How to Quit Smoking Without Giving Up Cigarettes
The biggest problem with quitting smoking is that you don’t want to give up your cigarettes. what you really want is to have your cake and eat it too. You want to carry on lighting up a cigarette at your usual smoking times every day and you also want to quit smoking.
So is it possible to do both?
How many times have you seen advice about giving up smoking that tells you to pick a date to quit smoking and stop? the idea is that you use the lead up time to this date to mentally prepare yourself to stop smoking for good.
But as with almost everyone who’s tried to quit smoking this way, all you’re really doing in the lead up time to your quitting date is thinking about how much you’re going to miss your cigarettes. and you’re just hoping against all hope that when you wake up on your quitting day, some miraculous event will have happened while you were sleeping that magically took away your desire to smoke.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if giving up smoking really was that easy? You just go to bed one night as a smoker and you wake up in the morning and “POOF!” you no longer want to smoke. your craving for cigarettes has mystically disappeared overnight never to return again. So you can get out of bed, throw your cigarettes away and that’s it. Bob’s your Uncle. You’re cured.
It’s such a nice dream. But in reality, you wake up on your quitting day and think “Oh damn! How am I going to get through the rest of my life without another cigarette?” and that makes you feel just terrible, so you light up a cigarette to make yourself feel better.
And so the cycle continues of smoking, failing to quit, and smoking again. and all the time, you know deep down, that the reason you don’t stop smoking is because you simply don’t want to. what you’re really searching for is that illusive “something” that will MAKE you want to stop smoking because you know that no matter how you try and quit, you’ll always still want to smoke.
And that, in a nut shell, is the real predicament about giving up smoking. You just don’t really want to…not really.
The good news is that it IS possible to quit smoking without giving up your cigarettes.
You see, quitting all at once and going completely “cold turkey” is not a good idea. just because you don’t buy cigarettes any more doesn’t mean you’re instantly a non-smoker. You’re just a smoker who doesn’t have any cigarettes.
But if you’d stopped smoking the correct way, you wouldn’t have to give up your cigarettes. You just simply wouldn’t want them any more.
You see the problem arises when you use the term “giving up cigarettes”. the words “giving up” make it sound as though you’re being forced to let go of a life-long friendship you’ve been having with your cigarettes.
But if you didn’t want to smoke any more then you wouldn’t have to “give up” anything, because instead of losing something, you’d be gaining something. and what you’d gain is the control of your life that you “gave up” when you started smoking.
So if you want to quit smoking for good without giving up cigarettes, start looking at all the positive things you’ll gain when you become a non-smoker instead of grieving the loss of you cigarettes which never really were your friend in the first place.