Quit Smoking Cigarettes - Why It's Hard

If you are a smoker who has tried to stop and couldn't, you know how hard it is to just quit. If you are not a smoker but have loved ones who do, believe me, it IS hard to simply quit smoking. This article is addressed to the smoker. In it, I am going to explain why it is hard to quit smoking and tell you about an easy way to remove cigarettes from your life without trying to quit.

You Didn't Always Smoke

Think back to the time before you started smoking. Whoops, that's a long, long time ago, isn't it? If you are like most smokers who are trying to quit cigarettes, you have smoked for over 20 years and you started before the age of 18. Some people even start much earlier! You probably can't remember a time when you didn't smoke because of many years and over 100,000 cigarettes.

Yikes! More than 100,000 cigarettes smoked?

Yes! The average cigarette smoker uses one pack of 20 cigarettes per day. That is 600 cigarettes per month and 7,200 cigarettes per year. So after 20 years, it's, around 144,000 cigarettes! Now that's a lot of smokes. Of course, if you've smoked longer than 20 years, it's even more.

So it's easy to see why the smoker simply can't remember a time when they didn't smoke. Of course, another big reason the smoker doesn't remember is the seriously unpleasant nature of the learning to smoke process.

You see, learning to smoke was the hardest and most miserable task you undertook in your young life! Smoking was something that you had to learn to do. You didn't simply pick up a cigarette and start smoking. It took a while with persistence and enduing great misery to learn to smoke.

What were you learning?

You were learning to suppress your body's normal protective reactions to hot, polluted smoke entering your delicate lungs. Lungs designed for clean air only! You were learning to control your body with your mind!

The Body's Protective Reaction to Cigarette Smoke

Cigarette smoke is hot, caustic, chemical pollution. If it gets in your eyes, it makes them burn and water. It can make your skin itch in really sensitive people. If you inhale the hot smoke, it makes you cough, gag and gasp for breath. This is the body's way of telling you smoking a cigarette isn't really a good thing to do.

This reaction is what happens to the smoker to be with the first series of cigarettes. But the person really, really wants to smoke so they persist. Over and over, they subject themselves to the harsh cigarette smoke. As they do so, something begins to happen. The coughing and gasping begin to fade away until finally, they can smoke an entire cigarette without the body's defense mechanism kicking in. How is this possible?

They have focused their WILL POWER to interfere with the body's defense mechanism. In other words:

You Can Smoke because You Will Yourself to Smoke

As a smoker, you use an incredible force of WILL POWER that stops your body's normal defense responses to hot, polluted smoke entering your delicate lungs. It is powerful MIND over Matter that allows you to smoke!

Over time, you as a smoker have used your MIND to suppress your body's protective mechanisms. By your WILL POWER you have created a system that shuts down your built in protection and allows the damage you do to yourself every time you smoke a cigarette. It does this because you want it to; YOU WILL IT!.

Have you destroyed your body's protective mechanism? No, it's still there. You just selectively turn it off for cigarettes. This example will illustrate:

You are a smoker but what happens when you've been around a smoky fire of any sort? Perhaps your fireplace if you forget to open the flue. You get your cozy fire going but with the flue closed, smoke quickly fills the room. What happens? Your eyes start burning and watering, you start coughing and gasping for breath immediately until the source of the irritant, the smoke, is removed. Even with the smoke gone, it takes you a while to fully recover. This is the normal body defense mechanism response. It will happen to you even if you are a multi-year smoker.

Yet, you can smoke a cigarette without those reactions. It's still smoke and you are intentionally pulling it into your lungs. The only difference is that you selectively turn off your body's protective reaction to allow yourself to smoke a cigarette with your WILL POWER. Did you realize you had such a strong mind?

Why It's Hard to Quit Smoking

When people think about quitting cigarettes, they know it's in their best interest to do so. Intellectually, they know the health dangers of smoking cigarettes. They know how much money they have to spend these days on smoking. They have every good reason in the world to quit smoking cigarettes. Yet, many can't do it!

Why? Because smoking the cigarette is an end result. It is actually the mechanism, the repression of the body's defense system, that the smoker has spent years creating that allows them and now compels them to smoke. If you manage to quit smoking but don't remove the mechanism, the best you can hope for is to be an ex-smoker. What is an ex-smoker? A smoker who isn't smoking right now but could pick up a cigarette and start smoking again without missing a beat.

The mechanism that you spent years creating is still operating. It has become your Frankenstein monster that you've forgotten how to control! Not only that, you've forgotten why you created the monster in the first place because it was so many years ago! You may overpower it and get it strapped down to the table for a while but it's constantly straining to break loose. Eventually it will break loose and you are smoking again.

The cigarette is not the monster. It is the mechanism you've created with your MIND that allows you to smoke the cigarette that is the monster.

Is There a Solution?

Yes. The solution to removing cigarettes permanently from your life is not control of the monster you have created, but to disassemble it! Overpowering the monster and restraining it which is what you do when you forcibly quit cigarettes, will only work for so long. This mechanism you've created will constantly work to assert itself and eventually, it will do so; you will be smoking again as if you never stopped. An ex-smoker is just a smoker who isn't smoking cigarettes right now.

Fortunately, there is a way to systematically disassemble this mechanism you created many years ago so that it never compels you to smoke again. When you remove the smoking mechanism you've created, you eliminate cigarettes from your life without trying to quit. When you remove the mechanism that allows you to smoke, you become a non-smoker again!

I will discuss the steps to remove the smoking mechanism in future articles.

(c) Copyright 2009, R. Michael Stone