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Breaking the Smoking Addiction
Breaking the Smoking Addiction
This is the first in a series of posts that I am planning to write about health. These posts will focus on how, with common sense and just a modicum of will power, you can overcome much of what ails you without prescriptions, over-the-counter remedies, or other outside sources which are only after your money.
Let me state clearly and emphatically that I am not a doctor, and I have no formal training in any field of health whatsoever. All I know is what has worked for me. That’s it. And all I’m doing is sharing my personal experiences with you, just like I did with the two posts I recently wrote about how I rid myself of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
If what I say in these posts makes sense to you, I would suggest you talk to your doctor about it first. Everybody is different, and different folks have different pre-existing conditions which may have a bearing on if certain regimens are healthy for you or not. What is good for one person may be dangerous for another.
With that disclaimer out of the way, here goes:
I am going to turn fifty-five years old this Friday. I was born on April 4, 1953. My mom tells me that the day I was born was warm and sunny with a light breeze blowing the daffodils around.
I mention my age here not to get birthday greetings or cards or cakes. I mention it because, at fifty-five years old, I am in the best shape of my life. And, with the exception of the one minimal dose of medication that I take for my heart, I did it without drugs and without programs and without a membership in any gym.
The first of my health issues that I’d like to discuss is smoking. I think that the greatest thing that I ever did for my health was to quit smoking. It was also, without a doubt, the hardest thing that I’ve ever done in my life.
I started smoking cigarettes when I was thirteen years old. Like most kids back then, I did it to fit in with the group, to be cool. However, within five years, that cool activity turned into a two-and-a-half pack-a-day addiction.
Over the years, I had tried to quit smoking probably fifty times. Every time I tried, it lasted less than twenty-four hours.
I would have three or four cigarettes before getting out of bed in the morning, lighting a new one off the old one with the ashtray sitting on my chest. I would repeat the same ritual at night before turning the light off.
I would gauge how long it took to drive somewhere by how many cigarettes it took to get there. On long drives, I would get bored and play a game where I would try to have only one cigarette every twenty miles. (Can you believe that? It takes five or six minutes to smoke a cigarette, and it only takes about twenty-five minutes to drive twenty miles on the highway!)
I couldn’t sit through a movie in a theater without getting up and going outside for a smoke. That’s how bad the craving was.
At work, I would try to have only one cigarette every twenty minutes, but I seldom succeeded at that.
After several attempts to quit had failed, I all but resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be a smoker all of my life, and that my life would be shortened because of it.
Then my Dad, who was also a heavy smoker, had his first massive heart attack at the age of forty-nine, and it almost killed him. According to his cardiologist, the main cause of this heart attack was cigarette smoking.
Then and there, I decided that that was it. Come hell nor high water, I was going to kick the addiction. So, I learned how to hypnotize myself and others, and, within thirty days of my first self-treatment, I was free of the cigarette habit.
I didn’t use Nicorette. I didn’t use the patch. I just decided that I was going to do it, and I trained my brain so that I could.
Let me tell you something, these companies that manufacture "the patch" and gums like Nicorette don’t really care if you quit smoking. In fact, they hope that you don’t. If you actually do quit, they lose a customer! If you don’t quit, you may just use their product over and over again. (Somebody once told me that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.)
I smoked my last cigarette on May 5, 1982. That’s twenty-six years ago. No cigarettes in twenty-six years, and I was a guy who, back in my twenties, couldn’t go twenty minutes without jonesing for nicotine!
I’m not telling you this to brag. I’m telling you this to let you know that you don’t need the products to quit smoking. All you need is the determination to quit. That’s it! You can do it on your own.
You don’t need anybody to tell you that smoking will kill you. You know that. It’s a fact that is proven hundreds of thousands of times every year. (Did you know that every actor who played The Marlboro Man back when cigarettes were advertised on television died from lung cancer?) Knowing that fact doesn’t help. What you need to know is that you have it inside of yourself to actually quit!
Now, I’ve helped a few people kick this addiction with a few little tricks to enhance your will power, your knowledge of your addiction, and your knowledge of your own smoking habits. I don’t want to bore those of you who are not interested with that stuff here, but if you are interested, send me a private message from this blogsite, and I will give you the information that worked for me. This is, of course, completely free of charge. I’m not in the business of helping people quit. Even when I hypnotize people and teach them how to hypnotize themselves to quit smoking, there is no charge. First of all, I am not licensed to do such things, and secondly, even if I was, I wouldn’t charge for the services. That’s how strongly I feel about this topic.
I do it because I know that smoking will kill you, and there are a whole slew of people out there who are multimillionaires because they sell you the poison that is slowly and surely killing you and those who are around you.
posted on Apr 1, 2008 5:46 PM ()
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I have never been a smoker but I have used hypnosis successfully for a number of things, including conquering fear of flying, control of chronic pain, weight loss, and stress management. It is a wonderful mental skill. 
My precious daughter HATE's my smoking. I've quit other addictions but this one is murder...no pun intended.
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