyone mentioning her breathing at all, Eleanor will tell you she is wheezing today because of the high humidity index!
She saw it on the news!
Smokers are fully capable of dealing with the myths that keep them going; what one has invented one may just as easily recognize and rid oneself of. Being conscious means knowing one's own mind; Eleanor is capable of seeing through her rationalizations because every one of them is hers. She knows the reasons to stop smoking, too...
Smokers turn on themselves the minute they stop smoking. They turn on themselves instead of noticing all the positive signs resulting from the refusal to pull nicotine, tar, chemical additives, free radicals and all the other elements contained in smoke deep down into their lungs. The reason smokers do so is it is the mainstay of keeping their smoking habit alive. Without the incredible inventory of lies smokers invent to reach out for their next cigarette, the smoking habit would die from sheer lack of attention!
The actual sensations quitting smoking brings result from your body's freeing itself of nicotine within a day. Eight hours after your last cigarette, levels of oxygen and carbon monoxide normalize. In 24 hours, your risk of heart attack decreases. After 2 days, damaged nerve endings start growing back. By the third day, lung capacity starts increasing. In 2 to 12 weeks, this increase will reach 30%. Circulation improves.Over the next few months, cilia start growing back in the lungs, bringing fewer infections, less coughing and shortness of breath with them as they develop. The greatest long-term benefit is a steady decline in your chances of getting cancer. Ten years after quitting, your chances of developing lung cancer are the same as though you had never smoked.
Smokers, in a word, lie to themselves the whole day through in order to keep smoking. Imagine what telling yourself the truth will do in place of the crazy dialog of lies smokers practice in the privacy of their rather confused minds. When a smoker coughs a pathetic, wracking smoker's cough in a public place, often sympathetic friends, or even total strangers, turn one's way and say, "Hey, you really might think of getting rid of your smoking habit. It breaks my heart to hear a cough like yours. Please think about looking after yourself a bit better..." This is as open and honest as a smoker's musings are private and twisted. "Look, she's a wonderful, rich, popular movie star and she's smoking my brand in the love scene, too WOW."
Nonsmoking is something you can do. It is not only wonderfully easy once you get the knack of it, you will start feeling better in a thousand ways from the very first day! Stopping is the antithesis of the self-torture smokers put themselves through by smoking, by working overtime pretending they do not notice the things they notice very well indeed. The trick is not admitting it, how clever!
Why not quit fooling yourself?
To smoke is to pretend you have mastery in a basic master-slave relationship. Nicotine addiction is the master over every smoker who is the habit's slave. Smokers are the habit, the means by which the habit stays alive and the victims of the habit all in one! Smokers devote their waking lives coddling their habit with a new excuse for every single cigarette they smoke.
To lie is to keep the truth to yourself. To lie is to tell the victim whatever you think he or she will believe. Lying, in other words, is a theft! Liars keeps what they know is good and offer their victims stuff they know is worthless. What is the situation, then, when you lie to yourself? You are liar and victim all in one. Stand tall. Do what you know you should have done the moment you started smoking. Quit smoking publicly and privately all in one! Quit pretending to quit when you know you can't and won't. Be who you know yourself to be and please remember, you are also a person who never smoked at all! You can happily be that way again.