If you want to quit, and stay quit long-term, you have to get honest with yourself. As I’ve mentioned before (and will no doubt mention again), one of the things addicts are really good at is denial. In fact, we’re world champs at it. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s so easy to go back to feeding our addictions after we quit; there are so many things that we’ve been in denial about that we just can’t deal with them without the smokescreen in place.
First of all, you have to get honest about being an addict. It doesn’t help for you to continue to kid yourself about this by saying things like, “it’s just a bad habit,” and, “I can give it up any time I want to.” No it isn’t, and no you can’t. Studies have shown that over 90% of people who smoke regularly do so because they’re addicted. How likely do you think it is that you’re one of the few regular smokers who aren’t addicts?
Let’s try an experiment:
- Put your cigarettes down in a place where you can easily find them again.
- Decide that you’re not going to smoke any more.
- Walk away and do whatever you need to do next.
How long does it take for you to miss them? How long until you go back and look at them, just to make sure they’re still there? How long before you start to feel like you “need” one or you’re going to go crazy? How long before you grab one and light it up?
Was it minutes? Hours? Days? Be honest; you only have to answer to yourself.
If you ever started to miss them, if you ever went back to look at them, if you ever felt like you “needed” one to keep from going crazy, and especially if you ever went back, grabbed one, and lit it up, how do you explain that, if smoking is really just a bad habit?
Let’s try another experiment:
Picture this: you’re in the habit of biting your nails. You don’t really think about it, you just do it, sort of absent-mindedly. Now picture that someone you care about looking good in front of tells you, “I’ve noticed that you have this habit of biting your nails, and I think it’s kind of disgusting. I wish you’d stop.”
What would you do? Think about this for a minute. OK, now that you’ve pictured what you’d do to “cure” yourself of the bad habit of biting your nails (assuming of course that you didn’t just tell this person you care about to get over themselves and kept on biting your nails out of spite), let’s fast forward to a point in time where you’ve successfully cured yourself of the habit and you no longer bite your nails:
Do you miss biting your nails? Do you think about it all the time when you’re not doing it? Do you feel like you “need” to bite your nails once in a while or you’ll go crazy? Do you sneak off somewhere and nibble a little when you think nobody will notice?
Probably not. Because biting your nails is just a bad habit, and all it takes to stop doing it is deciding not to do it any more and reminding yourself that you don’t do it any more when you catch yourself doing it. No big deal, right?
The reason this approach doesn’t work with smoking is that you’re an addict. And until you admit that to yourself, until you own it, you’ll keep shooting yourself in the foot every time you “try” to quit smoking. Because dealing with addiction is in a whole different league than dealing with a bad habit.
Let’s Get Honest
Go look in a mirror and tell yourself, “I am an addict.” How does it feel?