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Seven Common Myths about Stopping Smoking
by Leon Jay
http://www.now-quit-smoking.com
There are many urban myths around about the
difficulties involved in stopping smoking that contribute
to the anxiety and subsequent delay in seeking help to
quit. The problem is further exacerbated by a poor
understanding of the real basis of the addiction and the
frenzied marketing of inappropriate tools to help the
smoker stop. Smoking and Stop Smoking are two multi-
billion industries that benefit from hyping the difficulty
of quitting.
Here we discuss some of the most common myths and
misunderstandings and offer a more useful in depth
understanding of the problem and suggest a direction for
a successful solution.
Myth 1: Nicotine is Highly Addictive
Nicotine is a mildly addictive substance, and any
withdrawal symptoms are nothing more than a mild
anxiety that lasts for about four days. If nicotine was
highly addictive, non-smoking family members of
smokers would also suffer strong withdrawal symptoms.
They too inhale enough nicotine passively to have an
addictive effect, yet they are rarely aware of any
withdrawal symptoms when they move to a non-smoking
environment.
This is because they have no emotional association to
smoking. Similarly people who work in smoky places
have levels of nicotine in their blood high enough to
cause an addiction, but they don't need to smoke when
they get home, because they have no mental association
with smoking relieving the mild nicotine-induced
symptoms.
The symptoms often referred to as nicotine withdrawal
symptoms are associated with levels of anxiety and fear
that the addictive behaviour is used to cover. When the
cover is removed the underlying anxiety is exposed. The
smoking has been masking the underlying anxiety.
Myth 2: Habits are Hard to Break
If you walked your dog every day along the same route,
you might call it a habit. Perhaps one day the road is
closed, as they are demolishing a house down the street.
Do you find it difficult to walk a different route or do
you keep going the same way despite the life threatening
danger to both you and your dog? After all it is habit.
Most people would just turn another way and carry on
with their walk, without much lingering annoyance or
concern. In a short time a new habit would form of
taking their new route.
Similarly habit may make you reach for a cigarette
with your coffee in the morning, but that is all it is,
just habit.
If you have stopped and no longer want a cigarette, it
doesn't cross your minds to force one upon yourself.
Habits are there to make life easier. They allow your
mind to focus on what's important or new without
becoming cluttered and confused. If a routine has no
emotional charge then it is easily changed. It is only the
emotional charge associated with a habit that keeps us
from letting it go, no matter what the habit. Once the
reasons the habit was formed are removed then there is
no reason to continue it any longer and the habit will fade
and be easily replaced at will.
Myth 3: Nicotine Withdrawal is Usually Long and
Painful
The 'withdrawal symptoms' you experience when you try
to give up smoking are exactly the same physical and
emotional symptoms as fear and anxiety: sweating,
restlessness, irritability, insomnia and nervousness. They
are the same symptoms because they are the same
problem. It is simply another smoking lie that being
smoke free needs to be mentally and physically painful.
True nicotine withdrawal is simply a mild anxiety; the
rest is an exaggeration by the smokers mind, fuelled by
urban myth. This artificial anxiety induced by smoking,
will last only 4 days if left to its own devices and if it
is not re-triggered by smoking another cigarette. The reason
people start again after quitting, is the subconscious
memory that smoking once seemed to relieve anxiety, an
illusion created by smoking in the first place. Any longer
lasting symptoms of anxiety and fear are unrelated to the
actual nicotine withdrawal, and are based on the
underlying mental and emotional associations, which no
amount of nicotine can alter.
Myth 4: I'll Put on Weight if I Stop Smoking
There is NO need to gain any weight when you stop
smoking. If you stop smoking without dealing to the root
causes of your addictive behaviour, there is a great risk
you will just transfer from one addictive substance to
another. This is why some people gain weight after
stopping smoking. By changing your underlying beliefs
and thoughts, you are not longer in the addictive cycle
and are free to enjoy a healthier life. People only eat more
if they quit with and don't deal with the root cause of
their addiction. Stopping with inappropriate support often
results in an increase in anxiety levels, and people reach
for an alternative pacifier. Food like smoking begins to
be used as a treat, an emotional safety blanket or as a
time filler. If you feel incomplete within yourself or
unhappy with yourself you are far more likely to smoke
or over-eat. By dealing with your loneliness, anxiety and
deprivation directly there is no reason for your mind to
try and substitute smoking with food.
Myth 5: I Need to Smoke to Relax
The nicotine trick is the illusion that smoking causes
relaxation, when in fact it is only relieving (temporarily)
the effects of the stress caused by the previous cigarette.
Nicotine is a powerful stimulant. Once it has entered your
blood-stream it has an almost immediate effect. One of
its side-effects (usually noticed within 30-90 minutes) is
a pharmacologically induced sense of fear, which is
experienced for up to 4 days. Under normal
circumstances this artificial fear can only be reduced
either by another cigarette, or by allowing the nicotine to
leave the body. It is only this feeling of anxiety caused
by the nicotine that is being reduced, not any real
anxiety. Because of the time delay in the anxiety effects
of the nicotine on the body your mind makes the mistake
of believing the stress is real. It also makes the mistake
that the subsequent cigarette is what removes the stress.
