Why You Really Need These Quit Smoking Tips
‘Smoking helps me to relax.’ You get home after a hard day’s work and you sit down in your favourite, most comfortable chair with a drink and a cigarette. Smoking has helped you to relax and unwind after the day’s hectic pace. But has it? You have inhaled the lethal gas carbon monoxide, in a concentration 600 times the safe level in industry. Along with that you have also inhaled 4,000 chemicals, many of them poisonous, including hydrogen cyanide, carbolic acid and arsenic trioxide. If that in itself is not reason enough to finally figure out how to quit smoking I don’t know what is!
Nicotine itself is a deadly poison and can be used as an insecticide. If you took the nicotine from one packet of cigarettes and injected it into your blood stream all at once, it would kill you. That’s why, with every cigarette you smoke, your heart pounds away with 20 extra beats per minute. Part of the buzz effect you like so much is your body trying to cope with a poison that is constricting your blood vessels.
Smoking is a cause of stress, not a relief, that’s why so many quit smoking tips include some of stress relief exercise. The delusion that it helps you to relax comes about through the conditioned association. Wanting to relax or take a break triggers your desire to smoke. Smoking relieves this desire and gives you the impression that it helped you to relax.
Again, this delusion often gets reinforced during attempts to stop smoking. If you deny choice when you stop smoking you will feel deprived and end up more tense and stressed than when you were smoking. Then, of course, this stress is alleviated as soon as you light up a cigarette. You have demonstrated that you are free to smoke, so you no longer feel trapped. But you have also failed in your attempt to stop smoking - and reinforced your dependency as well.
The solution is to change the way you are thinking about choice during the process of stopping smoking. When you stay connected to the truth of free choice - whether or not you are actually smoking - you will feel much more relaxed. You will be able to notice your desire to smoke, but realise that it’s your choice not to satisfy it. When you know that it’s your free choice to do whatever you want to do, you can simply allow yourself to feel the desire rather than fight it.
Tags: arsenic trioxide, cigarette smoking, deadly poison, extra beats, stress relief exercise