Addiction – An Unconscious Signal of Not Being in Control
If you’re substance-addicted, this may be accompanied or caused by the inability to fulfill a number of of your deepest desires. Although unconscious of it, you might have this idea that there’s a power away from control that stops you against achieving your dreams, big or small.You may even admit self-defeat by maintaining the belief that it is only too hard for you to give up old habits like smoking, drinking alcohol or eating addictive foods.
Many smokers reason that they can’t stop smoking if they constantly see others smoking. Others should not face the possibly unbearable withdrawal symptoms that usually accompany a sudden abstinence from smoking. Quite a lot of people managed to quit smoking, however when they suddenly put on lots of weight, they resumed the habit of smoking.
Most smokers who would like to end their addiction believe they don’t have enough willpower to prevent smoking. How come we giving a small cigarette such great energy that with the ability to rule over our freedom to make conscious choices in our life? Smoking, like any other addictive habit, is just an indicator of an underlying void or lack of some sort. What’s really missing in our lives that people continue to desire substitutes? This question doesn’t seem possible to reply to in this context as a result of vast number of possible answers, a few of which may only be known through the addict himself. However the need to smoke can become very useful in as much as it can reveal and actually overcome this inner lack, whatever it may be.
Rather than criticizing or judging yourself for giving your capacity to a habit that has the possibility to make you ill or kill you, you can learn a great deal from this making yourself feel complete again. Because you may not be in a position to understand the underlying message that smoking entails, you often resign yourself to the expectation that quitting the habit is a difficult and frustrating task. Yet smoking will make you conscious that you’re no more completely in control of your life, as well as provide you with a method to reclaim that control.
The excuse “I cannot quit smoking because…” is an unconscious recognition that i’m a victim of some kind, and i also am suffering from low self-worth. There is a a part of me that I consider weak and inadequate. Part of me isn’t alive and well. The action of smoking makes me admit in a manner that my desire to have a cigarette is more than my desire to remain healthy or, in other words, to like myself. It’s very difficult to quit smoking or other addictions for as long as I preserve this underlying weakness, projected by such exclamations as “I can’t provide up” or “I add too much if I do not have my cigarettes”.
Learning to Recover Your Freedom
Similar to using a thorn to pull out another thorn, learning to quit cigarette smoking generally is one of the very best methods to uproot any underlying incompetence and dependency in your lifetime. By suppressing or fighting the habitual desire to smoke, you merely feed it with increased of your own energies. All of this but boosts the addiction. Desires desire to be fulfilled, or at least you should be in a position to decide whether we want to fulfill them or otherwise. The dependence on smoking, which reflects an absence in inner competence and completeness, can in fact be a very effective approach to fill you up again and regain conscious treatments for your life. What am i saying, you’ll ask. Smoking isn’t the problem you have to combat. Just seeing smoking as an addiction that may have horrible consequences is a depressing notion, and fighting it does not lift up your self-esteem. Even though you succeed in quitting this habit, you still haven’t regained your inner feeling of freedom and are prone to develop a dependancy to something else, like eating sweets, alcohol consumption or making love. Instead of waging a war against nervousness or poor self-confidence, all that you should do is increase that feeling of inner freedom to make your own choices in everyday life.
If understood and handled properly, smoking may be one of the most crucial stuff that has ever happened for you. It can lead you to adopt a completely new way of thinking, thus reshaping your destiny. If you are a smoker and also quit the habit of smoking, you first need to understand that your addiction is not an accidental mistake you made during your lower moments in everyday life. You have created this habit to not suffer because of it, but to understand from this. It is likely to stay with you or change into another addictive habit until on that day when you will have acquired the ability to refer all power of fulfilling your desires back to yourself. Quitting smoking isn’t about quitting one addictive habit simply to adopt a different one; it is about recovering your feeling of free will.
To use one’s willpower to fight an unhealthy habit is defeating its purpose and likely to backfire because fighting something is dependant on the premise that you are being attacked or perhaps in some sort of danger. Using what we all know today concerning the powerful mind/body connection, the worry that underlies fighting against a dependancy is enough to keep your cells of the body jittery, anxious and dysfunctional. They are able to never find the peace, balance, and energy they require to become ‘happy’ cells provided the fear of not being in charge prevails in the awareness of their master. The enzyme-based messages that cells are sending towards the brain and heart are pretty straight forward cries for help. The host interprets these signals, though, as depression and nervousness. To ‘overcome’ the discomfort, at least for a few moments, the host feels compelled to grab the next cigarette or search for another drink. Each time the discomfort reemerges, she or he feels defeated and weakened, so the addiction continues.
True willpower, however, is about finding out how to make conscious choices. Addictions stick like glue to everyone who wishes to overcome them. Those are the ‘ghosts of memory’ who live in our subconscious and appear each time the addictive substance is in sight or perhaps is imagined. The following urge isn’t under conscious control, hence the feeling of ‘dying’ for a cigarette, coffee, or a bar of chocolate. It is important, though, to realize that you simply always have a choice. This is all that you should learn when it comes to overcoming a dependancy.
