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I really want my dad to quit smoking, but it is really hard for him, so besides support, how else can he stop?
Kat asked:
Hi! I’m trying to quit smoking, but I believe that my addiction is primarily behavior. I’m looking for a fake cigarette of some kind (Styrofoam, plastic, electronic) that is affordable (no $70 e-cig) and I can buy in person or from a reputable online seller? I’ve found some cigarettes online, from places like Better quit and EZ quit, but the websites don’t look legit. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Here’s one from South Beach
Electronic Cigarettes by South Beach Smoke
Help to Stop Smoking – an herbal remedy
Already since 1972, over 60 million people in the USA alone have successfully quit smoking!
At one stage over 60% of the adult population was addicted to this drug. Today it is 28% and dropping.
Now, isn’t this a fair thought.
If all these people can do it (60 MILLION OF THEM!) – and they include EVERY TYPE of person imaginable – surely that is PROOF that IT IS POSSIBLE to successfully quit smoking.
Here’s another Fact.
We now know from the latest scientific research, that although nicotine is one of the world’s fastest acting drugs — the actual PHYSICAL withdrawal pangs when you give up ARE SO MILD, YOU WILL HARDLY BE AWARE of THEM WHEN YOU STOP.
YES, you have read that sentence right!
I know you will want to argue with me on this point, but, first, let me first make the following points.
The Desire to Smoke
Yes, when you stop smoking you will feel the desire AGAIN and AGAIN to smoke.
We all know that feeling — ‘I must have a cigarette’. But that desire in itself is not bad or painful.
It is just a feeling, a sensation we feel in our body.
However……..this is where, for most of us our problems start.
If we start to fear that ‘craving’ or try to use ‘Willpower’ to REPRESS it or FORCE it go away, — “I wish this feeling would go away” we WILL create pain and tension.
This is what as smokers we have all done in the past.
That ‘feeling’ of wanting to smoke then becomes painful, annoying and terribly irritating.
Now this is the hard part to realize.
The pain, the horror does not come from the desire to smoke, but from HOW we deal with this desire, moment-by-moment WHEN we stop.
Can I emphasize this.
You do not have to experience ANY pain or agony when you stop. Yes, when you stop you WILL experience a.
Temporary feeling of loss
A feeling that you are being deprived of something
A feeling of emptiness
A feeling that you will never be able to enjoy yourself again.
A feeling that you must have a cigarette
These feelings, although very real in themselves are not inherently bad or painful. What is important is how you deal with these feelings when you QUIT SMOKING.
The key part of quitting smoking naturally is learning how to deal with these cravings when you stop.
Conflict
Right now, you don’t want to give up smoking because you are TERRIFIED of how you will FEEL when you can’t smoke.
Let’s be honest.
You smoke now because you enjoy it.
Or — to be more accurate: You smoke now because you have conditioned yourself to enjoy it.
It is important that we are honest with ourselves here.
In fact, even the ‘THOUGHT’, the mere ‘thought’ of not been able to smoke probably fills you with complete dread now.
But there is another undeniable fact: This ‘pleasure’ is killing you. Again we must be brutally honest here. Everyday, you are systemically destroying your health.
This is the conflict all smokers face.
On the one hand, smoking is killing you and you desperately want to stop.
..And yet on the other hand, you don’t really want to stop because you believe you really enjoy it.
Yet, one other truth cannot be denied and this applies to every smoker.
We are terrified of how we will F-E-E-L when we can’t smoke. We are convinced it will be unbearable and impossible.
FEAR
Right now, the ONLY thing — yes, THE ONLY THING stopping you from quitting smoking is this fear of how YOU WILL FEEL WHEN YOU STOP.
And yet this very fear is the actual key to quitting smoking naturally.
Quitting smoking is really all about learning HOW to deal with the cravings and feelings you WILL get when you stop.
When you learn how to do that – you will realize that there is nothing to fear when you give up.
What is there to fear?
When you get the craving to smoke, which you will, again and again – - you will now take the OPPORTUNITY to ‘change’ or ‘transform’ that craving so that it is actually enjoyable or at least tolerable to experience.
Imagine.
You have decided to give up smoking. It’s dinnertime.
