We’ve talked about these two roots before. There may be some guidance in this story from Aesop’s Fables. A boy playing in the field was stung by a nettle. He speed home to his mother, telling her he had brushed the nasty weed and it had stung him. ‘It was just your touching it my boy,’ said his mother, ‘that it caused it to sting you. Next time you meddle with a nettle grasp the weed tightly, pull it up by the root and it will do you no pain.’
The two roots, as I’ve already said, are the physical. Involving an addiction to nicotine and some of the other 4000 chemical compounds in cigarette smoke, and the psychological, which shows up as a habit when you automatically light up after eating a meal, while speaking on the telephone or driving, or finishing off a drink. You may remember I said both had to be dealt with and both roots removed. Otherwise, it’s like chopping off the head of a weed and allowing it to sprout again.
There are guidelines that will show you how to do this and remove both the these roots, making it easy for you to stop smoking for good.
Let’s be rid of the psychological root first. A lot of research has been done in this area, but what it all comes down to is that when you take a certain action, and associate certain feelings or emotions with that action, it determines your behaviour. The equation is: action plus feelings equal behaviour. This meets one or more of the criteria of your reticular activating system.
The quiet but speedy activity that I described going great guns in your brain is the backroom work that directs human behaviour. In easy terms it means that we seek pleasure and avoid pain, and when we do or we experience something that gives us pleasure, we seek it more. The opposite is true too, of course. When we do experience something that gives us pain it makes us feel uncomfortable and we avoid it.
I’ll give you an example, but I’m sure you could find many more yourself from your own experience. You telephone a friend to whom you haven’t spoken to in a long time, and he says: ‘Oh, so you do know how to use the phone.’ Or he snaps out something else equally negative or sarcastic such as: ‘You decide to call… at last.’ You associate pain with the action of calling him. So you think to yourself: There’s no point in phoning again if all he’s going to do is complain.’
Alternatively, you telephone another friend to whom you haven’t spoken to in ages and he say’s: ‘It’s so nice to hear from you. Thanks for calling.’ That’s much better, isn’t it? You associate pleasure with that action and you think: I enjoyed calling him and I’ll call again soon.’ You reinforce the action in a positive way.