You cannot successfully exorcise the ghost of memory by throwing away your cigarettes, avoiding your smoking friends, or living in a smoke-free environment. Society has condemned the action of smoking a lot that many smokers already feel missing out on that feeling of personal freedom they need to feel to make their very own choices in everyday life. If you are a sensitive person, be aware that a nagging spouse, a doctor, and the warning written on cigarette packs that smoking hurts to your health could make you feel ridden with guilt. When all of this external pressure succeeds in making you give up smoking, you will keep to feel deprived of your freedom and, therefore, search for other more socially acceptable forms of addiction.
Making Smoking a Conscious Choice
All of us remember our childhood days when our parents told us not to eat chocolate before lunch or wouldn’t let us view television when we wanted. The subconscious reacts negatively when it is missing out on its ability to make choices or when it feels instructed to make a move against its will. Disappointments resulting from the inability to fulfill one’s desires can also add up and result in an inner emptiness that wants to be filled. Smoking is only a subconscious rebellion against the external manipulation in our freedom to select what we should want, and it appears to fill that uncomfortable space within, at least for a short while. However, this inner lack can only subside permanently whenever we have regained the freedom to make our very own choices. You must know that you are liberated to smoke if you like so that as often you like. If you have a cigarette along with a match to light it, you’ll certainly find a way to smoke it, too.
The unconscious association of smoking, with all the other ‘don’ts’ in your past, will be negated by accepting your need to smoke. I had my first cigarette after i entered high school at age ten. I felt like a criminal since the law said I had been only allowed to smoke when I was sixteen years old. My parents were certainly strictly against smoking. Many years of hiding my ‘secret’ from my parents and my teachers left me without any other choice but to continue smoking until I felt I’d an option. After i finally got the legal permission to smoke, I lost interest and chose to quit. I was capable of giving up the habit at once, with no withdrawal symptoms.
The foremost and first thing to do to quit smoking would be to have permission to smoke. Guilt in the act of smoking will only stop you from gaining satisfaction and urge you to definitely have another cigarette that could ‘at last’ provide you with what you have been looking for. But you are not really searching for the short sensation of satisfaction that smoking provides as well as the lost freedom to create your personal choices in life. By trying to avoid lighting up, additionally you deprive yourself of the potential satisfaction. The resistance to smoking creates powerful psychosomatic negative effects. They are known as withdrawal symptoms. Symptoms may include depression, lack of interest in life, sleeplessness, anger, nausea, ravenous hunger, obesity, coronary disease, lack of concentration, and shaking. However, these symptoms are only able to manifest if you believe that you have been deprived of your freedom to smoke.
Choosing To Smoke Less, But…
Don’t fight your need to smoke. Contrary to general belief, to give up smoking you don’t need to abolish your need to smoke. You will start stopping smoking automatically when you not follow your need to smoke every time you have it (the desire to smoke).This will take the fuel out of your subconscious, rebellious mind and prevent you lacking becoming a victim of external forces, situations or people. A master of yourself, you can choose to smoke or choose not to smoke. Keep the cigarettes with you so long as you feel you need to have this choice. It might be also a good idea to encourage your desire to smoke by keeping your cigarette pack before you, smelling it from time to time. Watch others who are around you illuminate and inhale, imagining that you simply inhale deeply too. Don’t count the times that pass without you smoking and don’t look ahead over time either. You neither have to prove to yourself nor to anyone else that you could beat this addiction. Actually, you won’t want to beat it whatsoever. You want to benefit from it. You’re neither a much better person if you quit, nor are you a worse person if you do not. You are liberated to stop smoking today and start again tomorrow. You will always have this choice, and you will continually be only a puff from as being a smoker, just like the rest of us.
The option of using and training your free will has to be made in the ever-present moment, right now, and has to be done anew repeatedly many times every day. The longer the amounts of time and you actualize your decision not to smoke, the greater quickly diminishes your urge to smoke, becoming less intense each day. Whenever the desire to smoke returns, which is possible because the ghost of memory doesn’t just leave your subconscious overnight, you are once more compelled to make a new choice. This time around, however, your conscious mind finds it much easier to stay using its previous successful choice because of the newly improved self-confidence and self-esteem. Setbacks don’t appear in the program; only exercising your freedom of choice does. One of the ways or even the other, you’re in charge.
The conscious retraining of the mind may benefit your whole life. It’ll restore your power of utilizing your free will and take away the ‘victim’ inside you. Since you have been told so often in your life that you cannot do this or cannot do that, you commenced to use this belief dogma to simply accept your addiction as being too hard to quit. By reclaiming your power of creating conscious choices you’ll be able to interrupt the self-fulfilling ‘I can’t’ pattern in your life permanently. This will be a great asset in each and every part of your life.
Ending the Addiction
Before you decide to stop smoking (or other addiction), make sure that you understand the following points:
Make ending your addiction a priority in your lifetime.
Don’t attempt to make a lot of other alterations in your life at the same time.
Don’t reward yourself for ending the habit of smoking; quitting is enough of a reward.
