Developing the Will to Quit Smoking

I want to quit smoking - I know I should quit, but do I feel I MUST quit? I love smoking! I also know I’ll be miserable without my cigarettes. They’ve become a part of me, and I almost can’t bear the thought of giving them up...yet I know I have to...

Does this sound familiar? Does your mind bounce back and forth on the issue of quitting smoking? Do you think you should quit and yet you find it impossible to go more than a short time before you’re smoking again? Does smoking make you feel weak? Powerless? Do you wonder if you'll ever succeed at cessation?

You’re not alone.

Nicotine addiction is powerful. Smoking cessation involves a lot of work for most people - it’s not handed to us on a silver platter. It is doable, however, and the good news is that thousands of people quit smoking successfully every year. Many of them thought at one time or another that they couldn’t do it, yet they have...

So, how did they do it? How did they turn a feeling of should into the certainty of must? How did they make their dreams of quitting permanently a reality?

While there is no magic bullet that makes quitting easy and pain free, there are steps you can take to create the commitment you‘ll need to boot cigarettes out of your life for good.

“If you want to change your life, change your mind.”

Positive thinking is great, but positive thinking alone isn’t usually enough to help a person make permanent changes to their life. If, however, you can find a way to alter the meaning of the thing you’re trying to change; if the associations you have to smoking and quitting smoking change in a way that helps you, then you’ve got a good shot at success.

The path to commitment involves changing how you feel about quitting. Intellectually, you can rationalize that you need to quit until you’re blue in the face, but until your emotions engage, and you begin to feel better about quitting than you do about smoking, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Conditioning

Think of mental conditioning as the vehicle that will lead you to creating solid commitment.

People often think that smoking is enjoyable...comforting...even like a best friend. They also relate quitting to feelings of pain and misery. Often these feelings exist and are reinforced on a subconscious level. It’s been said that the average person has approximately 60,000 thoughts a day. For most people, a significant percentage of those thoughts are negative. We are almost always our own worst critics.

Begin to take note of every thought, feeling and statement that you make about smoking and quitting. Look at how you feel physically too..tension, headaches, tight stomach, etc and how the things you think/say affect how you feel.

Page 2 - How to condition Your thoughts to help you Quit Smoking