Ever wondered why even after telling innumerable number of times to someone who is in the habit of smoking that cigarette smoking is bad for health,the person being told never listen.It is true for those people also who are ready and willing to quit the habit but are unable to do so for some strange reason.The reason is they don’t feel emotionally well connected with the advice on the packet,no matter how much ads you show on TV, no matter how much awareness is carried out, no matter how much anti tobacco campaigns are launched,the number of people who are consuming these products is on the rise.So the real question is , how do you get rid of this bad habit?You need to break it off course but do you think that just breaking it would be sufficient?It wouldn’t be ,as there are many cases where the individual has quit smoking for 6 months and the habit has relapsed back again with a vigorous turn of events.
Now we are going to break this problem down to its minute parts,and together find a way out of this problem.I was first introduced to smoking through a friend, who encouraged us to try the new thing.Adolescent brain is one of the marvel of the world, peer pressure can make it do anything that it wants.Their is a saying,”choose your enemy wisely but choose your friends even more wisely” ,friends can make you do even the most dangerous things,like jumping of a 2 story building and hope your parkour technique works,or like bike riding competition through the expressway to see who reaches the destination first,anyway,because you get emotionally connected with them through the pages of time you have spent together, you don’t realise the pros and cons of the instantaneous decision you make before the habit is formed to envelope you into its shadows.It may not necessarily be a friend, it might be a relative, your own big brother, sometimes it is circumstances and the society we live in, sometimes it is the work pressure or your idiot boss who drives you to the brink and you pick up these products just to ensure you don’t kill anyone in rage.
Passing of one’s own time and doing no productive work is also a habit, as the individual might not have put in any work or effort previously, may be he is rich or has filthy rich parents or may be he doesn’t have anybody close to talk to and going home and being with people who the individual doesn’t care about has no more significance to his life.In work environment,people acquire the smoking habit out of stress and work pressure where they see others also doing the same thing.If smoking would be killing a person if somebody smoked more than 10 cigarettes than it would have been banned till now, but the real issue with the product is that it behaves differently with different body types of people and thus there are examples of some people who smokes and still live till 90 years of age, but there are examples of people who started smoking and even have not lived 2 years after that.
So to prepare yourself in order to quit smoking, you need to change your mind drastically, according to Power of Habits, a book by Charles Duhigg.It is stated by the author that their is a cue for every kind of habit that their exists and their is response which our body and mind generates for that specific cue.It does so because we need rewards or results, which are expressed in terms of the high we get after we had a puff or two and the feeling of letting the stress going away while your chitchatting with your peers who are their to support and listen to you over the cigarette break.Here you vent out your frustration and enjoy a nice small high ,which leads to temporary happiness and this forms a real high in your mind.Soon your mind forms a pattern, and doing and having these breaks regularly become your thing.You say to your peers,”Lets hurry up, lets have a drag before the next meeting start because it is going to be long”.Have you ever realised it???The things which you are telling yourself and others.Sooner or later smoking becomes a regular activity around which your other activities are planned.So in order to escape from this fiasco, you need to change your response to the situation or change the situation altogether.Now many of us will not be able to change their situations overnight, so what we need to do is CHANGE OUR RESPONSE to the situation.
Instead of heading for that puff break, ask yourself these questions everyday,Is what i am doing in synergistic consonance with the overall aim or plan of my life?(If you don’t have a plan for your life, skip this point and jump down to the next point, read it again later)If not, what can i do to stop myself from using this habit as a medium for release of my inner emotions?Now each and every one of us will answer this question differently but the important thing to note is it should be an honest answer.Don’t lie to yourself, you are your best judge. You know it is making you slow, you know whenever you exercise you are out of breath, you can see the symptoms by quietly listening to your breathing pattern which has become short and fast.Now before i explain to you the HOW, we should first start with WHY. As Simon Sinek says in his book Start with Why(great book by the way, a must read) ,we should always begin a quest for meaning with the question of WHY.For example everyday whenever you feel like having a drag, you take out one cigarette , hold it in your hand and ask why should you have it?(seems strange doesn’t it, at that particular time you might not be looking for why, you might be in a hurry to just have a drag and be done with it, but here i request you to urge yourself to do this thing over and over again)Keep asking yourself this question again why should you have a drag or why do you want to have a drag?If you do this often enough, sooner or later one day your brain will respond to these questions and the answers might be amazingly simple than you think.Answers like “All my friends or colleague are having it, so i am having it.”,”I will look stupid if i am the only one that don’t have a cigarette if everybody is having it”,”What would one drag do”,”I promise this is the last one, just want to have this feel the last time”,”I am too f**ked up right now, i need to have one right now”,”I will not have it completely, i will take 2 or 3 puffs and throw the cigarette away”,”Its just over drinks , we can have a drag over drinks, its all good”,”My brother gifted me this Cigar, its cuban for god’s sake”,”I have reduced my cigarette intake to one per day, i will slowly quit”,”I have really quit smoking, this is just occasionally”,”After 5 years i am meeting my high school friend, today i can have anything, i should celebrate”,”There is nothing better to do, need to kill some time”,”Look he is my friend and he just offered me a puff,this doesn’t count,we are sharing”. Many more reasons will come to your mind,the one’s you buy would lead you to the cycle of forming an irresistible habit that is not just difficult to quit but has really destroyed families all across the globe.
