Smoking was cool. My friends did it, my parents did it, the coolest celebrities did it. That’s why I started smoking.
I kept smoking because everyone else around me smoked. When you start smoking as a teenager, you tend to become friends with other smokers as you move through school and on to work. In high school, college, and at all my jobs, I only became friends with smokers because we all hung out together desperately trying to get a few cigarettes in before we have to back to class or work.
But then one day it became uncool. I was feeling sick and coughing all the time. Fewer people were smoking. And I got to an age where I realized I wasn’t invincible and would die sooner than later if I kept smoking.
Everyone who smokes knows that it’s bad for them. That’s why when it became mandatory to disclose the dangers of smoking on the packages, nobody cared. We already knew that, so it didn’t bother us.
I used to smoke Avanti cigarettes. I thought they made me look so cool. The package I remember looked like this.
I didn’t give a crap about the message. I paid attention to the color of the box, the shape of it, and what was inside of it.
The problem was that I was heavily brainwashed (by cigarette companies and everyone who believed their messages) to believe that smoking was doing me more favors than not, so I didn’t care if there was the possibility I could get cancer from smoking.
Besides being cool, look at all of the amazing things that smoking was doing for me!
- Smoking helped me relax (and gave me energy).
- Smoking helped me focus (and give me a break from focusing).
- Smoking helped me deal with crap (and avoid it).
- Smoking helped me have fun (and soothe me when I was feeling depressed).
- Smoking helped me wake up (and helped me go to sleep).
- Smoking helped me avoid hunger (and stimulate my appetite).
Do you see the contradictions?
I believed that cigarettes were doing EVERYTHING for me from helping me wake up to putting me to sleep and everything in between.
But that’s impossible.
Taking a drag from a cigarette and ingesting the toxins doesn’t make you capable of doing all those things.
It’s just something that stands in the way of you being about to all of all those things.
The Thing I Realized About Smoking
Smoking was standing in the way of doing all the things I wanted to do with complete freedom.
- Before I could relax, I needed to smoke.
- Before I could feel energized, I needed to smoke.
- Before I could focus, I needed to smoke.
- Before I could deal with anything in life, I needed a smoke.
- Before I could have fun, I needed a smoke.
- Before I could deal with my emotions, I needed a smoke.
- Before I could eat, I needed a smoke.
- Before I could go into any building, I needed a cigarette.
- Before I could go on a flight, I needed five cigarettes and I wasn’t even sure I would be able to sit on a plane for five hours without having a cigarette.
Before I could do anything else, I needed to fill my body up with nicotine and keep it filled so I could stop focusing on that need. That need to ingest nicotine was standing in the way of doing anything else with complete freedom.
That’s what addiction is.
That’s what cigarette companies want you to experience.
That’s what keeps you going back to cigarettes again and again and again.
All you need to do is remove the need for nicotine in your body, and then you can do all those things without needing to have a cigarette first or at all.
In order to do that, you can’t chew nicotine gum or put on the patch. Those are just more ways for the industry to make money off you.
You need to stop giving your body nicotine so that the dependency on it wears off and you become free to live your life on your own terms.
If you want to say that you are truly someone who is free to make their own choices in life, then stop filling yourself up with nicotine. Stop letting cigarette companies control your life. Let the nicotine drain out and stop being a slave to its demands.
In order to do that, you need to change how you feel about smoking. I just gave you one different way of looking at smoking, and here are some other affirmations to help you quit smoking.
