Photograph by Ryan McGuire
A million dollar question.
This is a million dollar question. You know why is a million dollar question? I will tell you why, if you answer this question right it will exponentially increase your possibilities of quitting smoking.
I am assuming you are a smoker for a number of years and with at least 10 cigarette consumption a day user.
You may also be a concerned family member or a friend that wants to help a relative or another friend to get rid of its smoking.
You came to the right place.
Well, you came to the right place because I am not going to trick you. I am going to tell you the correct answer. The answer that will help you quit smoking and escape the nicotine prison.
You are a drug addict.
Yes, you are a drug addict, and your drug is nicotine. Nicotine is a potent toxin an alkaloid in the same family as cocaine and heroin but with stronger and quicker addictive powers. I am going to reveal to you the way I use seven years ago to get rid of this filthy(smoke everywhere) disgusting (nicotine everywhere, nails, teeth, clothes saturated by smoke, yellow ceiling room) drug addiction.
Smoking is not a habit.
Have you noticed that I did not use the word habit, well that’s because it’s not, sorry to burst that bubble. A habit is a choice that you apply to three to four weeks so it will become an automated action.
If it’s a good practice, the results have a positive impact on your well being and your surroundings if it’s a bad habit then it has the exact opposite effect and spreads negative vibes everywhere.
Again very important…
Smoking is not a habit. It’s one very combustible crude way of delivering a highly addictive, toxic and deadly substance into your body, into your brain, heart, lungs, blood and once in the blood, it goes everywhere in your body. When you smoke you don’t just mess up your lungs; you are destroying your entire body from the inside out.
If it was a habit, ex-smokers that did not have a puff for years will never see them relapsing in seconds in front of you, usually after a stressful event.
Smoking doesn’t help you deal with stress.
Smoking doesn’t help you at all in managing your stress, it’s simply not true. The only thing smoking does is to raise back up your blood nicotine levels in your body, when they drop below a certain threshold.
When that happens you need to smoke to get them up again. That’s what a drug addict does and just because nicotine is still legally free to be sold in every corner of this planet doesn’t mean it’s not a deadly drug like the rest of the illegal drugs like meth, cocaine, heroin and others.
Nicotine addiction kills millions every year around the planet.
Nicotine addiction kills more people worldwide than all the illicit drugs and global wars combined!!! Think about that for a moment. Let me repeat it so you get an idea of what an actual epidemic Nicotine addiction is. They say A.I.D.S. is an epidemic; A.I.D.S. is a dwarf compare to Nicotine addiction. I am repeating, smoking kills more people on the planet every year than all the wars and illegal drugs combined!
Be patient I am getting there.
You are thinking, you haven’t told us the way to quit smoking yet. Don’t worry I will, just be patient; you need to start learning to be patient, all these years of smoking made you the exact opposite of patient, you know why? Because nicotine sets your body to a condition called flee or fight mode.
Flee or fight mode.
When we were living thousands of years ago in the caves, running around half naked trying to find food to survive and make it through the next day intact we were often faced with the very stressful situation of fleeing or fight.
Flee or fight situation.
The brain will send more blood to our extremities (legs and hands) preparing us to escape in case a big ass tiger or a lion came to eat us or stand our ground and fight when another human came to take our food, our woman or whatever else he fancied.
In this situation, the heart rate is increased to send the necessary blood to the body and usually, after we either fled or fight our brain would reward us with nice happy hormones like dopamine and also our heart rate will go back to normal.
Nicotine increases our heart rate by 17,5 beats per minute, putting us in a stressful situation of fleeing and fight as long as we continue smoking. When someone is stressful all the time!!! Guess what it lacks? Yep, you got it, it requires patience.
Start practicing patience you need it for the journey ahead.
So one of the many good things you will regain after quitting smoking is patience, and you know what they say patience is a virtue, and they are right. So if you want to stop, start practicing patience, it will help you. Trust me I know I have been there.
Also, nicotine hijacks the dopamine pathways of our brain makings the brain unable to reward us properly. Our pleasure center is so messed up we are always in a high state of alertness because of the nicotine addiction. No one can survive being alert all the time at some point the system will break down (heart attack, stroke, lung cancer, esophagus cancer, emphysema) and other.
My first attempt at quitting smoking was a disaster, and it was one of the many methods big pharmaceuticals managed to impose on the medical world and convince us that Nicotine Replacement Therapies for Smoking are a real therapy, which is not true of course.
Stay away from Nicotine Replacement Therapies.