You have finished a day’s work.
You finish your meal and ….. subconsciously, you reach for a cigarette. But then, of course you remember you no longer smoke.
Bang! At that moment, certain gut feelings will arise.
Feelings of regret……..a feeling that you are missing out on something important and then maybe….. terrible feelings of emptiness….. We all know how it feels.
But the real question is: How will you deal with this feeling — this craving to smoke?
Will you just suffer it, try to repress it and hope that it will go away? That is one option. The old willpower method.
Or will you give in to the feeling — and start to smoke again (promising to start again tomorrow)?
Or will you – - for the first time ever: – - follow our instructions and actually ALLOW yourself to transform the feeling/craving so that it is actually enjoyable or at least pleasant or tolerable enough to experience.
You see, when you can do that, you will no longer be AFRAID of these cravings when you stop smoking.
In fact, you will start to WELCOME them because they will give you another opportunity to RESPOND and DEAL with them in this NEW WAY.
This process is the essence of quitting smoking naturally and finding it a pleasant and life-affirming experience.
Weight-loss?
Are you now beginning to see how these principles can also apply to losing weight.
You see a beautiful cake. You want to eat it….when BANG! — You remember you are on a diet.
Now watch HOW YOU feel when this happens?
Couldn’t we describe it as.
‘Feelings of regret……..a feeling that you are missing out on something important and then maybe….. terrible feelings of emptiness.
Isn’t it essentially the same feeling as not being able to smoke?
However, the real question is the same with smoking: How will you DEAL with this feeling – this craving to eat?
Will you GIVE IN to it — and eat the cake or will you try and FORCE yourself not to eat it- and be miserable?
Why not consider our alternative?
Accept this feeling, this desire to eat. But, instead of giving in to it, learn how to deal and respond to it in a NEW way so that you don’t MIND experiencing it?
Transform the craving so that it is actually enjoyable or very pleasant to experience.
The Joy of quitting Smoking?
Remember, when you stop – yes, you WILL feel something but there will be no physical agony, only a temporary feeling that you are MISSING OUT on something. A feeling that you are being deprived of something SPECIAL — but these feelings will ONLY be temporary.
However, to quit smoking successfully and to start to enjoy doing it we must go deeper than these temporary cravings.
We must realize that:
You find it difficult or impossible to stop smoking now because……… you BELIEVE ABSOLUTELY that you NEED to smoke and even deeper, you BELIEVE that if you give up smoking now, your life will never be as ENJOYABLE again.
In one sentence: You believe your life will be intolerable.
It is these beliefs that makes quitting smoking difficult NOT Nicotine addiction.
Right now, you are not only physically addicted to smoking but you are psychologically dependent or addicted to smoking.
If your addiction were purely physical wouldn’t all these nicotine patches have a 100% success record!
Yet, we all know that even if we use a nicotine substitute, we will still continue to feel a terrible desire to smoke.
Again and again, we’ll feel we must have a cigarette. At times, it will even get to the stage where we just don’t care – even the most dire health warnings will have no affect on us – we just WANT to smoke. Where does this desire come from ?
It comes from our conditioning, our beliefs about smoking.
This moment, we believe that smoking is an essential pleasure. In fact, most of us have a terrible resistance to EVEN thinking about quitting smoking.
Why ?
Because we believe that in order to do anything about our addiction, i.e. give up smoking — we would have to end our pleasure and ending pleasure is something we have NO DESIRE to do.
YOUR REAL JOB
Your real job in giving up smoking lies in REALLY UNDERSTANDING that you don’t NEED to smoke.
You remove the psychological addiction to smoking.
You will never be truly free until you realize that smoking is not a real pleasure and that when you stop, you WILL NOT BE depriving ourselves of a real pleasure……. ……and then you will not only be able to give up smoking for good but you will enjoy doing it!
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Is it possible to enjoy, yes ENJOY quitting smoking – and not gain ANY weight? Follow Sean O’Riain famous 10-day free online Quit Smoking Course at www.quitsmokingonline.com and prove it for yourself.
Others quit smoking articles available at http://www.quitsmokingonline.com/Articlecontentspage.htm
mike@quitsmokingonline.com
This article will help you remove the need to smoke naturally by argument and reason alone.