If it were necessary to smoke to relieve anxiety then how
does the rest of the non-smoking world manage? Are they
more stressed than the smokers?
Myth 6: Smoking Isn't as Harmful as the Media
Makes Out
The Facts:
Your baby - 40% more likely than non smokers' babies
to be stillborn and about 20% more likely to die in the
first month after birth; 50% greater risk of low birth
weight, double SID deaths
Your preschooler - 50-100% increase in respiratory
infections, asthma & glue ear; 17% greater risk of mental
retardation
Your school age child - 40% less likely to start smoking
if parents don't
Their future - about 17 percent of lung cancer cases in
non-smokers could be attributed to exposure to second
hand smoke as children
An estimated 3,000 lung cancer deaths and 35,000
coronary heart disease deaths occur annually among adult
non-smokers in the United States as a result of exposure
to second hand smoke.
Your health - Smoking kills more Americans than
alcohol, drug abuse, homicide, suicide, car accidents,
fires and AIDS combined - Every eight seconds, someone
dies from tobacco use.
Financial cost - at one 20 pack a day costing $10, in 1
year you pay $3,650 year, or $48,000 including unearned
interest over 10 years. Add to this lost productivity and
earnings at work (for you and partner and other affected
family members) due to smoking related illnesses and
associated medical costs and your end bill is much
steeper.
Medical costs - In the US, direct medical costs are about
$16 BILLION per anum, with an additional $37 billion in
indirect costs related to death, disability, and premature
death.
Accidents - smoking while driving increases your risk of
auto accidents
House fires - Smoking is the major cause of fires in the
United States. One-third of all apartment and hotel fires
are caused by smoking and 17 percent of house fires are
caused by smoking, resulting in 4,000 injuries and 1,500
deaths each year.
While there are a small percentage people who smoke for
many years and live a long and relatively healthy life, the
vast majority do experience negative consequences both
to themselves, to their family, socially, economically and
environmentally. The odds are heavily stacked against
you and your loved ones escaping undamaged - it's like
playing Russian roulette with your family only there are
five bullets in the six chambers instead of only one.
You've got to ask - is this a risk I'm willing to take with
my life? Is this a risk I'm willing to take with my
family's life?
If you know for certain there was a 80% chance you
would have a life threatening accident if you drove your
car today, would you get in that car with your family and
drive away if there was no pressing need? That is the
level of risk you take when you choose to smoke. It
might not happen today, but it will happen to someone
you know, and probably someone you are close to.
Myth 7: I've Failed So Often in the Past I'm Bound to
Fail Again Now
Most smoking programs rely on the use
of willpower, nicotine replacement, hypnotic suggestion
or a combination of these. If you have failed using these
techniques it is not a personal failure on your part but a
failure of strategy. If it's Monday in LA and you want to
get to Hong Kong by Wednesday, walking or swimming
or even a bus is unlikely to be effective. You need to use
the right strategy to get to your destination. These
strategies alone or in combination rarely have a
permanent result without resulting in subsequent
addiction to another substance and can create
considerable mental and emotional strain.
Going cold turkey and using will power does not usually
work as a long term strategy. 90% of your thoughts are
subconscious and 90% are the same thoughts you had
yesterday. So no matter how hard you try to think you
way out of smoking there is a huge amount of thoughts
and feelings you don't have any conscious control over.
These thoughts like dragging a dead weight up a steep
hill behind you. Eventually you become tired and the
weight drags you back down again. Using will power is
in effect setting up and internal civil war where you are
always the looser.
Nicotine replacement does not work as nicotine is not
the thing you are primarily addicted to. Nicotine is only
mildly addictive and the withdrawal symptoms wear off
over about 4 days. So using nicotine replacement is only
useful to the companies that manufacture these products.
If this were really the case you would only need to cut
down one cigarette a day until you no longer smoked. In
many cases of light smokers they actually increase the
level of nicotine in their body by using patches.
Hypnotic suggestion alone does not work often as a long
term strategy. Hypnotic suggestions adds a new layer of
unconscious thought patterns down in the mind, but does
not eliminate the underlying root caused of the addictive
behaviour. Hypnosis can be a very powerful adjunct to a
successful stop smoking program, but is not so effective
as a stand alone technique.
What does work?
Only a technique that deals with the root causes of your
addictive behaviour will be completely successful in
helping you give up smoking easily permanently. A
program has to have these elements to help even the most
serious long term smoker quit:
*~Willing participation by smoker
*~Respectful honest attitude to smoking
*~Intellectual understanding of the lies and myths
about smoking
*~Symptom relief during nicotine withdrawal
*~Built in stress relief techniques
*~Systematic exploration of emotional associations
to smoking
*~A simple appropriate technique to permanently
change thoughts, feelings and beliefs that hold
the smoking addiction in place changing the
subconscious programming
This combination of elements allows you to approach the
change process comfortably and deal with all the various
aspects of this addiction until you are ready to quit
without strain.
Perhaps the biggest myth amongst smokers is 'I'll stop
tomorrow'. As Henry Wight once said:
'If you are ultimately going to do something important
that will make a real difference... do it NOW'
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