The problem is that everybody goes about quitting smoking all wrong. It's kind of like being unsure of going into an interview and how it reflects upon your manner during that interview. If you think that something is hard, it's going to be hard.



The way that the tobacco industry makes smoking seem hard to quit is partly to blame, but so is the way that so many people put quitting off like it's actually that complicated. It's not, and it's not something that you can learn to quit by applying some sort of patch or gum.

Nicotine replacement therapy flat out is a silly idea. You can't cure an addiction by replacing it with another addiction. That would be like someone quitting heroin by picking up a cocaine habit. Does that make sense? Not really.

At this point, you're probably scoffing at the comparison between tobacco and heroin. While they are vastly different, the comparison works. Nicotine replacement therapy is a dumb idea.

What is, then, the easy way of quitting smoking? You have to realize that your body isn't making you smoke, your mind is. Your mind is convinced that it needs cigarettes for some lofty purpose.

Think about it. You're stressed, what do you do? Smoke a cigarette. You don't think about it, you just smoke a cigarette. By taking a break from whatever it was that was stressing you, you feel better. Your subconscious, however, links smoking with relieving stress. Next time you feel stressed, you smoke another cigarette, and viola! No more stress! This smoking thing must be great!

Next time you're stressed, try taking a break for a few minutes and do something else. Go for a walk, read a book, yell at your pet iguana, whatever you want to do. You'll have gotten your mind off the stress, but you won't have smoked a cigarette. Keep it up, and your mind will stop associating cigarettes with relieving stress.

Let's go back to nicotine replacement for a second here, specifically the nicotine patch. Quitting smoking is hard, but let's slap on another source of nicotine and hopefully we'll be tricked into not wanting a cigarette. Sounds easy, right?

Before I learned how to quit smoking the right way, that's what I thought to. Strangely enough, though, I kept pulling the silly thing off and smoking a cigarette. Why? My mind didn't associate hanging out with friends with wearing some ridiculous circle thing stuck to my chest. It associated friends with smoking cigarettes, since that's what we'd always do together.

That's the root problem with nicotine replacement and why it has such awful success rates. You still want to smoke, you're just wearing something that has a warning on the box indicating that your heart will explode if you smoke while wearing it. It might cure the (extremely mild) physical withdrawal symptoms from nicotine, but those aren't really attributable to wanting a cigarette.

So, what should you do if you want to quit smoking? Figure out why you want to smoke and fix that, don't band-aid the problem by throwing your hard earned money at it.