Do you remember the last time you tried to quit smoking? How long did you make it? A week? Two weeks? Did you know that if you made it more than a week that you had probably broken free of your physical addiction to nicotine? So if you got past your physical addiction why did you resume smoking? In this article we're going to look at that.
Most people can't successfully quit smoking because they have a mental addiction to smoking that is not broken by quitting cold turkey or weaning yourself off of cigarettes by using nicotine substitutes like pills, gums or patches.
NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic-Programming, is being promoted as the most effective way to break that mental addiction to smoking.
I personally look at the mental addiction as more of an emotional addiction to smoking, since we use smoking as a coping mechanism.
It becomes ingrained in our brains as something we need to enjoy certain situations and to tolerate others.
Even those who have quit for months often still want to smoke.
NLP eliminates your desire to smoke.
The way it works is simple yet quite effective.
You simply listen to some recordings, and your brain relearns how to think about smoking.
Seems too simple to work doesn't it? It's a form of psycho-therapy, but don't let that put you off.
When you began to smoke you started to associate smoking with certain aspects of your life.
It slowly became part of your daily ritual.
You didn't immediately become mentally addicted to smoking; it was something that you learned to do through repeatedly smoking at certain times or in certain situations.
Eventually those circumstances didn't feel right to you unless you were also smoking.
Eliminating nicotine from your body as the sole method of quitting smoking does nothing to help you relearn your life without smoking.
As a way to quit smoking, patches, pills and gums will eventually leave you out there on your own.
You're left with just your still untreated mental or emotional desire to smoke.
At some point it becomes a matter of willpower.
So you have two options before you it would seem.
You could retrain your brain to think life without smoking while you quit or you can quit first and then hope that shear willpower is enough to retrain your brain later.
That's exactly what those who quit cold turkey do: retrain their brains.
They may not be thinking of it as that but the reality is that those who manage to quit that way basically put themselves through a sort of self-induced psycho-therapy.
So back to NLP as the best way to quit smoking.
Neuro-Linguistic-Programing would seem to accomplish with much less ease and certainly a lot less cost, what smokers who use patches, gums and pills do in the end: quit smoking and then retrain their brains to think life without smoking.
I think I'd be doing the easy thing.