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There are five things about quitting smoking that no one will ever tell you. Do you just want the truth? If you read to the end of this post I will give you real tips, tricks, and hacks you can use to actually help yourself quit smoking for the rest of your life. So, read to the end.

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We’re going to hop right in.

Here are 5 things that nobody will ever tell you about quitting smoking – just the truth. We’re going to count down from 5 to 1.

All this is based on the over 9,000 people that I’ve helped quit smoking through my quit smoking program. It’s specifically designed to help you quit smoking for the rest of your life. This is taken from all that experience. It’s taken from all those conversations with the 10’s of thousands of people I’ve talked to over the years and the over 9,000 people I’ve helped quit smoking.

These are all the things that people will never tell you, and this is all really real.

#5. Quitting smoking is no fun. The number 5 thing that people won’t tell you about quitting smoking is that it sucks! It’s no fun at all. People will tell you, in fact, non-smokers will more than anyone, that if you quit smoke you’ll have more energy, more vitality, your breath will come back, you’ll be able to exercise again, and your sex drive will come back. They will happily tell you all this information.

In some of my YouTube videos I’ve talked about the benefits to quitting smoking and what they’re saying is all true, but here’s what they’re not telling you. You don’t reap these benefits on day 1 after you quit. It’s not like you quit and all of this happens tomorrow. It can take up to a year to reap these benefits. The part of the information that they’re not telling you, and nobody ever tells you is that quitting smoking totally sucks!

It’s no fun at all. It’s really hard.

A piece of advice and practical tip is don’t let people minimize your experience. What happens when you do is you quit smoking, and you think to yourself, “Everyone told me this is going to be easy,” but quitting smoking is actually really hard. So guess what happens!

You’re setting yourself up for failure because your expectation is that it is easy because that’s what everyone said. I’m going to tell you it’s not. It’s actually really hard.

I have an entire business built around helping people be successful at quitting smoking, and I make good money doing it. Why? Not because it’s easy. I do because it’s actually really hard, and it’s not that much fun.

#4. The fear is real.

This is one that almost nobody will tell you before you go to quit smoking. Ninety-eight percent of people experience fear when they quit smoking. I can’t figure out who these 2% of people are who don’t have any fear when they quit smoking because I’ve never met them.

I’m sure there is somebody out there who says they had no fear, but I think truth be told they probably say that after having quit, and they actually did have fear, but they’re just not telling you.

So, the fear is real. Let’s talk through this a little bit. As a former smoker myself, we know that smoking will kill us. The average smoker loses 14 years of life to smoking. We know it smells. We know we stink. When we smoke we know others hate it, especially the non-smokers in our life. If you have kids you know they hate it too. We know it affects our health. These are all things we know. We’re not stupid. We understand, and we get it, but guess what. Even though we know all of these things we still smoke, but we want to quit.

So let’s dive into this. What are these fears?    Well, these are the general ones that the over 9,000 people I have helped quit smoking had. These fears are the most common.

  • Can I handle the cravings?
  • Can I handle the withdrawal?

The fear of the cravings and what’s going to happen when the cigarette is gone is a very real fear. It’s a real and an authentic feeling.

  • Will I become a tyrant?
  • Am I going to be mean to everybody in my life and make my kids hate me?

These are real fears.

  • Will I be okay?
  • Will I be bored?

Everyone that quits smoking or faces quitting smoking all has this one.

What’s unique about this fear though is everyone thinks it’s only them. I hear all the time, “I think I’m the only one that is afraid I’m going to be bored if I quit smoking.”

Almost everyone is. It does not make you unique. If you’re afraid when you quit smoking that you’re going to be bored you’re not unique. You’re just like everybody else, and there’s good reasons why. We’ll get into them shortly.

I’m giving up something that I just feel so intimate with.

Smoking feels like a friend. It feels like you’re giving up a part of yourself so you have this fear. That’s a real fear.

Will I be depressed?

This is also an authentic and real fear. Well, guess what. Are you going to have these fears? Probably.

You see. That’s the truth. This is what people won’t tell you. You probably will experience these fears. So the question becomes what do you do about it?

Feel the fear and do it anyways.

The fears are not going to go away. This is why it’s best to join a program like mine that’s designed to deal specifically with these issues. You want to look for a program that understands it and is willing to tell you the truth. You want a program that has built into it how to deal with these fears and these issues.

Support. Support. Support. Get support. That’s a really good way to deal with the fears. Join the Facebook quit smoking groups. Doing the support groups, the apps and things like that is actually a really good way to help alleviate some of our fears.

Understand that all great decisions have a cost. All things in life have a cost. Everything has a price. Even quitting smoking has a price. One of those prices is actually going through all 5 of these things no one tells you. Part of that price is the fear.

