Psychological Preparation To Quit Smoking

People sometimes cannot quit smoking because they are psychologically unwilling to do so. Your will may be strong, but your strategies are weak. Perhaps there is a lack of clarity about the reasons why you should quit or a lack of conviction about the benefits of quitting smoking.

Tobacco addiction is physical and psychological. You don’t just smoke out of habit, but there are reasons behind it that we can’t ignore. Cigarettes, despite their harmfulness, also provide some form of well-being or relief, even if this is fleeting. For the same reason, quitting smoking gives the impression that you will no longer experience those benefits.

Nicotine is a highly addictive substance. So it takes a lot of effort to stop it. In many cases, however, it is also an exercise in intelligence. However, not everything has to do with biological issues.

When someone starts smoking, that person develops a whole range of patterns and behaviors that revolve around tobacco. Quitting smoking also means that you leave all these behavioral patterns behind.

Smoking behavior patterns can be associated with social contexts, loneliness, anxiety, just that cigarette after a meal, and so on. So an intelligent response would be to reduce exposure to these contexts as much as possible, especially in the first few days.

The reason why people smoke

Psychoanalyst Gustavo Chiozza makes an interesting analysis, both for the reasons for smoking and for the reasons for the intolerance to smokers, which is so widespread today.

He points out that a large number of people start smoking during puberty and adolescence. They usually do this by ‘stealing’ cigarettes from parents or other adults.

Smoking, then, is originally associated with sin. In a symbolic sense, it is a ‘steal from fire’, which Prometheus did to make himself equal to the gods. In adolescents, this act is equivalent to entering the adult world.

This initial theft, and the resulting entry into the adult world, also generates an unconscious sense of guilt. This increases as we see increasing intolerance to smokers everywhere we go.

When sin and guilt are firmly connected to the adult world, the desire to smoke increases, as does repentance. As a result, compulsion also comes and this is very difficult to get rid of.

The reasons to quit smoking

To return to the previous point, anxiety, guilt and remorse tend to affect smokers. Often all of this has its origins in adolescence, where tobacco was symbolically a statement of entering the adult world.

If that adult world was rejected or caused very strong tensions, then that smoking habit is more deeply rooted. Finally, although it may seem a bit absurd, people smoke to say “this is me”. But as you say this, you feel guilty.

Nearly all smokers experience feelings of anxiety and guilt, along with a sense of reassurance when they smoke. It’s pleasurable and rewarding, yet destructive at the same time.

The reasons for giving up smoking are almost as important as the reasons for using tobacco. If the motivation is censorship, the person subconsciously assumes that he or she is reliving the limitations they experienced as children among the adults.

This is why many people do not quit smoking. Deep down they experience it as a surrender of their rebellion and as ‘ceasing to be’. 

Psychological preparation

Experts believe that about 60% of smokers try to quit at some point in their lives, but only about 10% of them succeed. In most cases, this is because there is an unconscious force that eventually overcomes the conscious reasons for stopping.

It may be a good idea to go beyond these technical smoking cessation techniques and start understanding what smoking means in your personal life. It’s especially helpful to remember those first moments when you got into this habit.

What were the circumstances around that moment? How did it feel to smoke? And how does it feel now? When do you feel most like smoking? Of course, tobacco addiction has a very strong physical component. There are already many effective tools to tackle this from an organic point of view.

What sometimes fails, however, is the motivation to quit. By examining what smoking means in your life, you may be able to understand the self-destructive axes of smoking. Perhaps there will arise a greater desire to stop harming your body.