Do you want to quit smoking? When you have finished reading this article you will be ready to give up your habit (PHOTO)

Do you want to quit smoking? When you have finished reading this article you will be ready to give up your habit (PHOTO)
Do you want to quit smoking? When you have finished reading this article you will be ready to give up your habit (PHOTO)
 August 15, 2019


"I liked smoking. Or at least, I thought I liked it. Being a doctor I know the dangers, but never have they been an incentive to quit. If you simply know the risks of smoking, no doctor or nurse would ever light a cigarette. it is not". Speaking of which is Dr. Max Pemberton, who suggests some simple and effective ways to quit smoking at DailyMail . And he does it by telling his personal experience as a smoker.

"At 20 years - he writes - I thought that one day I would stop for sure. Then my thirtieth birthday arrived and I realized that if I had not made an effort I would have smoked until my death. Yet the thought of quitting saddened me. Then one day While I was going to work, I thought of my uncle and my grandfather who had recently died of cancer and how worried my mother was about my smoking habit. I needed to make sure I loved smoking enough to accept that I could die for him.

Then I activated myself. Taking advantage of my experience of working with drugs, I developed a system based on cognitive behavior therapy to change my habits and those of my patients. This therapy invites first of all to examine some aspects of life that create hardships or difficulties, to face them and overcome them ".

Here are some of the exercises that help you begin to rethink your relationship with smoking.

Exercise No. 1
Write a list of things you love about smoking and why. You need to understand what cigarettes actually can give you. Does smoking make you more confident? More relaxed? What do you think smoke is giving you? After all, he has to give you something, otherwise why do you do it?

Exercise No. 2
Now write a list of what stops you from quitting. It may be more difficult than it looks. In fact, smoking is something you do without realizing it and it's easy to create false myths about why you do it. What are the real obstacles to your ability to quit? What are you afraid of? Make a list that you can edit, adding your motifs from time to time.

Exercise No. 3
Now I want you to make a list of what smoking would do to you. Are there any benefits? Why don't you smoke? Why try to quit? Even if you don't realize it, what you wrote in list number 1 is an illusion. What should be the reasons why you smoke really are not real reasons. It's just a way to justify something that really doesn't make much sense. We all know that smoking hurts; that smoking is expensive and causes death and cancer. We know it and we know that we should immediately stop. But we don't. In psychology this phenomenon is called cognitive dissonance: each of the rational reasons we give to justify our vice does not have a logical basis. For example, it is not true that nicotine alleviates stress. In reverse, increases blood pressure and heart rate. It does not relax us at all; at most, it makes us less bored.

Exercise No. 4
Now imagine you are a lawyer defending the cause of smoking and those who want to continue smoking. You have lists number 1 and 2 and you have to convince the judges with them, using effective and convincing sentences, playing on their sensitivity. Now imagine you're the prosecutor's lawyer. And having to convince the judges by taking into account the list made for exercise # 3, emphasizing how to continue smoking and nonsense. Who's right? This last exercise serves to make you understand what happens inside a smoker's head. And it serves above all to observe the situation with objective eyes. This distance is what you need to proceed.
Being a smoker has been a positive experience, because every time I am in front of something discouraging, so I find myself questioning my abilities, I think of this result that I got by working with my mind.

This path has given me confidence. Now trust me and try to stop: it's the best thing you can do