How To Want To Quit Smoking
Despite the overwhelming medical evidence, the peer-pressure, the anti-smoking legislation, and the ever-increasing financial cost, smoking remains an unprecedented marketing phenomena, with over 1 billion people still ‘enjoying’ the habit worldwide.
What’s new about ‘With Friends Like Him’?
Apart from destroying lives, cigarettes have powerful hidden talents. Sadly, none of them benefit anyone but the cigarette and their morally bankrupt creators. Cigarettes are the ultimate manipulator and smoking the quintessential destructive relationship. Having spent twenty years imprisoned by this sadistic habit, a sense of lasting freedom has dawned – thanks to a new way of thinking, an approach which I want to share with others snared in the trap.
Before writing this addiction ‘patch’, life without cigarettes was unimaginable. I was sure that they helped me to enjoy relaxation time or manage stressful situations. Without them, life wouldn’t be the same, would it? Slowly the realisation dawned that they were selling these ideas to my nicotine-soaked brain – the reality was almost certainly the opposite.
The question went around my head for weeks – ‘What if this habit was actually a person? Someone who was a big part of my life, through good times and bad. Someone I spent a lot of money on.’ How would I feel about him/her and our future, knowing what I know?’
Until six months ago, I had almost given up giving up. As a self-confessed ‘serial quitter,’ smoking the ‘last’ cigarette was becoming an almost weekly occurrence. Deep down, stopping smoking was desirable, but in reality, unachievable.
‘With Friends Like Him’ has stopped me lighting up for over 6 months, and I believe it could do the same for you.
The strategy is simple and based on one of the fundamental principles of leading a happy and rewarding life – friendship, and what happens when we question that friendship.
In order to do that effectively, you have to go back to the beginning……………..
I met him a few times during the mid-eighties and was always left with a deflated sense of ‘Is that what all the fuss is about?’ He was undoubtedly popular, undeniably one of the gang, but his presence always left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Most of the people I wanted to be seemed to never leave his side, so when he made me sick at a house party, I figured that it was probably my fault for being un-cool. Then in 1988 I turned 18 and with the coming-of-age came the textbook desire to break free from the shackles of home and savour the all-encompassing freedom that college in a new town offered.
In the midst of this rebirth, he was seemingly omnipresent, forever carrying an expression that whispered
‘Come on, let’s try again’. So when a new friend introduced us formally, it would have been rude not to at least try, even if I did have some reservations. The tidal wave of excitement that filled those young hearts swept away anything in its path that represented the adult world, so I took a leap of faith, persevered, and soon started to notice a sea-change.
What had started off as a casual acquaintance soon blossomed into a 24/7 deep-seated bond. Within months he was such a frequent fixture of my life that it became hard to enjoy anything without him. From just a pub companion to occupying pride of place at my breakfast table, the relationship was overpowering. And although I felt that the novelty factor was starting to wear a little thin, he was always reminding me how much I needed him. I always laughed off his supercilious assumptions – me, need him?
Then on January 22 1989, while I was surrounded by beer cans, and slumped in front of the Superbowl, he was busy killing my aunty Lilian. Of course, there was no proof, but the finger-pointing left no one in any doubt. She had always relied heavily on him, through the blitz in London during WW2, and then after, in fair times and foul, he was never far away – as if she wanted to repay a loved one for their steadfast support when there was precious little else to rely on. And this was his way of showing gratitude? Lung cancer?
I was furious. We had a bad bust up and I swore I never wanted to see him again. Not only was he implicated in the death of a relative, there were many other home truths which reared their ugly heads.
This was a one-way relationship – there was me paying through the nose to be with this friend who was making me smell, giving me bad breath, reducing my fitness, ageing my skin and taking my hard-earned cash. Not only that, I faced the bare facts – that he wanted me dead too. Through all the laughs and tears we’d shared together, when I thought he was offering me a helping hand, making me look cool, there he was trying to kill me. To find out more, you can check out How To Want To Quit Smoking.
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