Monday, March 26, 2012

Reasons People Smoke -- Part 2

In my last post, I told you about a question I ask all of my Quit Smoking clients: Why do you continue to smoke? Here are MY responses to their answers:
1. I'm under so much stress. I need smoking to reduce the stress. 
Smoking does not reduce stress. If you think it is reducing your stress, you are believing your own bulls--t. When you smoke, your blood pressure goes up and your heart rate goes up. This the opposite of reducing stress. Several things are going on here when you have a cigarette because you feel stressed and you THINK the cigarette is helping you: 
a. You are breathing deeply, which is a good thing to do if you are stressed and if you weren't filling your lungs with smoke, it would be one of the best things you could do. Your body is craving oxygen when you are feeling the "fight or flight" response when you are feeling stressed. When you are breathing smoke deeply into your lungs, your poor body is expecting oxygen, but you are tricking your body. It's not actually reducing your stress. 
b. You are leaving the situation that is stressing you. Your client ticked you off, so you slammed down the phone, you grabbed your cigarettes and you went outside to calm down. Leaving the situation is a GREAT thing to do. Smoking a cigarettes are only an excuse to leave. 
c. When you are putting nicotine in your body 10, 15, 30 times a day for years, your body starts to expect it. If it doesn't get its fix, you start to go through withdrawal. This is true. But unless you always wake up in the middle of the night to have your fix then you are able to go through eight hours or so. Your withdrawal symptoms are not as strong as you think they are. So you are probably not as addicted to the cigarettes as you think you are. (If you are a bad sleeper, and you get up and have a cigarette because there is nothing else to do while you are awake in the middle of the night, that is not the same thing as being woken up in order to have a cigarette because you need the nicotine. Don't confuse them. VERY few people are so addicted to nicotine that the withdrawal symptoms wake them up. Truthfully, I've never met such a person, and I have worked with hundreds of smokers.)
2. I'm afraid I'll gain weight if I quit smoking.  
This will only happen if you are replacing smoking with food. Or, you are rewarding your smoking cessation by eating. For example, "I quit smoking, I deserve a second piece of cake at the office birthday party." "I don't know what to do with my hands now, I might as well eat potato chips while I watch TV."
I will agree that smoking does curb your appetite. (you didn't think I'd admit that, did you? Come on, if I tried to convince you that smoking did NOT curb your appetite, I'd lose all credibility with you.) Most smokers who quit using hypnosis do not gain weight, or they gain a little bit -- a few pounds because they quit in the middle of winter -- which falls off when the snow melts. You move more when you quit smoking and you have more energy. When you quit using hypnosis, you come up with lots of healthy activities to replace the smoking. Chew gum, drink water, call people on the phone, take a walk, visit a colleague down the hall. There are thousands of things you can do, instead of smoking.  
3. Cigarettes were my best friend.  
What kind of friend makes you sick and even kills you, and charges you money to do it? Cigarettes happened to be around when you got divorced or moved to a strange city, but the cigarettes never, ever helped you. Either you made it through this difficult time all by yourself - which means you are much stronger than you though, OR you made it with your friends and family at your side, in which case, they will help you again when you decide to quit smoking. You do know who your friends really are - cigarettes are not your friends.
4. I'm afraid I'll fail and hate myself.  
You've been smoking for a long time. As I've said before in this book, you've been smoking 10/20/30 cigarettes a day for how many years? 15? 20? 40? How many times did you practice smoking? A lot, right? Anything you've ever done well, you had to practice: Learning to use a fork or knife; drive a car, tie your shoe, typing, flipping a pancake in the air, played the piano, threw a strike (baseball or bowling) etc, etc. The first time you tied your shoe, you probably threw the shoe, threw yourself on the floor and cried. But you can do it now, can't you? (You have my permission to throw your shoe right now and as many times as you picked up a cigarette after you said you quit.) 
If you quit before and went back to smoking, let me tell you something profound -- You didn't fail!!! You just aren't finished yet. If you keep going, you can't fail. Pretty cool, huh?
End of Part 2 -- Hang in there, I'll post again.

12 comments:

  1. Thank you sir Meg Tocantins.My Grandpa is a smoker but he can't quit it.He think he need smoking to reduce the stress. I told him ,its wrong but he don't agree.sell my house

    ReplyDelete
  2. Electronic cigarette or smokeless cigarette has become the future of smoking. E-cigarettes are not only a safer alternative as against the normal tobacco cigarettes.

    e cigarette starter kit

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  3. Hi
    Smoking is bad for your health. Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body. Cigarette smoking causes 87 percent of lung cancer deaths. Stop smoking aids are among the effective techniques that one can use to crush their nicotine addiction. However, as they say, what works for some may not work for everyone. One of the best products that I have ever come across to quit smoking is Nicorette Gum and I believe in that product because today with the help of that I have quit smoking and from past six months I have not got a single craving...
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  4. Smoking is hard to give up but it is not possible to give up and it can be given easily by using vaporizer device.

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  5. Well yes these are common excuses people make for smoking

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  6. The main reason is stress all person tell who smokes.
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  7. Hard but not impossible to quit smoking thing. Use portable vaporizers as an alternative to smoking.

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  8. i Used to smoke a lot but now i gave up smoking 5 months back and it feels amazing, the above stated problems were my problems too, but i think these are just silly excuses and they can be controlled easily. I have written a post about quit smoking and think you will like it. please click here

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  9. This short article posted only at the web site is truly good.
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  10. My friend had the same issues when he was a chain smoker 3 years back. We did a lot of effort to make him quit but nothing seemed to be working back then. Then one of my colleagues recommended hypnosis as a therapy for smoking and I checked out the internet and some websites like http://does-hypnosis-work.org/ to see if it's true. It sounded good to me and we checked with the nearest psychiatrist in town. I'm glad my friend Johnny was able to quit smoking and lives a healthy happy life now. Well thanks for sharing this information with us.

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  11. I agree with some of the ideas here. I myself recently stopped smoking, about 3 weeks now.

    I tried a lot of stuff before like nic patches, nic gums, even professional help but to no avail all those didn't work for me.

    Then my friend told me about how he quit smoking literally overnight! I didn't believe him at first but then he gave me this site: http://goo.gl/tRIXgw , everything turn around and very thankful for this because it helped me from 2 packs of marlboro reds a day to zero!

    This will definitely help you stop smoking today!

    ReplyDelete