So if you weren’t addicted to nicotine would it be easy for you to quit?
If there was no possibility of addiction, will you be able to quit smoking? Most peoples’ answer to this question is yes. According to most people, they would be able to quit smoking cigarettes more easily if they weren’t addicted.
So, keeping this in mind, first, let us talk about addiction. Here, the focus is physical addiction rather than mental addiction; the physical symptoms of addiction are mainly to be considered here. One must know what happens to their body when they are actually addicted to any substance and what the physical aspects of addiction are. How does one know that they are addicted to cigarettes? Who tells them?
Tobacco Companies:
It is mostly these tobacco companies who emphasize on the certainty of cigarettes being addictive. But, one has to know that thousands of people around the world, despite claiming that they’re addicted to cigarettes, don’t really experience any real physical withdrawal symptoms that one experiences when they are actually addicted to any drug or heroin. Again, the emphasis here is on the physical aspects of addiction; the physical problems that one experiences when one is deprived of the substance that they are addicted to. How long can you go without a cigarette without experiencing such physical malfunctions?
How much sleep do you get without smoking a cigarette throughout your sleep? For how many hours can you sleep comfortably without having to get up to have a smoke? Normally, a person who is really addicted to substances like heroin or meth cannot sleep through the night without taking a hit. He/she has to consume heroin or meth just to go back to sleep. This isn’t so in case of people who claim to be addicted to smoking.
What happens when you go to see a movie? Can you sit through a good movie without smoking? People who can agree to this are usually the same people who claim that they cannot even go two hours without a cigarette. All of this just makes us wonder how addictive cigarette really is.
Most crack addicts, alcoholics, heroin or meth addicts cannot go even an hour, let alone hours or days even, without these. Their mind and body instantly start reacting. Cigarette addicts don’t really face such biological symptoms in their daily routine, when they are deprived of a smoke. Hence, the real addictive symptoms that are shown by real addictive drugs are absent in cigarette addiction.
So again, how addictive are cigarettes really? Avoiding the discussion of conspiracy theories, one has to think about the real beneficiary of cigarettes. It is these tobacco companies and cigarette manufacturers who emphasize upon cigarettes being addictive and really gain out of it. It is a great sales pitch and it really gets the customers reflecting upon it. Much like a placebo effect, it is all about believing.
According to most of the non smokers who quit smoking for a while then, the worst they have experienced are headaches and grumpiness. Looking at these symptoms experienced by people who quit cigarettes and are now non-smokers, it is more of an irritation that they face than physical malfunctions. These don’t even come close to the serious physical problems of drug addicts or alcoholics.
Seeing a heroin addict or a meth addict in a deprived stage is an ugly sight. They face major physical withdrawal symptoms. If they haven’t had their regular dose, they will face terrible malfunctions such as sweats, vomiting, paranoia, hallucinations, trembling hands, shaking, heart palpitations etc.
This is not the case with people who claim to be addicted to cigarettes and try to quit smoking. Generally they get grouchy, crabby and irritable, but they don’t face such serious issues as drug addicts or alcoholics do.
There have been cases wherein people have suffered from lung cancer by breathing in second hand smoke. If the smoke was strong enough to kill them, why didn’t they ever feel the urge to smoke a cigarette? If cigarette was really addictive, then why didn’t the smoke turn these people into regular smokers? Despite breathing in all that Nicotine, not once did those people feel the need to smoke a cigarette.
So the addiction to cigarettes is not really a physical addiction. Cigarette smoking is more of a habit than an addiction. It is one of the most powerful habits that one keeps reinforcing every time they take a cigarette to their lips and smoke. Say, a person smokes twenty times a day and they take a cigarette to their mouth probably ten times, each time they smoke. So almost two hundred times a day, this habit is reinforced upon themselves by these smokers. One doesn’t do any activity accept blinking and breathing so many times a day. Hence, cigarette smoking is such a powerful habit which is to be broken and is confused with addiction.
This habit of smoking is developed over time due to this kind of psychological conditioning. Right from the moment you wake up till you go to sleep, you keep smoking a cigarette at regular intervals. As you keep doing it, this habit is reinforced more and more. The only way to stop smoking cigarettes is to make a decision of quitting and executing it. Cutting down cigarettes is not a good idea. It won’t work, just as it isn’t possible for an alcoholic to quit by cutting down drinks. You will need more. Therefore, you have to just stop at one go.
Once, when a person decides that he/she is willing to quit and is determined enough, this habit becomes easy to kill off. So, is the physical addiction to smoking still a concern or are you assured that it is more of a powerfully conditioned habit which can be broken easily.
Then again, there are things like Nicotine patches and gum which may help. The success ratio of these though doesn’t really show a good picture. These patches work in a way where in one gets ten times more Nicotine supply injected into the body than they would through one cigarette. Now if one was really addicted to cigarette, this Nicotine supply was to be a sure shot success to help them quit as their body already had Nicotine supply from those patches and that too in such a huge amount. Then why don’t these patches or gum work?
It is like a crack or heroin addict injecting drugs in their left arm instead of the right one for a day and still wanting more drugs. They wouldn’t feel deprived of it as their body had received enough supply of these drugs from elsewhere. This is the way addiction works. If your body is really addicted, it doesn’t matter where you get the substance from. So ideally, these Nicotine patches or gum had to work.
Looking at the statistics, out of all the people who try to quit smoking through will power, only about 7% succeed in doing so. In case of quitting cigarettes with the help of gum, it s 10% and it is 16% for Nicotine patches. It is not much of an improvement. Hence, it doesn’t really work.
Now, let us imagine that we are the world’s most successful hypnotherapist group where everyone becomes a non smoker with just one session. So, if you succeed and become a non smoker, will you feel some sort of emptiness? A void you need to fill?
What happens is that when people notice this void in their life, they interpret it in their own ways and freak out. They feel that this void is due to their necessity of smoking. They might fidget or play with their hands and immediately, as soon as they notice that they are doing it, they feel that they need a cigarette. It is not so.
In reality, you feel this void because the hypnosis therapy has worked. Your body has quit smoking and your mind just needs to find an alternative thing to do instead of smoking. That’s why you feel this void because your mind has nothing to do. You fidget or play with your hands because that is your mind engaging your body elsewhere instead of smoking. If the therapy didn’t work, if you really needed a cigarette, you would be having one. You fidget instead of immediately reaching out for a cigarette because that is your body finally quitting to smoke and your mind working on alternatives.
Thus, smoking is just an extremely powerful habit developed over time by repetitiveness. The more you keep smoking cigarettes, the more this habit develops. It becomes a routine, like having a cup of coffee and needing a cigarette with it, or having a cigarette while driving a car or talking on the phone. This habit just gets engraved in your routine. This develops a kind of mechanism, psychologically linking one habit to another and when one is triggered, it triggers the other habits as well. It is just the mental perception where one confuses addiction and habit.
So, now you know smoking cigarettes is just a very powerful habit, it becomes easy to quit using hypnosis as a the unconscious mind controls all your habits.
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