If You Are To Ever Going To Quit Smoking Permanently, You Must Have A Strong, Personal Reason
ByOkay, so you’ve made the decision to stop smoking. Smart move; but you wonder how you’re going to do it and if you can successfully break free from this addiction. While it’s true that statistics show that the odds of success are against you, nevertheless many have gone before you who have won the battle.
I believe that the most powerful weapon in your stop-smoking-campaign arsenal is the motive you have for breaking free from smoking. Will power alone can’t help you very much without a strong, personal reason for quitting. Among my own reasons for quitting, two of them were the most powerful:
1) One day in my college dorm, I took the stairs up to the second floor. After climbing a single flight of stairs, I was winded. That kind of shocked me, since I was only in my 20s at the time. “What kind of condition would my body be in by the time I’m 40,” I wondered?” And that was assuming the best-case scenario of not getting lung cancer by then.
2) The second motive I had for quitting was the realization that I could get emphysema from smoking. (I’ll go into greater detail about emphysema in a future blog post, and you’ll see why it was a strong motivator for me to quit smoking.)
At this time in my life, I had already had some experience with quitting the habit, and learned how, like any addict, I fooled myself into believing that I could break my addiction by different ways that didn’t involve a total, 100% separation from the drug.
Standing at the top of those stairs, winded, knowing that I had to quit smoking, I knew that just cutting down on the number of cigarettes I smoked each day doesn’t work. It’ll work for a day, a week, maybe even for a month, but like any addiction, your body yearns for the drug. No, I knew that I would be either a 100% smoker or a 100% non-smoker. As a side note, once you do finally quit smoking, don’t fool yourself into thinking you can go back to it, “only THIS time, I won’t smoke so much”. I guarantee you, within 24-48 hours you’ll be right back to where you were. If you smoked a pack and a half a day before, then that’s what you’ll be right back to.
No, it’s all or nothing.
What are your thoughts on this?
