HOW TO QUIT SMOKING IS CENTERED ON THE UNCONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE DESIRE TO SMOKE AND RECLAIMING YOUR POWER.
The sensations of a few seconds from a dose of nicotine entering the body – the racing heartbeat, the dizzy kind of intoxication, the extra adrenaline running through the body, the brief feeling of excitement, a very brief high, are truly what motivates people to smoke. A depressed state usually follows the artificial highs, and the toxins in the smoke rob the blood of energy-producing oxygen. Hence, how to quit smoking is important for enhancing your energy level.
The desire to smoke often arises from the memory of a nicotine high. This desire to smoke is an energy quite like anger and grief, and repressing it frequently leads to symptoms like loss of sleep, hunger and poor concentration, and physical ailments. The desire to smoke often begins as a thought and ends up as a physical sensation.
Feeling deprived is a consequence of thinking and perceiving in a particular way. Feelings of anger, loss and frustration soon mutate into feelings of deprivation because of the thinking that you have been denied of smoking.
To learn how to deal constructively with your desire to smoke is to initiate the process of how to quit smoking. The outline of this process is in five steps.
Step One: when you detect a craving or a desire for a smoke, affirm the following words to your self, “I have a desire to smoke.” Saying the words enables you to observe what is transpiring in your mind and to choose your next line of action.
Step Two: Declaring the words: “I have the freedom to smoke,” reminds you of your free choice and prevents the addictive part of your mind from concluding that you can’t go back to smoking, a prelude to getting up symptoms of deprivation.
Step Three: The statement: “smoking is just one puff away,” highlights a basic truth.
Step Four: Proclaim the words: now, I have a choice to return to smoking or to just accept this desire rather than smoke.” Frequently experiencing and accepting the desire to smoke, as uncomfortable as it might be, rather than reacting by smoking, brings effectiveness to this practice. When you welcome the desire, you make it your friend instead of our enemy, and gradually, it runs its course and dissipates. With unconditional acceptance, you appropriate absolute conscious control and power over the desire. Repressing the desire is not advised because once a repressed desire finds an outlet, it is often difficult to control its associated automatic reactions. You tend to repress this desire to smoke by distracting yourself with other physical activities like eating, thus, also courting the danger of trading one habit for another.
Step Five: State to yourself: I’m choosing this process to gain the following benefits: improved energy level, sense of taste and smell, breathing, hearing, voice, fewer headaches, more satisfying experience of sex and so forth.
Frequently engaging with the process when you quit smoking for the first time, enhances your chances of kicking the habit.
It also pays to induce the desire to smoke and then, to follow through with the process. Activating the desire helps you to accept it unconditionally and transcend your fear and resentment of it.