#3. The side effects of quitting smoking are biological and natural. When you quit smoking often people who are like me, experts in hypnosis, EFT, or neuro linguistic programming with a background neuroscience, talk a lot about it being a mental game, and it really is.

The thing is it’s not just a mental game it’s also a biological game. The nicotine really is an addictive substance.  It’s not a very addictive substance as far as addictive substances go, but it still really is addictive. The side effects of when we stop smoking, the cravings and the withdrawal, are real.

So what? They can be real. No, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have any of these, but people often experience them.

So what are they? Well, you may become irritable. You may become angry. You might get moody. You may experience insomnia. You might have diarrhea or irritable bowel syndrome. You might have brain fog. You may feel disoriented or spacey, and maybe even clumsy. Often people feel exhausted and some people experience depression.

How much and to what degree are you going to experience any of these? There is no way to know. What I can tell you is there is no magic pill. Even in my program this is true. The very first thing we tell people when they get into my program, The Secret to Quit Smoking for Life, is we tell them this isn’t magic. What we’re doing here isn’t magic. What we were doing is we’re going through something with you, and we’re going to alleviate these things so that it’s as easy as possible for you. What that means is you have a higher success rate. My program has a 95% success rate, but not a 100%.

These things all are real, and they could really happen to you. It’s about how we go through it. In life you have to go through something – not over it, not under it, not around it. If you are looking for a way to go around the process of quitting smoking you’re looking for that magic pill. You’re just going to waste your money. You have to look for and seek out programs that understand these things are real and know how to deal with them.

So how do we set you up for success? How can you deal with these things?

This is important to know because the side effects of quitting smoking are very real. What’s happening here with these side effects, the cravings and withdrawal, is our body and our brain are actually changing. We are physically changing the biochemistry of our brain when we quit smoking. Our body is clearing out the toxins. We are changing. Yes. We’re actually changing our brain chemistry.

This is totally normal. You’ll see it in the Facebook chats all the time. “I’m at 3 months now and my brain is foggy,” or “I’m at 6 months now and I’m feeling depressed.”

It’s just because your body is changing. When you do something for so long and it is so ingrained in your brain as a habit, not an addiction a habit, it takes a long time for your brain to create new neural pathways that are different. These things can last for up to a year. That’s the truth.

#2. The feeling of loss. This the number 2 thing that people won’t tell you.

Just like the fear, the feeling of loss is real. Your brain cannot help but think something has changed.

Think about it. You’ve been smoking every day for how long? Has it been 10 years, 20 years, or maybe even 30 years? Maybe you smoke 15 cigarettes a day, or maybe you smoke 40 a day, and every time you smoke a cigarette you’re taking around 20 drags. The average person smokes 25 cigarettes and takes 20 drags per cigarette. So, you’re someone who 500 to 1,000 times a day, depending on how many cigarettes you smoke, puts your hand to your mouth and takes a drag from a cigarette.

You don’t take any days off. It’s not like you go on vacation for 2 weeks to the Caribbean and you stop smoking. You do it day in and day out unless you are trying to quit. You do not stop.

Your brain forms associations. You get what we call in neuroscience “rutted thinking”.

This sense of loss is very real. Your brain cannot help but know something is different.

The other thing that exasperates this issue is that smoking often is comforting or it’s routine. Even though you may be sick of it now, all those years you were not.

You smoked when socializing. You were having a beer and a smoke at social events. These are positive things. You’d be at a wedding and you’d have a cigarette. You’d have a cigarette when you were stressed out, and when you were sad or nervous. You would have cigarettes in the good times and in the bad times.

So, we have good and negative associations with cigarettes, and a part of us liked it or we wouldn’t have done it in the first place. It’s not like you picked up a cigarette for the first time and you thought, “Oh, this is really good. This tastes amazing. I love this.” No. We like it because we want to fit in, be cool, rebel or whatever, but basically it boils down to smoke = feel good.

Think about this. When you smoke cigarettes are with you through the good times and the bad times. Likely they were there in the most turbulent years of your life when you were becoming an adult.

The average smoker smokes once every 30 to 60 minutes. Think about how long you’ve done that. This has been with you since you were young. You probably started like most people between the ages of 14 and 16. So, this has been with

you since 14 to 16. How old are you now? Are you in your late 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s?

How long has this been with you?

Cigarettes have been with you most of your life. It was a part of everything you did, and now you’re just going to give it up just like that?

This is why cold turkey is the least effective method of quitting. It’s because all of a sudden you just think you’re going to turn a switch off and you’re not going to experience feelings of loss. No. This thing has been with you forever. It became your friend.

