How to Make a Tobacco Habit
Friday, January 9th, 2009    Subscribe To Our Feed
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Let’s pretend you wanted to form a habit. And not just some wimpy habit, but a major, mind controlling, and life changing habit behavior. Where do you start to make it a really strong habit that will feel impossible to break? There are three basic ways we learn habits; emotions, authority figures, and repetition.
Example:
Let’s just use a younger you for the example, 10-14 years old. And for this example, let’s use the habit of smoking. If you don’t smoke…. replace the word “smoking” with any craving you get, or just pretend you smoke? It is an article about smoking after all.
So when you were around that age I think we can safely assume you were learning about life and how you fit into it. If you were like most kids, you weren’t as confident about yourself as you would be later in life.
You may have felt self-conscious, dependent on others, powerless, not good enough, or just not as capable as you would have liked to feel. Let’s call this feeling “bad”. Now, this doesn’t mean you felt miserable, but, did you feel as “good” as you wanted to feel? Did you feel as “good” as you believed other people felt?
Possibly, (probably) not. Which would mean you wanted to feel better, or at least as good as you thought other people feel. What would make you feel better? That depends on the influences in your life to that point.
Maybe you had authority figures in your young life that smoked, like parents, relatives, friends, advertisements, role models. At this point in your life, smoking would have been seen as tough, strong, independent, self-assured, unique, “good”. Repetitively exposed to the thing you felt your life lacked.
Your mind would develop a craving for the very thing it believes is in your best interest. The thing that will make you feel better. A craving that is a “feeling”, separate from a “knowing”.
Then you tried your first cigarette, and chances are that you weren’t so good at smoking. That would come with practice.
As life continues you come across situations that make you feel “bad” again and do what you’ve been taught makes you feel “good”. That is repeated emotions and practice and you have a strong habit.
People that have tried to quit smoking have spent a lot of time analyzing their habit, fighting themselves for control of cravings. But, you didn’t learn the smoking habit with the thinking and analyzing part of your mind, so why try to use that part of your mind to change the habit?
It makes a whole lot of sense to quit smoking using the same methods you started smoking with. A “hypnotized” state of mind combined with emotions, authority figures and repetition. Also known as: modern hypnosis.
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