Good day all
I was just thinking about that time when I was totally addicted to those darn cigarettes. They were everything to me. A plant that was controlling me, although that plant had a little help from the manufacturer of cigarettes.
But one thing always comes to mind when I think of my past struggles with my addiction. It was how I associated stress with smoking. Somehow, I’d decided that I couldn’t deal with stress anymore without cigarettes. Like they somehow magically made the stress go away.
Sure, I felt better after smoking. An addict always feels better after feeding the addiction, but somehow my addicted brain decided that I could more easily deal with stress by smoking. Another way that the tentacles of addiction snake themselves into our beings.
And I was totally convinced that the cigarette helped me cope with the everyday stresses in my life. I now know that this was a false reality crafted by an addicted mind to understand why I smoke even when I know that every single one is killing me. But there was comfort in the knowledge that when things stressed me out, I had a mechanism to make that moment in my life better so long as I could get somewhere where I could smoke.
When I decided to quit, the fear of that thought just made me want to smoke. I wondered how I could deal with life stresses without doing what I’ve always done. In the end I had to realize that quitting is very much about change, and accepting that even though it might not make sense right now, this change was for the better.
The moment I thought about dealing with stress without the cigarette, I felt fear. Fear was one of the number one weapons that my addiction had over me and I knew that I had to get over this if I was going to succeed.
I thought about those moments when I would always reach for the cigarette. Since I was dealing with change, I knew I had to find some kind of way to do something different. For me, the answer was straws. I know, it seems odd to decide that straws could change my thinking but the reality is that it didn’t change my thinking that much. I just had to have something else to reach for in those moments of stress. Something that won’t kill me.
And you know what? Over time I realized that these straws weren’t really doing anything to help my stress just like the cigarettes weren’t helping me. I learned to accept this change simply by changing up what I always did before.
Change always seems scary but it doesn’t have to be so long as we prepare for it. So long as we think of new ways to accept that things are different. This is how we pull the tentacles of addiction out of ourselves.
It’s within all of us to find new ways to do things. New ways to look at things. We just have to get past the fear of change and try and soon, what used to be scary becomes our new normal and suddenly change is no longer so scary. No, it’s just a little bump in the road and a chance to learn new things!
Go for it! Find that new life that’s waiting for you. It’s such a peaceful life once you do. And not only that. The things we have to learn to quit smoking are things that will help us in other ways for the rest of our lives. And if you think about it, freedom is always worth a fight.
ONWARD TO FREEDOM!!!
Chuck
