How To Quit Smoking: Emotion Trumps Logic

One of the principles of selling is that people buy based on emotion, then justify their purchase with logic.

What does that have to do with quitting smoking? One of the principles of quitting that I’ve discovered is that the people who succeed at quitting quit based on emotion, then justify their quit with logic. People who fail at quitting often have great-sounding “logical” reasons why they want to quit, but they don’t have the emotional fire to get the job done. Emotion trumps logic. Every single time.

Think about it: how many times have you told yourself (or somebody else) that you have to quit smoking because it’s ruining your health? That’s a logical reason to quit smoking, and yet here you are, reading a blog about how to quit smoking

The list of “logical” reasons that we can come up with to quit may be long and detailed (“it’s ruining my health”, “it costs too much”, “I hate the way I smell after a cigarette”, etc.), yet we continue to smoke.

Why is that?

Maybe the main reason is that we’re not buying into our quit: our reasons are all logic and no emotion, and emotion is what moves us to action.

Here’s a basic principle: your reasons to quit have to be stronger than your reasons to keep feeding your addiction.

Here’s a refinement to that principle: your reasons to quit have to resonate with you emotionally, or they won’t be strong enough to motivate you to get the job done. Because you’ve got all sorts of emotional attachments to feeding your addiction (“they calm me down”, “they help me concentrate”, “they help me deal with stress”; any of these sound familiar?), and logical reasons to quit just don’t stand a chance against these emotional attachments.

Every quit smoking program I’ve ever seen or heard of starts with having you make a list of reasons why you want to quit. What they miss is this part; the part that tells you that emotion trumps logic, and that, if you’re going to succeed at quitting, you need to start with an emotional foundation.

So, rule number one for a successful quit is: when you’re putting together your list of reasons why you want to quit, make sure that all those reasons are emotional and intensely personal.

More to come…

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