Quitting smoking isn’t just about finding new ways to keep your hands occupiedâ€"it’s about changing the way we feel about cigarettes. Although many smoking cessation programs focus on the physical aspects of smoking, the root of the addiction is buried deep within our emotions. Without changing the way we feel about cigarettes, we will continually lapse and start smoking again. This is why so many people try to quit smoking and failâ€"they haven’t figured out that the real addiction isn’t physical. The idea that cigarettes represent the promise of relief to so many problems is deeply ingrained within us. As smokers, we are not simply responding to the ingredients encased within the paper wrapping; to us, cigarettes are something we can always rely on to help us through a difficult or stressful part of our lives. Unfortunately, when we stop learning to deal with emotional problems as they occur, and rely instead on cigarettes, we forget that our emotions can be dealt with in a healthy manner. Cigarettes become a much more important part of our emotional lives than they should be; we start sacrificing our health for what we think is a solution to our stress, but in fact is only a clever way of hiding the real problem. By separating what cigarettes actually do to us physically from what we subconsciously think they’re doing to us emotionally, we can see them for the harmful substitutes they are, and cure ourselves of the desire to ever smoke them again. Re-conceptualizing cigarettes in this way takes commitment, but the results are astonishing, and absolutely worth the effort. You can think of it this way; imagine trying to fix a car by constantly changing the spark plugs, when what it really needs is some new oil. You end up spending hundreds of dollars changing the spark plugs, but the car still doesn’t drive smoothly. It’s a frustratingly simple problem, but because you don’t know what the real problem is, you can’t fix the car. Luckily, you can finally quit smoking permanently because you understand where your addiction lies. Once you change the way you feel about cigarettes, you will never want to smoke again.
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