Quit Smoking Tips - How To Deal With Your Conflicting Desire To Smoke

As a smoker wanting to stop smoking, you are in a state of conflict. On one hand, you have an addictive desire to smoke. On the other, you want to stop satisfying it by smoking. Stopping smoking and staying stopped depend on how you resolve this conflict.
As soon as you have smoked your last cigarette with the intention to quit, the conflict you feel could be deep and last for several hours. You may question yourself over and over again, asking yourself if you really do want to stop smoking, and whether this really is the right time to do it. You may spend hours trying to figure out a good excuse to justify smoking for just a little bit longer, or just one more...

Don't be surprised by this: it's all part of the process. The way through this conflict is to experience it and resolve it, and not avoid it in any way.

In order to resolve this conflict, you simply ask yourself this one, basic question: "Am I willing to accept my desire to smoke in order to stop smoking and stay stopped?" In other words, here you are feeling uncomfortable and unsatisfied because you want a cigarette but aren't smoking one; do you think it's worth it to you to feel this way in order to break free from a life of smoking?

Out of Sight, but Not Out of Mind

Some people avoid resolving this conflict by ignoring their desire and quite often feel confident that they have conquered their addiction. One of the more unhelpful things about repression is that, at the time you use it, it appears to be effective, and is therefore rarely perceived as being a problem.

You can see from your own experience that it is a problem, though, if you have ever stopped before. The first cigarette you smoked when you went back to smoking was preceded by a desire to smoke, even though you may have only been dimly aware of that desire at the time.

A friend of mine, James, who attended a quit smoking program, gave an ideal example of this. He told me that at his last attempt, three years ago, he decided to stop smoking at the same time that he was going to redecorate his house. In other words, his strategy was to avoid as much of the difficulty of stopping smoking as he could by keeping busy painting and hanging paper.

He threw his cigarettes away and got rid of anything that might remind him of the smoker he used to be. The plan appeared to work and he managed to stop smoking with very little difficulty. He stayed stopped for a month, with smoking totally forgotten, until something happened that took him by surprise.

He told me that he was at the station where he commuted to work each day and went to the kiosk where he always used to buy his cigarettes. He asked for chewing gum, but the man behind the counter, recognizing him, handed him his usual packet of cigarettes.

James took them, paid for them, opened the packet, took out a cigarette, lit it and was halfway through smoking it before he realized what he was doing. He was simply not aware of the desire to smoke that was guiding his actions.

When he realized he was smoking he felt devastated, but the damage was already done: he had gone back to smoking again, and was soon smoking his usual number of cigarettes every day.

When you stop smoking by avoiding your desire to smoke, you have no way of controlling your automatic reaction once the desire finds a way to break through.

If James had spent some time during that month consciously dealing with his desire to smoke, then when he was given cigarettes by mistake at the station, he would have noticed there was a desire to smoke, and would have been able to deal with it.

Quitting smoking successfully is a lot about learning how to deal with future situations where you would automatically light up a cigarette if you were still smoking. Learn how to quit smoking for good with these simple steps that teach you what emotions to expect, how to handle them, and how choices can help you succeed.

By: Michelle Spencer0

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com