Mistake number 1

In the context of smoking these feelings of fear and anxiety will have been seen as withdrawal from nicotine. Why? Because you have been told that is what happens when you smoke, so why would you question it? This has immediately made the brain think ‘I need another cigarette’. This is also the point that makes people smokers or not. For those people who try one, feel the fear and then decide not to smoke another will have a perfect memory of what smoking "DID" for them. It made them afraid and fearful. They will then just let the chemicals in their system come out naturally and often in the background. For these people, the only reason they would smoke again is if they wanted to feel afraid and anxious and no-one wants to feel that on purpose. So for them there will never be a situation or event that makes them think smoking will be an answer to anything.

Mistake number 2

For those who mistook these feelings of fear and anxiety for real danger, instead of chemically induced (cyanide) feelings, they would need to find a way of getting an answer as quick as possible to stop these feelings. By smoking a second cigarette the chemical balance will be altered again and the nicotine will override the cyanide and stimulate the feel good receptors in the brain. This will give the illusion of making the fear and anxiety go away, giving the impression of relaxation. But this cigarette has not touched any real fear and anxiety that you may have been feeling, it cannot do that. All it has done is brought the chemically induced feeling of fear down to a less frightening level, giving the impression that it calmed you down and creating a link in the subconscious brain that will carry on until these mistaken images are put right.

Mistake number 3

Each cigarette you then smoke will reinforce this illusion that you are in some way making all your fears and anxieties go away. You now have the perception that smoking does something for you and slowly over the years you begin to attach every situation and feeling, whether good or bad, to a cigarette. You feel that things will never be the same without cigarettes, because you have used them as a safety net against feelings of artificial fear and anxiety that will happen every time you smoke. You need to create a new memory and put the perceptions you have of smoking in the right order. I will show you how to do this. You may also still be thinking, ' Why is it that when it comes to smoking, I forget all the bad things I know about cigarettes? Why does it not scare me enough to quit, even when I become ill I still smoke?' This goes back to the fear response explained in the last chapter. When the chemicals in the cigarette create this false alarm and make you feel anxious and afraid, your brain will search for the answer to make you safe again. It will scan the memory and look for a past experience that made you feel safe again, and at the moment it stops at smoking. This gives instant gratification and that is something you will take every time. You want relief there and then and are not prepared to wait. What also happens is that anything that does not help get the answer, or is not connected to the answer will just not register in the brain. It is like a large computer program. When you open it, it will sap the energy away from other smaller programs and they will stop working. When the large program has loaded the others will start to respond again. This is what happens with smoking. All the thoughts of illness and poison and everything associated with the bad side of smoking does not register because, even though they are important to you, they do not stop the feelings of anxiety and fear. But smoking does not stop real fear and anxiety, only the chemically induced feelings created by the last cigarette. After a while though real and artificial feelings, or anxiety become confused. Your brain cannot split the two, so in order to stay safe you have to treat every attack as if it were real and that is the reason you find it hard to stay off cigarettes for an extended period of time. You will never stop anxiety, but you can reduce the alarms to be real and not induced by cigarettes.

The Ultimate Cigarette

I am going to upset you now, because what you didn't know was that every cigarette you have ever smoked has been the ultimate cigarette. The mistake you made was not waiting long enough for the full effects to hit you. All you had to do was wait 4 days and all your fears and tensions would have returned to normal and you would have been happy again. There would have been no fear or artificial tension and the cage would have been unlocked. Instead though, every time you felt the delayed reaction and the fear built up, you lit a cigarette, effectively starting the whole process over again from the beginning. It is, if you like, pressing the 'reset button' or pressing rewind on a video before you've seen the end. My daughter got a new video and watched half of it, got to the point where the little dog was hit by a car (it was a Disney film I assure you) and became so upset at that point that she used to turn it off. If she had carried on watching she would have seen the little dog get up off the road and walk off. But she would only watch the first bit and in her mind the dog died. She even had bad dreams about it so I had to stop her watching it. She got a little bit older and was watching it one day and forgot to switch it off at the point just before the dog got hit by the car. For the first time ever she saw what really happened to the little dog. She came into me shouting for me to come and watch. She watches this film every night when she goes to bed now and has never had another bad dream. This is what you will be doing now, seeing the ending, what should have happened when you had smoked that first ever cigarette, the happy ending. Smoking is like an affair. Not a normal relationship, but an affair. To be an affair it has to have 3 things. It needs to be painful, it has to have deceit, and lastly, no future.

THE AFFAIR

The Pain. Every smoker has a plan. You may not realise it, but you do. The plan is to 'stop before I get ill or cancer ', whichever comes first. So even though you do not know how you are going to do it you have a plan. You may think that one more cigarette will finally hit the spot, kill the urge forever, satisfy the need, but does it? Does it ‘do it’ for you? No! Which means every cigarette you smoke is creating a need for the next. Even though you have smoked for XX years, your link to cigarettes is only as strong as your last cigarette. I think it is a falsehood that someone who has smoked for 20 years and 40 a day is somehow more 'addicted' than someone who has smoked for 7 days and say 2 a day. The thing that keeps you smoking is your last cigarette. Not the next one…the last one!

The Deceit This is where the deceit comes in. Every smoker thinks that the thing keeping them smoking is the craving for the next cigarette. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the thing keeping you smoking is the LAST one. The bad news is you do not realize this. A delayed chemical reaction in your brain is causing you to become tense and mimic the feeling of fear, but because this happens an hour after you smoked the last cigarette you do not associate this feeling with that cigarette, you associate it with the feeling for wanting another cigarette. What would normally happen is that when this feeling happens the only way you know to make this fear go away is smoking. BUT all that does is take the feeling of tension and fear down to a less frightening level. This is where you get the concept that smoking relieves your stress. It does, but only the chemically induced stress from the last cigarette. You have never taken that fear and decided whether it is real or not. If you do look at it, you will see that there is no immediate danger, or life threatening situation that your mind would otherwise have you believe. No Future. I see people try and squeeze every last drop of determination out of them when they try to stop smoking, until they are just too tired of trying and briefly succumb to the cigarettes. This cycle happens all over the world. You will hear people saying, ‘I have quit for over 2 years now and I still fight the cravings’. They do not do give in to it but they are still fighting and that puts a lot of people off trying to quit. What sort of future is that? But the reason they are still fighting is because they do not have the permission of their subconscious to stop. They have not broken the link. They have not seen how the trick is done. If you have ever witnessed magic, you know it is not real. It can't be, but as long as information goes into your subconscious it will always believe it. Showing you how the trick is done will give you a new memory of what really happened. Once it is in there you will never be fooled again…EVER. The only thing that can stop you smoking is YOU. This is true but as long as your subconscious still believes that smoking relaxes and calms, YOU will not stop. To understand that nicotine is the poison and not the antidote, you have to make a new memory.

The Break-up As with all affairs they do come to an end. The excitement fades, the dirty habits come out in the open and the image you had of that person is gone. You are just left with a stale mundane affair that needs to be ended. But who ends it? If you end it, you leave with a little bit of dignity and self-esteem. If they end it, you will be crushed and devastated. In the context of smoking we all know what the end means. If it is smoking which ends the affair, your things won’t be in a wooden box, but you will. Once the image has gone it is gone forever. The new memory of that person has replaced the imagined one you had.