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Elements Of A Smoking Habit
Let's pretend you wanted form a habit. And not just some wimpy habit, but a major, mind controlling, and life changing habit behavior. Where do you start to make it a really strong habit that will feel impossible to break? There are three basic ways we learn habits; emotions, authority figures, and repetition.
Let’s pretend you wanted form a habit. And not just some wimpy habit, but a major, mind controlling, and life changing habit behavior. Where do you start to make it a really strong habit that will feel impossible to break? There are three basic ways we learn habits; emotions, authority figures, and repetition.
An example will help explain this.
We need a person to use for our example. Let’s use you, when you were 10 to 14 years old. For the sake of discussion, let’s use the smoking habit. Ok?
While in that age range, we’ll assume you were learning about life and how you fit in it. You may not have felt as sure about yourself as you would later in life.
You may have felt self-conscious, dependant on others, powerless, not good enough, or just not as capable as you would have liked to feel. Let’s call this feeling “bad”. Now, this doesn’t mean you felt miserable, but, did you feel as “good” as you wanted to feel? Did you feel as “good” as you believed other people felt?
Feeling like that would lead you to wanting to feel better, or, as good as everyone else. What ways does your mind see to do this?? That matters upon what learning situations you’ve been exposed to.
Experiences that teach you smoking is strong, capable, tough, independent, self-assured, unique, and feels “good”. Experiences that involve emotions, authority figures and repetition. Of course advertisements do this, so do parents and family members. Are these experiences repeated? Of course.
This would create a desire (craving) in you to do this thing. A belief that smoking is what your life is missing. And not just in a “knowing” way, but a “feeling” way as well, which is much more powerful.
Then at some point you tried your first cigarette, and DID feel better. But you were not very good at smoking yet and since it made you feel better, you practiced it until you were good at it.
Time passes and you continue to reinforce the emotional associations with your triggers. If you feel tired, stressed or angry, you want to smoke to get that refreshing “ahhhh” feeling.
A lot of people working to quit smoking have thought of these things. A lot have not. But, all of the people that have tried to quit smoking have used a lot of time thinking and analyzing their habit. Trying to argue themselves into quitting. But, you didn’t learn this habit by thinking and analyzing. Why would trying to quit smoking that way work?
It makes a whole lot of sense to quit smoking using the same methods you started smoking with. A “hypnotized” state of mind combined with emotions, authority figures and repetition. Also known as: modern hypnosis.