Have you ever wondered why some people find quitting easy while others find it hard?
Why some ex-smokers are happy while others feel deprived?
What are they doing differently?
What Happy Non-Smokers Have in Common
Over the years, my team and I have interviewed thousands of smokers and ex-smokers from all over the world and from all sorts of different backgrounds to find the patterns that make people find quitting easy or hard.
And happy non-smokers who find quitting easy have 1 thing in common.
And it’s NOT:
- How much they smoke or how long they’ve been smoking
- About how much stress they have in their lives
- How much willpower they think they have
- Or their physical addiction to nicotine. Because everyone who is nicotine-free for 5 days or more, they’re done with the nicotine addiction. However, there are millions of people who relapse and crave cigarettes even after the nicotine withdrawal is over.
So what happy non-smokers have in common is that they overcame their mental addiction.
The mental addiction is how much you believe you need smoking, how it makes you feel, and how ingrained it is in your life.
So happy non-smokers break up with their cigarettes. They realize that they’re better off without smoking, and they don’t want to be limited by their addiction anymore.
Yes, they have hard moments, but they know that one cigarette equals a thousand, and it’s just not worth it for them because being addicted is not a good place to be.
3 Ways to Know if You’ll Find Quitting Easy
Let me show you 3 ways to know when you’re mentally free from smoking, and you’re going to find quitting easy.
And if you notice you’re not doing these 3 things, use this article as a guideline so you will do things differently moving forward and find quitting easy.
1. How You Handle Your Craving Voice
When you’re addicted to nicotine, or to anything, you have a craving voice. Or else, a craving mind. Think about this craving mind as a miserable and needy creature that all it wants is its precious nicotine.
And the craving mind communicates to you in the form of a thought. It’s going to tell you anything to get you to smoke!
Cravings are just positive thoughts about smoking that create positive feelings about smoking. Craving thoughts create the desire for cigarettes.
Thoughts like “I need a cigarette right now” or “a cigarette would make me feel better” or “just one puff won’t matter”. Every smoker has those craving thoughts.
But when you’re mentally free from smoking, you’re able to handle those thoughts.
And there are many ways to do that.
You can ignore them. Imagine someone is talking to you and you don’t want to hear from them. When the craving mind tells you, “You need a cigarette right now”, just ignore it, say “okay, I heard you. bye”.
Challenge those thoughts. When the craving mind tells you “I need a cigarette right now”, think to yourself, “do I really need it?”
Let the thoughts pass mindfully. Or replace them. I explain how to overcome mental cravings here.
What you don’t do when it comes to your mental cravings is act upon them or believe the craving thoughts.
Remember there is a craving mind talking to you. This gives you the power and the choice to not act upon this thought.
That’s what it feels like to find quitting easy.
And none of the common methods out there teaches you how to be mentally free from smoking or how to handle your craving voice.
That’s why if you use nicotine replacement, vaping, or pills without working on your mental dependence, you will find quitting hard.
If you go cold turkey, quit gradually, take herbs or natural remedies and you don’t work on your mental dependence, you will find quitting hard.
If you do hypnosis without consciously working on your mental dependence, you will find it hard. But if you first set your mind free from smoking, you will find quitting easy.
And when you’re no longer mentally dependent on smoking, you have no anxiety, no irritation or deprivation, and you’re not jealous of other people smoking.
Because when cigarettes are out of the question for you, the nicotine withdrawal symptoms won’t even bother you. Because the mind is free, and the mind affects the body.
Even though most people are worried about the withdrawal symptoms, the withdrawal is not worse than a common cold and can actually be good for you.
2. How You Think About Smoking
There is this misconception that being mentally free from smoking and having no desire for cigarettes means that you never think about smoking. This is not the case.
The truth is that you actually think about smoking more right after you quit because your brain is biased.
But thinking is not wanting.
What matters is how you think about smoking.
When you’re mentally addicted, and you find quitting hard, you think of smoking as something you want right now. Otherwise, something bad will happen to you.
You’re going to have a nervous breakdown, feel stressed, or be irritable.
But when you’re mentally free from smoking and find quitting easy, you see smoking as something you used to do and choose not to do it anymore.
And you see cravings as just thoughts and memories – without having the compulsion to act upon these thoughts.
In 1971 during the Vietnam War, 20% of the US soldiers were addicted to heroin. So the government created an organization called Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention to track those soldiers when they returned to the US and help them.
And what they found is that only 5% of those soldiers relapsed back to heroin within a year of coming home and 12% relapsed within three years.
So 90% of heroin addicts stopped basically overnight. No withdrawals, no deprivation. This is an incredible success rate especially, for heroin – one of the worst addictions.
How did these soldiers achieve that?
Because when they came home, they changed their environment, and their reasons for using were gone. They changed everything: how they saw their addiction, their context, their frame of mind, and their routine.
So how you see things, how you think about your addiction, will determine whether or not you find quitting easy.
3. You’re Not Using Willpower
What’s the difference between using willpower and mind power? Between willpower and overcoming the mental addiction? Like how do you know you’re not using willpower to quit smoking?
When you’re using willpower, you want to smoke, you see a benefit in smoking, but you have to deny yourself the cigarette you desire.
But when you’re mentally free from smoking, you simply say I don’t do this anymore. You talk yourself out of smoking.
When you talk yourself out of smoking, you don’t need to use any willpower to not smoke.
Because think about it. Do you need any willpower to resist eating rat poison, ammonia, or acetone?
Of course not!
Why? Because they’re harmful and disgusting chemicals.
Well, tobacco has inside arsenic that’s used in rat poison, ammonia that’s used in toilet cleaners, and acetone that we use to remove nail polish. And the only reason why you want to smoke is not to taste those chemicals. You want to smoke because you believe it offers you something. That’s the mental addiction.
So when you see smoking for the poison it is, a sum of chemicals, you don’t want it anymore. So you don’t need to use willpower to resist it because there’s nothing to resist.
To Sum Up
Why some people find quitting easy while others find it hard is because those who find it easy overcome their mental addiction.
And you know you’re done with the mental addiction…:
- from the way you handle your craving voice.
- because of how you think about smoking.
- and because you’re not using willpower. Instead, you talk yourself out of smoking.
So I hope this was helpful and showed you a way to move forward.
As I mentioned before, we interviewed thousands of smokers and ex-smokers, so we took what the people who quit happily and successfully did right, and put it in a method that everyone can use to quit easily.
That method is the CBQ method. Over the last decade, the CBQ Method has reached and helped millions of smokers all over the world. It’s the same method I talk about in my TED talk, and it helps you overcome the mental addiction and find quitting easy because you take control of your mind.
The best way to get started with the CBQ Method and learn how it can help you quit smoking, is to get the CBQ foundational video.
The foundational video gives you an overview of your quit smoking journey from start to finish. So this is for you if you’re just starting your quit and need a plan or if you have already quit and want to stay on track.
Get the Foundational video of the CBQ Method here.
And if you want more support and great quit smoking tips, you can join the CBQ Method Facebook support group. The CBQ Facebook community has thousands of amazing members who are on the same journey as you. And my team and I post tips every day to help you quit smoking and remain smoke-free. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Join the support group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cbqmethod/