Ive been smoking for ten years and i want to stop, but every time i say i quit i end up with a blunt i my mouth.
i meant to say in my mouth… you see what happens when you smoke..u forget how to spell..lol
Five years ago when I was 27, I found out how to quit smoking successfully. I had no cravings, no weight gain and no mood swings. I used no substitutes, socialized just as much as I ever had before and had no problem hanging out with my smoking friends.
It was one of the easiest things I have ever done. Five years later I am still happily smoke free and never for the slightest instant do I EVER have the smallest craving.
I had tried to quit smoking many times before during my almost thirteen years of slavery. I thought I knew how to quit smoking, I just thought that I couldn’t do it. I thought that I must be weak willed, or perhaps it was just that I ‘enjoyed’ smoking so much that I couldn’t envision life as a non-smoker.
Before any attempt to quit smoking I always made lists of all the reasons I shouldn’t smoke: It was killing me, it made me cough, I was more susceptible to colds and flu and they tended to last longer, I had no energy for exercise, it was eating up far too large a slice of cash, it stank. On the other side, I would weigh up the benefits of giving up smoking: I would have more energy, more money; I would exercise, smell nicer and live longer.
For my first attempt to quit smoking I was 19 years old. I had already been smoking for five years and I was going at it quite heavily. I had a very stressful job and had my own office so I could smoke freely. Many times my first pack was empty by lunchtime and I already had a nasty nicotine headache.
After investigating the various help available to smokers, I decided on the patch. After a month I caved in and went back to smoking. My month long attempt to quit smoking had left me poorer than before, as my course of patches cost a heap more than the cigarettes.
For the next 7 years I made a few attempts to quit smoking. Some lasted a few days, some a few weeks; one attempt lasted as long as eighteen months, but all were doomed to failure.
So many times as I smoked myself sick I thought: why am I doing this? Why? Why don’t I stop, once and for all?
I tried to cut down on many occasions. When I worked in a non-smoking office, I didn’t smoke until I left in the evenings. I thought this must mean I was in control; maybe I didn’t NEED to quit smoking. Maybe I could just be one of those ‘happy smokers’ who smoke five cigarettes a day and never overdo it! As seems to be the case with most smokers, this happened sometimes and didn’t happen other times. A few days of five ciggies a day would be followed by a weekend of two packs a day.
So how did I go from being unable to quit smoking, to happily smoke free instantly? I read Allen Carr’s book “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.” In this book Allen Carr, who previously maintained a 100 fag a day habit, dispels all your illusions about why you smoke, and in the process reveals one of the biggest and most horrific confidence tricks in history.
Once you’ve seen through it, why would you continue to fall for it?
Smokers do not smoke for the reasons they shouldn’t. I didn’t smoke because I wanted lung cancer, or low energy, or bad breath. I smoked because I believed I was getting something out of it. I thought it was giving me some measure of genuine enjoyment or pleasure.
I used all the excuses that are common from every smoker, ‘I choose to smoke, I enjoy it!’ ‘I could quit if I wanted to, but the problem is that I don’t WANT to’, ‘I just love the feeling of the smoke going into my lungs’ or ‘I think it’s the hand to mouth thing, if I’m not smoking I don’t know what to do with my hands!’ or ‘It relaxes me.’ There are many more.
There is only one reason people smoke: nicotine addiction. Remove the nicotine and you remove the addiction. Nicotine is the most addictive drug on the planet. As Carr points out, we wouldn’t say to a cocaine addict, you must enjoy sniffing so much that it has become a habit, why don’t you inject it instead? Then you can focus on breaking the ‘habit’ of sniffing it.
As ludicrous as this is, this is exactly what Nicotine Replacement Therapy, in the form of patches, inhalers and gums aims to do! The entire notion of NRT is bizarre as Nicotine is not being replaced, it is being administered and there is no therapy!
All NRT serves to accomplish is to keep the smoker hooked on the very thing he is trying to come off! This results in enormous profits for the pharmaceutical companies.
The way smoking traps us is that from the moment we extinguish the cigarette the nicotine levels in the blood start to drop.
