Quitting smoking in the raw present.

Are you plagued by the cruel dichotomy of wanting to healthily quit tobacco-smoking whilst genuinely enjoying the act in itself (it HAS been a human pastime since we started recording time after-and-before-all!)? If so, take some time to examine the subjective psychological struts that prop up your own dependence on nicotine and see if you can’t kick a few out – are you holding onto that time when yourself or someone you may hold closer told you it was cool to smoke, and if so is that serving any purpose today other than the maintenance of your fiendish habit?… Alan Watts used to talk about an idea that; as children, we played a game with ourselves whereby the object was to elongate the amount of time before the commencement of any desired activity (“putting something off”) – whether it be eating sweets or going to the park after you’ve tidied your room, it was always sweeter or more enchanting if one had forced oneself to WAIT beforehand.
When this logic, then, is transposed back onto the abstaining from the deadly brown leaf, you can passively (and therefore quite easily) recapture the feel that it is you who are, psychologically speaking, in control of the decision/impulse to smoke or ‘the smoker’ – and from that perspective (alone) should you decide to quit – if that’s what you want to do. THE FOLLOWING should be on the bottom-front-and-back of fag packets (aren’t YOU sick of the impotent scaremongering on ’em currently?!): “If you want to get MORE ENJOYMENT/FLAVOUR out of your lovely delicious cigarettes, put them off, smoking less often and therefore giving your lungs a well needed chance to rebuild!” but alas, all we have at the moment are pictures of dead folk to show us just how resolutely and roundly DEAD we will be if we carry on – like some inane photographic old wives’ tale!
It’s as simple as, when you want a cigarette, really zone in on that pulling part of your psyche that seems to implore that you have one and open up a conversation with it – it’s a bit of you! Ask yourself questions like “how long, I wonder, does one of my cravings really last?” and observe the answer to your own question – watch the craving end! THEN review if you really do want a cigarette. It is hard but you’ll start to see that YOU are the master of the whole game – YOU are “the smoker”! Right that’s all for now, I’m just off to have a tasty stick of smouldering hypocrisy…