askjoel

"Quitting Smoking"
A Fate Worse than Death?

People sitting in at smoking clinics are amazed at how resistant smokers are to giving up cigarettes. Even smokers will sit and listen to horror stories of other participants in sheer disbelief. Some smokers have had multiple heart attacks, circulatory conditions resulting in amputations, cancers, emphysema and a host of other disabling and deadly diseases. How in the world could these people have continued smoking after all that? Some of these smokers are fully aware that smoking is crippling and killing them, but continue to smoke anyway. A legitimate question asked by any sane smoker or nonsmoker is, “why?”\

The answer to such a complex issue is really quite simple. The smoker often has cigarettes so tied into his lifestyle that he feels when he gives up smoking he will give up all activities associated with cigarettes. Considering these activities include almost everything he does from the time he awakes to the time he goes to sleep, life seems like it will not be worth living as an ex-smoker. The smoker is also afraid he will experience the painful withdrawal symptoms from not smoking as long as he deprives himself of cigarettes. Considering all this, quitting smoking creates a greater fear than dying from smoking.

If the smoker were correct in all his assumptions of what life as an ex-smoker were like, then maybe it would not be worth it to quit. But all these assumptions are wrong. There is life after smoking, and withdrawal does not last forever. Trying to convince the smoker of this, though, is quite an uphill battle. These beliefs are deeply ingrained and are conditioned from the false positive effects experienced from cigarettes.

The smoker often feels that he needs a cigarette in order to get out of bed in the morning. Typically, when he awakes he feels a slight headache, tired, irritable, depressed and disoriented. He is under the belief that all people awake feeling this way. He is fortunate though, because he has a way to stop these horrible feelings. He smokes a cigarette or two. Then he begins waking up and feels human again. Once he is awake, he feels he needs cigarettes to give him energy to make it through the day. When he is under stress and nervous, the cigarettes calm him down. Giving up this wonder drug seems ludicrous to him.

But if he quits smoking he will be pleasantly surprised to find out that he will feel better and be able to cope with life more efficiently than when he was a smoker. When he wakes up in the morning, he will feel tremendously better than when he awoke as a smoker. No longer will he drag out of bed feeling horrible. Now he will wake up feeling well rested and refreshed. In general, he will be calmer than when he smoked. Even when under stress, he normally will not experience the panic reactions he used to feel whenever his nicotine level fell below acceptable levels. The belief that cigarettes were needed for energy is one of the most deceptive of all. Almost any ex-smoker will attest that he has more strength, endurance, and energy than he ever did as a smoker. And the fear of prolonged withdrawal also had no merit, for withdrawal symptoms would peak within three days, and totally subside within two weeks.

If any smoker just gives himself the chance to really feel how nice not smoking is, he will no longer have the irrational fears which keeps him maintaining his deadly addiction. He will find life will become simpler, happier, cleaner, and most importantly healthier, than when he was a smoker. His only fear will now be in relapsing to smoking and all he has to do to prevent this is - NEVER TAKE ANOTHER PUFF!

Fear of Success.

The fear of success may keep more people from starting a quit than the fear of failure. The reason people are so afraid of success is that they are often working with a false perception of what life will be without smoking. No matter how how many people tell them what life can be like without smoking, the perception an active smoker has is going to persist until the person quits smoking and sees for him or herself that life really does go on without smoking.

In clinic settings I always explain to the participants that the real goal of the clinic is to help the participants to get off for two weeks. Two weeks—that’s it. In two weeks each clinic graduate will start to get a true sense of what it is like not to smoke. If the person decides that he or she hates not smoking, that life is unbearable, that he or she can no longer work, no longer carry on normal rational thoughts, no longer maintain a normal family existence, no longer have any fun or no longer able to meet life’s ongoing demands—he or she will be fully capable of just going back to smoking. A person should never be afraid to quit because of the feeling that if he or she quits, he or she will not be able to get him or herself back to smoking again if the so chooses. The choice should always be based on whether the person wants to go back to full-fledged smoking or smoke nothing—but the choice for full fledged smoking exists for all ex-smokers.

On the other hand, if in the two weeks the person decides that he or she likes not smoking—maybe not smoking isn’t perfect—but he or she is starting to get a flavor of where life is heading, how he or she is starting to face up to life demands and handling them reasonably well, maybe even a little better than he or she was just a few weeks earlier while still an active smoker, he or she has the choice of staying smoke free for another day.

People giving themselves the opportunity to see what not smoking is really like will overcome all these fears and generally truly appreciate the gift that they give themselves by being nicotine free. There are very few people who have ever left a clinic graduation went out and bought a carton or a case because they gave it the two weeks and decide that they really now want to become a full-fledged smoker again. Yes some people will throw away their quits days or weeks later, but it is not because they choose to relapse and are making a conscious decision to smoke until it kills them—it is because they get complacent and start to believe that they can somehow now control their quantity or duration of smoking. They almost inevitably regret this mistake and many will end up paying for it with their lives.

For as scary as quitting may be up front, the reality of what smoking can lead if understood is terrifying. A drag on a cigarette can end up costing a person tens of thousands of dollars, his or her independence, health and life. The reality of smoking does not improve with time, the fears intensify as symptoms develop and life gets a little more limited and the control nicotine exerts gets stronger and stronger.

You must quit smoking to see what life is really like as an ex-smoker and to some degree really recognize what life was like as a smoker. The longer you go without smoking and the more you understand, the less scary life will be and the more resolute you will continue to be to never take another puff!

Joel

Important Announcement The MSN Groups service will close in February 2009. You can move your group to Multiply, MSN’s partner for online groups. Learn More
askjoel	[email protected]