Stop Smoking Tip

Internal conversations we have with ourselves

People will almost never exchange present discomfort for possible future comfort-and there's another reason for continuing to smoke. Why be nervous and tense today? Who cares about what happens twenty years from now? Heck, in ten years the bombs may fall and kill us all! Anyhow, you have to die of something. Why not have some fun today?

All those were typical rebuttals of mine-and here are some of the other points I used to tick off in my mind after something or someone had challenged my smoking:

Point1: Tension is a bad thing, and is known to be responsible for physiological damage. It contributes to heart ailments. It can cause ulcers. A cigarette, on the other hand, seems to relax people. When a man is faced with a decision, when a woman is caught up in a whirl of nervousness, a pause for a drag seems to have a reliably relaxing effect. The "butterflies-in-the-stomach" kind of anxiety which people experience in social or business situations is frequently eliminated or at least subdued by taking a puff on a cigarette. In other words, it's like a sort of drugless tranquilizer. A good thing- score one for this 'unhealthy habit'.

Point2: Besides, there are now good filter cigarettes. Some of that "health propaganda" may be accurate, and perhaps a number of people can be harmed by cigarette smoke, or are allergic to it-but fortunately, there are now cigarettes, which filter out many of the possibly harmful irritants. The new filters are quite advanced, and in some vague way are similar in content and efficiency to the filters utilized on airplanes and in the production of atomic energy; in other words, able to filter almost anything out of anything.

Point3: Furthermore, practically everybody smokes. For every ten adults you know, you can think of six or seven or eight who smoke. You can think of athletes and coaches and actors who have this 'bad habit' (and you don't see them dying all over the place, do you?). People "in the know"-statesmen and politicians and newspaper editors seen on television-also have this habit. You can even name doctors who smoke! If they were really so concerned, wouldn't they just use a little will power or self-control and stop? Yes. Obviously then, they realize that there's a mighty difference between dropping tars from a cigarette on the shaved back of a rat and inhaling a pack of cigarettes a day.

If you look back over these fairly typical responses, you'll see how nicely they cloud the issues. Even I used to have to laugh at my own excuses for continuing to smoke, and even I was amused at the fact that I could transform an AMA report about cancer in men and women to cancer "on the shaved back of a rat" in a few hundred words.

If you make yourself aware of the conversation inside your head, you have half a chance at giving up smoking.