Everyone understands that quitting smoking is difficult. Smoking involves a nicotine addiction that creates cravings and withdrawal symptoms when you decide to quit. There are a number of ways of dealing with nicotine cravings – gum, pills, patches, etc. – but most of these products do not have a high success rate. You often hear stories from people who have “tried everything”, but still cannot quit. Why?
Mental Addiction Is Half The Battle
Smoking is more than just a physical addiction. It is a psychological addiction as well. Any attempt to stop smoking must deal with both the physical addiction to nicotine and the psychological addiction to smoking.
When you quit in addition to the physical cravings, you mind experiences something similar to an emotional of an old friend. Emotionally, you may experience denial, anger, and mild depression before finally accepting that tobacco is gone.
Another part of the problem with quitting is that you had some strong emotional reasons for starting in the first place. Maybe it was trying to be “cool” or “mature”. Perhaps it was a method or stress reduction. Or maybe it was a social bond that connected you to friends. These were POWERFUL motivators that your subconscious mind will use to resist your efforts to quit unless you can eliminate them as motivation. For example, you may have a nagging feeling that you are no longer cool, or that you can’t handle the stress, or that your bond with friends has weakened. Logically we would say that these are silly, but the emotional pull from these is very real and can repeatedly sabotage attempts to quit.
Emotional Solutions
There are three ways for dealing with the emotional issues that may be keeping your from successfully quitting.
1) Hypnosis. This can be very successful at breaking the emotional bonds with tobacco. Hypnosis allows a subject to get into a relaxed state of mind where suggestions can be placed directly into the subconscious mind that can replace current motivations to smoke.
2) Counseling. Professional counselors can be very helpful at identifying and eliminating the emotional issues that prevent you from quitting.
3) NLP. Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a method for communicating with the mind in a way that it most readily understands and accepts the message. NLP is used by some counselors and can be combined with hypnosis to improve effectiveness. One program that uses NLP has a success rate of over 97%.
You can successfully quit smoking if you have a way to control both the physical and psychological cravings from this addiction. I certainly wish you good luck and great health!