Around two hours later they will have dropped to the level that starts to send signals to the brain that more is required. The smoker feels a slightly empty, insecure feeling, almost indistinguishable from hunger, that only translates to them as ‘I need or want a cigarette’.
When they take that first drag, the nicotine levels are restored and they get that ‘AH’ feeling, which they then interpret as pleasure. However, again in Carr terms, this is no more pleasurable than wearing a tight pair of shoes all day so that you can experience the pleasure of taking them off.
Nicotine CREATES the void; there was no void before. As the body builds up immunity, the void becomes harder and harder to fill, which is why you gradually require more and more.
As a smoker you are constantly walking a tight rope between too little nicotine: feeling empty and insecure, and too much: getting a nicotine headache, sore throat, nicotine hangover, etc. The smoker spends his life trying to feel the same way that A NON-SMOKER FEELS ALL THE TIME!
So if its just nicotine addiction then why on earth do people go back to smoking after six months, a year, five years, even ten years of being smoke free? Why did it happen to me after eighteen months?
Because I still believed that it was something pleasurable that I had GIVEN UP! I believed that stopping smoking had involved some genuine sacrifice. If I was around other smokers I envied them, never realizing how much they envied me!
As long as you believe you are being deprived of something that was a true pleasure, you have to use will power to stop yourself from doing it. Will power is finite. It eventually runs out.
Once the brainwashing becomes clear and you truly understand that there is no sacrifice; there is nothing TO give up, you are free.
The moment I extinguished that last cigarette I was free. I went out with a smoking friend the next day. I didn’t envy her that cigarette in the slightest. She couldn’t believe it. She kept asking me if I wanted a drag, I couldn’t imagine why I had EVER wanted a drag. And it’s been that way ever since.
I had a pack of herbal cigarettes once. I honestly could not GIVE these things away. All those stories about how its all about the smoke going into the lungs, or the hand to mouth motion, or the habit, kind of blew out of the water there.
Of course the excuse was that the herbal cigarettes didn’t taste nice. I guess that’s because ordinary cigarettes are so delicious. Funny then how when we smoke one brand of cigarettes and it runs out, we seem to have no problem smoking a friend’s brand that we dislike. So I guess taste isn’t really that important. I like the taste of watermelon, but I don’t need to go out in the middle of the night to a late night garage in search of watermelon.
The problem with smoking is that it seems only Allen Carr and those who have read his books or attended his clinics actually understand the smoking trap. Both smokers and non-smokers have no understanding of it whatsoever, which is why well-meaning non-smokers propagate the same myths that keep the smokers hooked.
Of course non-smokers imagine that there must be something in it, smokers MUST be getting some genuine pleasure or crutch from it. Why else would they do it?
Whether you are a smoker or a non-smoker I implore you to read Carr’s last book “The Nicotine Conspiracy”.
It is absolutely gripping. Carr discusses 23 years of trying to get his message out to as many people as possible, and the enormous amount of obstacles the ‘Big 3′ – Government, the established medical profession, and the media have placed in his path. This is because his quit smoking method is so easy it requires no will power and most importantly NO MEDICATION! This makes him a mortal enemy of big business.
I can vouch for his method to quit smoking wholeheartedly. As can several people close to me who also quit smoking very easily and successfully after years of addiction using Easyway. There are millions upon millions worldwide who have quit smoking successfully using this method. It does not require any will power. This is not a false claim. As Carr points out, it doesn’t take willpower to cross the street.
The most frustrating thing I have come up against with people close to me, is the refusal to even read the book! They are actually scared that if they read the book, that will mean they HAVE to quit smoking. Well no one can make you do anything. But I can promise you that when you do read it, you will kick yourself seven ways to Sunday for being such a blind idiot. And even if you don’t do it for your own sake, do it for those you love. If you don’t understand the nicotine trap, how will you prevent your children from falling into it?
So go on, it’s free, read the book. And if you’re a smoker, read both books, or get the DVD’s, CD’s or attend a clinic, whatever. My sister attended a clinic and she highly recommends it. The clinics only take a day and you can smoke freely while you listen, argue and rail against what’s being said to you; but at the end of it, you’ll put out your last cigarette and rejoice.
Come over to the land of the free, it’s wonderful here.
