Posts Tagged ‘how to quit smoking’
Smoking ages you more than anything else does, in both your external appearance and your internal health. As just one example, dermatologists have found wrinkles on the faces of 20-year-old smokers!
Yes, you might get run over by a bus tomorrow; nobody knows how long they will live. One thing you can be completely sure of, though, is that the quality of your health is already impaired, right now, by your smoking. The longer you smoke, the more serious that impairment will become. There has never been a better time to start learning how to quit smoking and start rebuilding your health.
‘I must have one little vice.’ Many people are able to stop drinking or can diet successfully, but think of cigarettes as their last straw to clutch on to. But you don’t need to have any addictions at all: they serve no real purpose.
This ‘it’s my last straw’ kind of rationalization often comes from people who are doing a lot for others and spend too little time looking after themselves. If you can see that smoking isn’t really a way of looking after yourself, perhaps, after you have stopped, you will want to find other ways of providing real support and rewards for what you do.
‘Smoking doesn’t affect me, and I would stop immediately if it ever did.’ Smoking is affecting you now and it’s only a matter of time before you will be made aware of it. For some people, the very first symptom they ever notice is a heart attack. But smoking was affecting them long before that happened.
Another form of denial is pretending that a symptom like shortness of breath is caused by something else, such as asthma or allergies. One way to challenge that pretence is by quitting smoking for a while, and see what difference it makes.
As one doctor put it, many years ago: ‘Addicts are usually unaware of their disturbance of judgment; thus many smokers will allege in all seriousness that their cough is due to damp, draughts, dust, fumes, infection, chill, “catarrh” or gas in the last war. They will take all manner of useless medications while rejecting and even resenting the suggestion that smoking might be responsible.’
According to the US Surgeon General’s report of 1990: ‘It is safe to say that smoking represents the most extensively documented cause of disease ever investigated in the history of biomedical research.’
‘I don’t really smoke.’ This is an excellent example of denial. A 30-a-day smoker who was terrified of getting cancer admitted to me that she was able to deny to herself the fact that she smoked. Fortunately, it has now really become true for her. This gives you some idea of the power of the mind to deceive when it comes to justifying addiction.