Poprini

Posted 20 June 2014 

No I'm not trying to hypnotise you or play Jedi mind tricks.  I'm talking about relapsers or quitters who continue to have smoking thoughts and desires.

Nobody WANTS to go back to smoking. They quit because they want to quit (for whatever reason). What they want from time to time is to smoke. And what that means is something else. It means all of the things that people "like" about smoking:

A break in the day

Stress relief

Bonding time with buddies

Anxiety relief

Thinking time

Reward for finishing a job

etc

And it also means not having to THINK about not smoking all the time. Gawd I remember that. I remember thinking - "When will it ever end?...I just want to stop thinking about not smoking!" I see people saying it here all the time "I don't want to fight with myself any more! When will it end?!"

But it's not that you want to be a smoker again.

I reckon most smokers don't want to be smokers! If you gave someone a choice between being a smoker (with all the expense and smell and health fears and social shaming etc that goes with it) and being a happy non-smoker - of course they would choose the latter. But most smokers simply don't believe they can be happy without smoking. They believe they LOVE and need their cigarettes too much to live without them.

And when we quit it (generally) takes a lot of retraining for the brain to dismiss all of that addiction thinking and learn that we can actually get all of those good things in other ways without all the bad stuff you get with smoking. Some people are lucky and once they make the decision to quit, they are solid in it. Easy peasy. But lots of people struggle. And that's OK. The struggle is part of the process. Embrace it as part of the process. Look at it as the price of freedom. That's basically how I did it. I wanted freedom most of all. Freedom from smoking addiction and everything that went with it. The price became easier to pay over time. It took less. Every now and then I have a "want" to smoke but it's fleeting and easy to dismiss. Because I KNOW I do not want to be a smoker. No way.

Make a commitment to yourself. A promise. Promise yourself that you will never be a smoker again. And don't worry if you want to smoke from time to time. That's fine, because you know that it's really about something else and you definitely don't want to be a smoker again. No way. Ewgh

Link to original post: https://www.quittrain.com/topic/10483-you-know-what-you-dont-want-to-be-a-smoker-repost-by-poprini/