It’s not. But it IS your sucker, your binkie. YOU are it’s sucker in the sense you’ve been duped into believing cigarettes are going to give you comfort, relieve your stress, your sorrow, your hurting.
Smoking does none of that. It does one thing only - it relieves the next craving. Which IT, itself, created in you. Think about it. Before you ever smoked - you never needed one. I don’t care if you were 12 when you started smoking, you got through your 11th year and all the heartache and angst, and pressure and sorrow and anger and whatever else was going on with you at that emotional age and there wasn’t a thought of a cigarette, was there? You survived it all - without a cigarette.
Then you made that one fatal mistake, that every one of us on this site has made - we took that one puff. And continued on for a lifetime.
My point is, you don’t NEED a cigarette, a chaw, a pipe - to get you through the next emotional crisis, moment of boredom or celebratory instant. You don’t smoke because of that. You smoke because you’re addicted to everything that smoking, chewing, piping has been ingrained in you by doing it year after year and connecting it emotionally to “relief.” By the behavioral programming of it. The truth is that the only relief offered is the relief of the next craving. When you understand that, when you “get it” in your bones - you won’t allow any emotional excuses. You won’t allow any excuses at all. And THEN you will be on your way to a long-term quit.
If you want to quit and remain so - there can be no excuse that will turn you back to another Day One.
