How to Stop Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good by Gillian Riley

Author:Gillian Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409043386
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Not Sure?

Usually, smokers rationalise by saying that they are not motivated to stop, or not motivated enough. But what will it take for you to become motivated?

Perhaps you are waiting for the addiction to go away, for the day when you wake up and don’t feel the desire to smoke any more. But, as explained in Chapter 2, the desire to smoke doesn’t go away. In fact, it gets more reinforced the longer you go on smoking. Some smokers find that smoking becomes less and less enjoyable, and even get to the point when they don’t enjoy it at all, yet this still doesn’t cancel out their addictive desire.

Perhaps you are waiting for some event to occur that will provide your motivation. Or until you have sorted the rest of your life out, whatever that may mean to you. But the only time you will be finished with that is when your life is over. Even more dangerous is to wait for your health to deteriorate to the point where you decide that you ‘have to’ stop. As we saw in Chapter 4, this kind of motivation is threatening, and because of the additional pressure it can actually make it more difficult for you to succeed.

It is often said that before anyone can successfully stop smoking, they must be completely convinced that they want to stop. That is a myth that keeps people smoking for decades. The idea of waiting for strong motivation to stop is a delusion fostered by your addictive thinking.

What is true is that most smokers deny the real seriousness of their situation, and inevitably approach stopping smoking with a lot of ambivalence. That’s where much of the characteristic difficulty about stopping comes from. You are not completely sure that you want to stop, and you are not completely sure that you will be able to stay stopped. These two uncertainties often mix themselves up in your mind. You fear that you will never stay stopped, so you try to accept your life of smoking by telling yourself (and anyone who asks) that you don’t really want to stop – at least not now.

Your motivation can also be compromised by fears about your dependency on cigarettes. If you fear that you will not be able to think clearly without smoking, then it will be hard to consider stopping at the risk, say, of losing your job. If you think that stopping smoking will make you put on a lot of weight, continuing to smoke may seem to be the preferable option. If you feel deprived when you stop, your self-pity and resentment will mask any benefits you may gain.

The truth is, you are attempting to do something that is vitally important to you, and quite challenging, with no way of knowing whether or not you will succeed.

The chances are that it’s only when you begin to overcome these concerns that you will be able to appreciate that not smoking is a better way of life. But you can only overcome your fears by stopping smoking and handling the issues in the process.

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