In order to eliminate this habit and also to eliminate the relapse of it you need to do the following things
- Self reflection.Everyday take out 10 mins to think about your day and how to improve yourself to be better at all the things you desire.A quiet time for yourself to reflect on what’s bothering you and what’s eating you from inside.
- Making a goal better than the habit to go for whenever you have free time,it could be anything, painting,doodling, listening to songs, push ups , small burst of exercise etc, whatever you like to do when you are alone and stressed
- Eliminate the support group: Be it your friends, be it your relatives, be it your colleague , even family members,Whosoever who forces or offer to drag you into this pit should be avoided or permanently shunned at all cost, Now i do understand we will not be able to shun our family members or close friends but they can be avoided whenever they are doing such activities because if you are standing in a group of 5 people and each and every one of them is smoking and you have recently quit , you will feel the urge to smoke JUST 1 DRAG for old time sake when offered which will not go in favour of you.When you quit that means you quit, you don’t do that anymore,simple.There is no on again- off again relationship when it comes to bad habits.
- when you actually can’t avoid such circumstances, reach for the higher self, reach inside for the answer as to why you quit smoking,reach for your goals that are driving you and what would happen if you are not able to complete them
- Have you ever wondered you were not smoking when you were born?You were not drinking when you were born?Mother’s natural milk was breast feeded to you to grow, to fight all the diseases, to one day face this world.That means most natural things available in nature are in sync with our body’s requirement and is good for us.All unnatural things,man made things are though quite satisfactory will never be good for us in the long run.See youtube videos regarding how athletes train their body and mind.
- For many of you who don’t want to change their life all of a sudden and want to live it day by day peacefully,remember you can do anything you choose to do.It will be your choice which will decide whether you will be healthy in the coming future, it will be your choice that decide whether you will have the drive and lung capacity to take part in that marathon you were dreaming about when listening to your most favourite song.
- Sometimes its an emotional trigger, the feeling of losing someone you loved, breakup with your wife, divorce, kids not listening to you, the feeling when everything seems to be going downstream, the feeling of helplessness, the feeling of emptiness when nothing seems to be in your hand and your life seems to be controlled by someone else for survival.That kind of days, nobody remembers the good times in their life quite explicitly like the bad times.Why? because it scars you deep into your emotional side, it takes effort to come up from that muck of abyss devouring you down like a quicksand and that effort and scars remain with you for lifetime.A inspired person never ever forgets the bad times of his/her life because those were the time which challenged us to grow or to die, to change or to wither away like a leaf on a tree with changing seasons.
- You need to have something to go for on a daily basis, having adequate free time is yet another reason for smoking, hell such people don’t even need other people to go out and have a drag.They do it just by themselves.I know, i was one of these people.
- When nothing works, pray .Pray to the almighty , no matter which religion you belong to, no matter you are an atheist, pray to whatever you believe in and if you don’t,start believing in some power greater than you who is guiding you and your life, because until you believe in such power you will never be inspired enough to follow through the daily routine which is needed to have a healthy ,prosperous and lovely life that you have carved out for yourself.Such power can be found in another human being who came and went teaching all they could to all the wonderful people of this earth.Find such people ,learn from them, then change ,adapt, learn and grow
- In the end , if you still don’t want to change and still are not motivated enough to quit your habit, and you do that again, it means one of the following things:
- You are not clear of your future and are not having simple, clear,written down goals
- You don’t actually believe you could accomplish them.
- You know its a lot of work and your job is as it is killing you , how can and how will you ever find time to work on yourself like that?
- You don’t want to put in such an effort because you are quite comfortable the way life is working out for you.A little pain here and there, a little joy here and there, something you like, something you despair, but overall a nice way to play fair to you and your family.
- This means you need to understand that if you are not going for some higher purpose, if you are not going for all you can do , you are shortchanging yourself of the potential that is bestowed upon you,either by heredity ,either by practice.You and only you can make this paradigm shift in your thinking and your philosophy and make that jump from emotion driven life to practicality of healthy living.
Even after reading all of this you wake up tomorrow and start doing the same thing again, no amount of force can stop you from doing this.Its your future, its all your choices.By the way it would be a great game to see whether you smoke and still live to age till 90 or whether you smoke and die prematurely.HAVE SOME WORTHY GOALS TO LIVE FOR AND YOU WILL NOT REQUIRE ANY NARCOTICS OR PRODUCTS TO SOOTH THE PRESSURE OF YOUR LIFE.IF YOU DON’T HAVE THESE GOALS, FIND IT, FIND IT WITHIN YOURSELF, SET IT, GO FOR IT.
Written by Mahesh edited by SiteMaster
