Smoking has become a habit for many of us. We enjoy lighting up that delicious cigarette after an exhausting day at work. Yet we all know the adverse effects of smoking on our health and perhaps even on our relationships. However, some choices about how to quit smoking are made very quickly, so you do not have a strong basis to continue quitting. Insight is needed, this insight can be obtained by learning the psychology behind smoking.
Smoking is a habit
Smoking is a habit that does not add any extra value to our lives. So why is it so difficult to quit? The nicotine in a cigarette is, as we know, addictive. The substance nicotine ensures that the brain is rewarded. Instead of being rewarded in the form of money or appreciation, your brain receives a reward in the form of the substance nicotine. However, the reward is false, you are, as it were, fooling your brain. You haven’t done anything of great value. You have not written an essay that you can be proud of, you have not surprised your wife with a bouquet of flowers. You give yourself a reward without showing any effort. In the above examples you are already rewarded by a good grade from your teacher or a cheerful woman.
We all know this very well. We know the feeling that a cigarette gives, a satisfied, calm and happy feeling. This is also the main reason why it is difficult to quit smoking. Why would you stop if it makes you feel good? We can explain this using long- and short-term effects.
Short and long term effects
People tend to pay more attention to short-term effects. For example, buying a sandwich in the shopping center so you can eat something tasty weighs much more heavily than saving for that TV you really want. With this example we make it clear that short-term effects are much more attractive than long-term effects. This is exactly the same for smoking. As indicated at the top of the paragraph, smoking gives us a satisfied and good feeling the moment we light up the cigarette. This far outweighs the health risks that smoking poses. This is because when we stop smoking we are no longer rewarded daily as we were thanks to that one cigarette. How do we stop then?
Quitting an addiction is certainly not easy. It requires discipline and patience. You will also have to find something else that motivates you to keep quitting. For example, exercising, the fresh breath you would like to have or maybe even the money you save on buying cigarettes.
Below are some important tips to help you quit: 1. Find a hobby that can keep you busy where smoking has a negative effect.
2. Tell yourself, every day, how good of you you are for quitting and how happy you are with yourself.3. Tell as many people as possible that you have quit, this increases social pressure .
4. The first step of quitting is to stop buying.5. Quit gradually, for example a good first step would be to only smoke on weekends.6. Talk about how much difficulty you have with it and also ask about other people’s experiences .
7. Don’t wait, stop now and think of the many benefits associated with it.
Hopefully these are the steps that will give you a smoke-free life, either way it’s never a bad idea to try.