What does NRTs replaces exactly I still don’t understand. I mean will you tell a drunk that wants to quit drinking, listen we will replace the alcohol in your blood gradually. We start you this week with five glasses of wine a day!!! And then slowly every week we will reduce the number of drinks until you set free from your alcohol addiction!!!
Any ex-alcoholic out there reading these lines just felled down on his butt laughing out loud, because they know that if you take a sip of alcohol you are back to square one. It only takes a small sip.
NO!!!, he is an alcohol addict, you are going to cut his alcohol consumption to zero, you will remove anything that reminds him of alcohol and so on.
Another example
Will you tell a heroin addict, hey listen we will start you with a few shots of heroin this week and next week we will reduce the shots of heroin you get until there are not shots left after that you be free of heroin!!! NO of course not, you don’t do that he is a heroin addict, you remove the heroin from the equation.
And another example.
Will you say to a cocaine addict that wants to stop, hey we do it gradually, you can have a few sniffs this week, and we gradually reduce the number of sniffs until there are no sniffs left!!! NO of course not he is a cocaine addict you remove the cocaine from his face and everything that has anything to do with cocaine.
Stop Cold Turkey!
This is how you quit an addiction you stop using the addictive substance that triggers it.
Why on earth should quitting smoking be any different, why on earth this planet’s medical institution’s are telling people that a very effective way to quit smoking is with the so-called Nicotine Replacement Therapies (NRT)? They are alternative ways of delivering nicotine into your body. How is that going to help me or you to quit smoking when I still take the same drug that creates the addiction.
Ask successful ex-smokers how they did it.
Listen from personal experience and from other ex-smokers I talk to, nicotine patches, gum, sprays or whatever other approved by the FDA or not approved by the FDA(electronic cig, vapers and so on) nicotine delivery devices the only thing they achieve is keeping you hooked on nicotine.
The only thing they do is switching between the way the nicotine is delivered to your body, from cigarettes to gums, patches and so on. The addiction never leaves your body you are still a prisoner of nicotine!
The only thing you achieve is instead of giving your hard earned money to BIG-TOBBACO you are giving them to BIG-PHARMA while still being under the deadly influence of nicotine.
I hope I helped.
I hope with all the info I gave you that you realized that the only way for you to increase your chances of quitting smoking and never have another puff again in your life is to go Cold Turkey.
This is the method I used seven years ago to become from a drug addict to a recovering ex-drug addict.
It only takes one puff to become a nicotine addict again, don’t kid yourself.
Cold Turkey is the method the body wants.
This method is the method the body naturally is doing every day and allows you to continue smoking. Every day this marvelous, incredible machine that holds our psyche and our spirit is removing the toxins that we put into our bodies.
It removes nicotine every day through our urine, that’s why you need to smoke so you will recover the lost nicotine. If you stop taking nicotine either from smoking or the other nicotine replacement so-called therapies, the body will remove the bulk of the nicotine inside you in 72 hours and will eradicate all of it in 2 weeks. The method I am talking about, and it’s not very well known, and it has a bad name is quitting Cold Turkey as I already mentioned above.
Easiest Cheapest way to quit.
You know it has a bad name because it’s the easiest most successful cheapest way to stop smoking. There is no BIG-MONEY in quitting cold turkey and that’s the reason it gets a bad reputation.
Quitting using Nicotine Replacements Therapies costs money and you are still a drug addict, the only thing that changes is the delivery way.
Do not fight the beast alone.
All you have to do is take it day by day. Focus on not smoking on the current day, do not worry about the future, focus on the day you are in right now. Do not think about your life without smoking that will only create unnecessary stress, just focus going through the day without taking not even one puff and at the end of the day celebrate.
When the next day comes focus on not taking another puff on this day. Do that for the first three days and resist the urges and the deprivation symptoms; you can do it if you concentrate on each day.
In two weeks you will not have a reason to smoke, the addictive powers of nicotine are not there anymore, you have physiologically no need to smoke, think about it, you don’t have to be stronger than nicotine you need to be smarter.
Learn from the masters.
I have three names for you, Allen Carr, John R. Polito and Joel Spitzer. Search for them. These three guys helped me realize what a stupid man I was for 16 years. I wish I knew about them before I quit smoking, it would be much easier if I had the knowledge these three men offered and still offering to smokers that want to stop and reclaim their life back.
Come on you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Join us, on the other side of the non-smoking world.
If you want more information about, healthy living, quitting smoking, plant-based diet, losing weight and more please visit my site and blog.
Knowledge Knows No Bounds: Join Our Cause, Donate to Our Blog Today!