How to Quit Smoking Using Your Subconscious
Repetition is one of the simplest ways to teach your subconscious. Whatever action you repeat a lot will become a habit. Remember how you started smoking? I remember. I liked it a lot. But in the beginning I didn’t feel the need to smoke often. I could smoke 5 bond cigarettes one day, 10 the other day and none for the rest of the week. I was smoking just when I was deciding to. It was free choice. You may think that’s because I wasn’t addicted to nicotine yet. Well, I am not saying that nicotine isn’t addictive but it plays a small part. It is a common idea that it’s the substance which makes it so hard to quit but it’s not true. Some of you may have been or may be addicted to chocolate. I was once addicted to a very popular soft drink. I was addicted to french fries. Some are addicted to TV. Some are addicted to surfing the internet. I don’t think that the TV or the internet have any nicotine or some other addictive substance that enters your bloodstream. And these are also habits that are difficult to quit. So forget about the physical addiction. That is super easy to beat. The psychological reasons are what you need to understand.
Smoking is an action that is usually repeated several times per day. You have been doing this same action for maybe thousands and thousands of times. It is strongly imprinted in your subconscious. I’ll tell you a story that will help you understand how repetition programs your subconscious.
A light switch I had home started to have a problem. If I pushed it normally, it wouldn’t work anymore. I had to slightly hit it so it would make contact. A lot of time has passed until I finally had it replaced. After my new light switch was installed and working properly I have noticed that I was still hitting it when turning the light on. And every time I would remember I don’t have to do that anymore, after I was doing it. The switch was very different from the one before so it was easy to consciously notice that it was new but the subconscious habit was still there and it took a few days of consciously training myself until I got rid of it.
Subconscious actions have triggers. For example, I wasn’t hitting all the switches from my home, just the one that had the problem. Pushing light switches is a subconscious action. You don’t really think about how you do it, you just decide you want to turn on the light. The trigger in my case was going to the bathroom because that’s where that defective switch was. Every action that you do without thinking about it, has a trigger. Something external or internal is making your subconscious act. An internal trigger is usually a decision, like in this case, you decide you want to turn on the light then your hand automatically goes for the light switch.
Another reason why quitting smoking seems to be hard is because it has so many triggers. Examples: when you drive your car, when you’re drinking coffee, when you’re drinking beer, after sex, after you eat, when you’re taking a walk, when you’re having a conversation with someone. You may falsely believe that you decide to smoke in those situations, but it isn’t a conscious decision, it’s an unconscious one that you feel consciously. When something triggers the action of smoking you just instantly FEEL the NEED. To make you understand it even better, consider this: when you are walking through a mall, you may think about how you will smoke or you may not think about it. Either way, you don’t really need it, it’s not like you’re dying to have a cigarette but as soon as you sit at some table and order a coffee, you REALLY start to feel the need. Then, when you smell your coffee and take a sip, the FEELING of NEEDING to smoke takes total control of you. If you don’t have a cigarette, you can think of almost nothing else except ordering cigarettes and starting to puff away.
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