Often, I find myself wondering why I make the decisions I do. What drives them? And what makes us make bad decisions? I know that I started creating my addictive personality as a teenager. At that young age, I felt invincible. And thought bad things only happened to other people.
I took up smoking at a very young age because I wanted to “fit in” with everyone else that was doing it. As if a cigarette alone would buy me friendship. What a silly thing to think! But at a young age, we all do things that might not be in our own best interest.
And once I made the decision to smoke when I was younger, I didn’t give it much thought after that. And so my addiction was built into me as my mind was still developing. Throughout my life, many of my decisions were based on this addictive personality that I created for myself.
I think a lot of us have done the same thing. Creating the addict within at an early age and somehow as we got older, it all seemed perfectly normal. As if I’d been BORN a smoker! I continued on with what I called my “habit” for thirty or forty years before I ever even entertained the thought of doing something different, and I think this has a lot to do with the fear I felt when I first thought of quitting this last time.
You see, I’d developed the addict within at a very early age. And while at that early age, I nurtured my “friend” that was always with me. I kept doing what I perceived as normal for so long, that I forgot what life was like without smoking.
Hence the panic attack when I first called the Colorado quitline. I remember calling them and when a very pleasant voice answered, I hung up! I was shaking and sweating and wondering what the heck I thought I was doing! After all, I knew that smoking was normal because as far as my addicted mind could see, I always had. It was just part of life.
Thankfully after calming down a bit, I did call the quitline back and had a very good conversation about triggers and urges, and what to do to begin to win the war with myself.
I guess my point here is that there are reasons that quitting is so hard that go beyond the physical aspect of it. It’s literally considered the “normal” part of our lives by the addicted mind. The addicted mind is very good at convincing us to continue to feed our addiction.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! We actually have to change our entire perception of what is normal in our lives when we quit. I think this is where the voices come from. Our very being doesn’t understand that what has been normal for so long no longer is, and our mind wants to understand what has changed.
There’s so much more on these thoughts, but they will have to be for another blog as I don’t want to write an entire book here.
Anyway, have a fantastic smoke free day and understand that quitting is also normal. All we have to do is convince ourselves that this is really what’s normal!!
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
Chuck
