10- Anti Smoking

"Quit smoking or die trying"

When you quit smoking, your emotions may not be as in check as they were before. Even if you are not an emotional person, the effect that cravings can have on you can turn you into that kind of person.


Now that being said, you might be behaviorally addicted.  You might have these habits that 
have grown up around smoking.  So when someone who, two years after they gave up cigarettes, has a cup of coffee in the morning and has this urge to smoke with their cup of coffee, that’s not a physical addiction, that’s a habitual urge that’s reemerging and is making itself know.  So if you want to stop smoking, if we recognize that all you have to do is make it through the first 100 hours and you’ll not be physically addicted to nicotine anymore, what you need to do is you need to recognize the cues and the rewards that you usually associate with smoking.  

Now, some people smoke, and maybe you smoke because it’s social.  Right?  Because when you’re at a bar, you don’t know what to do with your hands or it’s a convenient way to go outside and gossip with your colleagues in the middle of the day or it’s a way to take a break.  If that’s the reward that smoking is serving for you, you need to find a new routine that delivers that same reward.  So that could mean that during the middle of the day, you have a couple of friends that you take a walk with around the block and you’ve planned this in advance.  Or at a bar, you have something else to do with your hands.  But you can’t just say, “I’m gonna quit smoking.”  You have to figure out what the cue is and what the reward its delivering is and find a new routine to sort of shoehorn in.