People often describe quitting smoking as like giving up a friend. Realize what this is. It’s the association with smoking and your life. The cigarette is actually a plant wrapped in paper. It’s actually not a friend. It has never been your friend.

Just realize that feeling this loss is natural, and when you feel it or if you feel depressed these are authentic natural feelings. It’s only because our brain knows something is different.

This is why you want to look for programs that account for this type of thing. If you do a program that counts on this you are more likely to be successful.

#1. Most quit smoking products are designed to make you fail. This is the number 1 thing that people will not tell you about quitting smoking. Most of these products are not designed for you to be successful.

Let’s talk about this. There’s really only 3 ways to quit smoking. Yes, there’s actually 12 ways we know, but all 12 can be put into 3 categories.

  • Things that deal with the addiction
  • Things that deal with our conscious mind.
  • Things that deal with our unconscious mind.

We know from science that the methods that deal with the unconscious mind are the most successful, but let’s just look at this. Let’s talk about nicotine replacement therapies.

Addiction – The nicotine replacement therapies deal with it as an addiction. These are things like the patch, the gum, and vaping.

Here’s what you need to know. Who owns these companies? They’re owned primarily by 2 types of companies: pharmaceuticals and big tobacco companies.

The tobacco companies invest in them through 3rd party investment funds. When you go and do your homework on companies like NicoDerm and things like that you’ll notice that it’s either a pharmaceutical company, or it’s owned by some subsidiary – a 3rd party affiliate of a tobacco company like Benson Rothman’s, for example.

They have 3rd party entities that they used to buy these companies. All the nicotine replacement products are basically all owned by Big Tobacco. There’s a reason for that dip and all these vaping companies like Joule have all popped up. Guess who the major investors are? They’re tobacco companies. Why? It’s because they know the longer you use nicotine the less likely you are to give it up.

It’s a cycle. They will sell you the product to make you sick, they’ll sell you the solution for you to fail, and then they’ll sell you the product all over again, thereby keeping you as a customer. That’s 1 of the main things that people will not tell you.

The other part to the problem is thinking of smoking as an addiction. Smoking is an addiction. It’s just not what keeps you stuck. That’s the habit, but that’s for a different post.

The problem with thinking of smoking as an addiction is this focus on something outside of ourselves because if it’s the addiction and the chemical keeping us stuck. We can blame staying on something outside of our self. It’s us not wanting to take the responsibility that it’s in us. The desire to smoke is driven by habit.

Conscious Mind – This category uses the books and the apps.

Let’s talk about Allen Carr’s book. Here’s why I like to talk to about it. I do recommend reading it. It’s a really good book. I’m not knocking the book, but things like the book and the apps are designed for your conscious mind. They explain it to you.  Using the conscious mind is really about using your willpower which is what cold turkey does.

Here’s what you need to know. Some people can quit using Alan Carr’s book. You’ll see them in the Facebook chats. It’s less than 6% of people. For most people it is not effective.

You have a better success rate simply by me giving you a sugar pill and telling you it’s a magic cure. You will be twice as likely to be successful at quitting smoking by taking that pill then if you read Alan Carr’s book.

Here’s the thing about Alan Carr. Alan Carr is very smart man. He was a smoker and he quit smoking. The thing to know though is he quit smoking before he wrote his book – not after. He didn’t write his book at that point. He didn’t use his own book to quit smoking. He used hypnosis to quit smoking. He went to a hypnotist and quit smoking. Then he wrote the book and left that part out of it.

You can find out how he actually quit smoking in his biography. It’s also on his wiki page.

Alan Carr’s book deals with the conscious mind.

Dealing with your conscious mind using the books and the apps is the support route.

Unconscious Mind – Things like NLP, EFT, or Hypnosis deal with the unconscious mind.

What’s the key here? It’s not any one of these. I’m not arguing for any one of them. The key is stacking them.

Why are you only using one method?

Here’s the secret to quitting smoking for those of you who read to the end, well, at least here’s one secret. There’s 12 secrets to actually quit smoking in my program. This is one of them.

So quitting smoking is broken into 3 ways:

  1. Treating it as an addiction. This is using nicotine replacement therapies.
  2. Treating it as a problem in your conscious mind. These are things like the books, the apps, and support buddies.
  3. Treating it as a problem in your unconscious mind. This uses NLP, EFT, and hypnosis.

Six years ago I invented the method stacking, meaning stacking these ways all together. Why only attack it from one way?

The big secret, the big takeaway in this video is stack different methods together. Don’t go, “I’m just going to do cold turkey.”

I tell people all the time that more things you do, the more stuff you stack the better chance you’ll have of being successful at quitting smoking. People ask me, “When I do your program can I do Chantix too?”

I say yes!

The more you stack the higher your success rate is.

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Blessings to everyone, and I look forward to talking to you.