It is good to not tell anyone about your intention to prevent smoking as this only undermines your freedom to select to smoke.
Carry your cigarettes or tobacco with you, so you can choose to smoke whenever you decide to. Also, individuals will assume you’re still smoking; by doing this you don’t have to convince anyone that you’re able to quitting the habit of smoking.
Unless for your health, do not attempt to prevent places where other people smoke; you want to remain in charge under all circumstances.
Realize that unless you are traveling on an airplane or a bus you are always liberated to smoke whenever you wish to, even if you need to do it out within the cold air.
Avoid substituting such things as tea, coffee, chocolate, gum, more exercise, drinking mineral water, etc. for cigarettes, because they won’t match your need to smoke in the long run.
Choose a starting duration of your program to prevent smoking that does not coincide with an emotional upheaval or stressful situation. It is advisable to link the starting date having a positive event in your life. New moon day is among the best days to begin quitting.
Think about all the benefits that will come your way when you stop smoking, i.e., better health, less discharge of mucus from the lungs, cleaner breath, saving cash, etc.
Acknowledge your desire to smoke when it comes up by telling yourself: “I really have the desire to smoke now and I you can achieve this, but right now I decide not to smoke.” When the desire to smoke returns in an hour, you may decide to fulfill it this time around. This can teach you to consciously accept your desire to smoke, although not always fulfill it. By choosing to not smoke each time the desire emerges, you train your mind to make conscious choices.
Often, your desire to smoke is along with clues like drinking a cup of coffee, the ringing from the telephone, waiting for a bus or a taxi, or switching on the tv. Your addiction is really a ‘program’ you have designed in your subconscious mind and associated with such clues. As the clues occur, your desire to smoke pops up, too. The next time you need to smoke when the telephone rings, as you drink a cup of coffee, or after you switch on the television, result in the conscious option to wait for a few minutes til you have time or chance to smoke consciously. Another suggestion would be to smoke somewhere in the house or garden in which you usually don’t smoke. This will sever the ties to your subconscious making your decision whether or not to smoke or otherwise a far more conscious one.
Allow your need to smoke to become quite strong before you actually take the cigarette; in other words, you still possess the freedom to smoke but postpone your final decision for a while before you really feel the discomfort. Notice where in your body you are feeling tense, irritable or nervous. It is important to feel how strong your desire to smoke becomes before you illuminate. Most smokers give into the slightest urge to smoke and do not even notice once they light up. You need to break the pattern of doing things unconsciously.
To help you to stop smoking (or any other addiction), drink half a glass (or more) of water (at room temperature) before you choose to smoke a cigarette every time you will find the urge to smoke. Physically speaking, the urge to smoke is directly associated with toxins which were deposited in the connective tissues of the body and therefore are now entering the blood, increasing blood thickness. The thickening of blood generally causes irritation, nervousness and anxiety, even panic. Instead of pushing the toxins back into the connective tissues (as they will surely reemerge) drinking a glass of water will make your blood thinner, which supports to get rid of toxins from the body. Thus, the urge to smoke lessens any time you do this and eventually disappears altogether.
Finally, your dependence on smoking isn’t something terrible you need to eliminate. It is rather an opportunity to train yourself to get to be the master of the destiny. Within this sense, your addiction may become one of the very best teachers you have ever had.
Introduction to the strategy to prevent Smoking:
Whenever you feel the need to smoke, repeat to yourself: “I want to smoke now.” This can bring your desire to smoke out of your subconscious to your conscious mind and permit you sufficient time for you to result in the conscious choice of whether to smoke or not to smoke. Drinking half a glass of water also brings the desire into your conscious mind.
Then say to yourself:”I have the free choice to smoke now.” If you do not remind yourself of your inherent freedom of making choices, your subconscious, addicted mind may think that you cannot smoke anymore and could go into a state of rebellion. This might cause withdrawal symptoms.
If you feel a desperate have to smoke, acknowledge your desire by saying:”I choose to begin smoking again.” Before you reach for any cigarette check whether this is what you want. Or you may repeat to yourself: “For as soon as I accept that I wish to smoke, however i choose not to at the moment.” Consider how you would feel if you stopped smoking altogether.
Follow this straightforward sequence each time you have the desire to smoke. The technique is fool proof since you cannot fail, regardless of the outcome. Whether you choose to continue smoking or not, you have begun to become ‘aware’ and exercised your free will – a prerequisite to consciously taking control in your life. The majority of people who follow this simple program give up smoking within one week, others take some longer. Just how long it takes to quit is not important. What is important, though, is you experience a major positive shift in your thinking and in your attitude towards yourself and others.
All the research studies which reveal that smoking is really a hazard to your health have missed the point. Instead of condemning those that smoke, we should show them ways to learn from this addictive habit once we can learn from every other problem in life.
This technique works equally well for just about any other addiction, including coffee, alcohol, drugs, sleeping pills, sugar, salt, sex, and even work. I would recommend that you read this section as frequently because it takes to understand the major points, or at least once per week.