The first thing to do is choose a day to stop and write it in your calendar the night before
What’s Your Reason?
If you are going to be successful at stopping smoking you need to get 100% clear on why you are doing it, you need to know exactly what you are going to gain by not smoking anymore. The first thing to realise is that these need to be your reasons if you want to stop for your kids or your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, pet cat, whoever it’s just not going to work you might even start to resent the person you are trying to stop for. YOU NEED TO WANT TO STOP FOR YOU!!!
Get a pen and a piece of paper and write down all the reasons you want to stop smoking, and then go through the reasons and find the three reasons that are most important to you, once you have those reasons write them on post-it notes and stick them were you will see them that could be on your fridge or bedroom door, it could be all over your house and car, the more places you stick those post-it notes the better!
What Will You Have As A Non-Smoker?
What will you be doing differently as a non-smoker? What will you gain by stopping smoking? How much more money will you have? How much do you spend a month, a week, a year on cigarettes? Write it all down, work out what you will save and what you will buy with the extra money?
Watch Your Language
Yoda says, “either do or do not, there is no try” or something like that. If you try to do something you are presupposing failure if a friend asks you to do something for them and you don’t want to be blunt or offend them by just saying no what do you say? You say I’ll try and then when you don’t what they asked you have a get-out clause right? You say, “I am sorry but I tried”. So if you are trying to give up smoking you are doomed to fail. Try implies failure give up suggests you have something to lose, quit is another bad word, it has a go at something and then gives up halfway through what do we say? We say they are a quitter right? If you are trying to quit or trying to give up you are setting yourself up for failure.
Become A Non-Smoker
Say, I am a non-smoker. A non-smoker is someone who doesn’t smoke, not someone who used to smoke, not someone who is trying to be an ex-smoker, if you become a non-smoker you will be firmly on the road to success.
Identify Your Triggers
As mentioned above smoking is a habitual addiction with triggers and associations, what are the times of day when you smoke, do you smoke with coffee, after meals? When do you smoke the most? Identify when you smoke the most and change your behaviour around that time so you break up that pattern. If you old pattern was to get up, eat breakfast, drink a coffee and have a cigarette then shower and brush your teeth change it around so you shower and brush your teeth as soon as you get out of bed. Many people find alcohol to be a major trigger so you may want to avoid it completely for a month or two.
Get a hobby, take up a new hobby, something that you have never done before and don’t associate with smoking, many people do something to occupy their hands like knitting.
I hope you like these tips and found them useful, you can also find my stop smoking hypnosis recording on my YouTube channel, I would recommend you listen to it a few times before your stop day.
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