3 Tips to Stay Quit
Do you fail at quitting smoking when you get feeling overwhelmed or you have a tragedy in your life? How do you not start smoking when you get feeling overwhelmed or experience tragedy in your life? If this causes you to fail at smoking this post is for you.
Make sure you read to the end because I’m going to give you 3 tips that you can actually do to make sure that you can get past this and actually quit.
I’m going to put a link at the end to my calendar so you can book yourself into a free 15-minute phone consultation with me where I’ll simply get you on the right track to quitting smoking for the rest of your life. It’s free and it’s fun so take advantage of it.
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Let’s hop right into the content.
Now, tragedy and feeling overwhelmed are terrible when they happen. If that has happened to you there may be nothing that I can say to ease it for you or make the pain go away. It’s difficult. Sometimes life is difficult and we experience difficult things. This can get in our way of quitting smoking. What I can do is I can tell you that there are known ways in psychology to deal with these issues.
Now this post is not about how to get over these types of issues, but rather how you can not use smoking as a crutch to try and solve these issues. This post is about how you can not fall back on smoking and actually stay quit. That all being said let’s hop right.
Something’s happened and now you’re dying for a smoke what do you do? Here’s what you don’t do – reach for a cigarette. Whatever it is that’s bothering you or stressing you out, or whatever tragedy has happened in your life will not be solved by smoking. So whether you’ve lost somebody close to you or something’s happened between you and your partner I promise you smoking won’t fix it.
All of these things that happen to us in the course of our life are never solved by smoking. Smoking will not change the facts of what happened.
Now, that’s not very helpful is it? It’s just a piece of knowledge that’s good to understand. It’s just a good starting point to understand that there’s actually no known problems that smoking has ever solved. Whatever problems you’re having or have had in the past will not be problems that are solved by smoking.
Association acts as an anchor. It’s something for our mind to get itself around. That’s how it works when we create an association through habit or through trauma. We make it very strong like an anchor and our brain can always latch onto it or find it.
So what can we do when we have problems or tragedy? Well, actually we can do a lot. Let’s go through those 3 things that we can actually do to make your situation better so you don’t try and solve it with a cigarette because we know it’s not going to solve anything. Smoking, in fact, is probably going to make things worse.
Avoid the things that make the problem worse or stunt recovery.
This is first thing that you can do, and there’s just a couple of components to this. We call them “the 3 p’s”.
They are personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence.
These are the 3 things we do when tragedy hits. We go through these 3 things. So let’s go through them together.
Personalization. This is essentially thinking it’s your fault. Now, this may be true, but at all likely it’s only partially true. I’ll give you an example. If somebody that’s close to you has passed away, unless you literally cause them to pass away, it’s not your fault. Problems with other people or say with relationships are never 1 person’s fault.
It’s a dance that people do. We tend to personalize tragedy in our life. We tend to make everything either our fault or we project it on somebody else. We blame somebody else. It’s all their fault!
We either personalize it to ourselves or we personalize it to them and shift it all onto them. The truth is in life usually it’s always a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B.
We always do these dances together. That’s just how our brain kind of works. We call this personalization, and I’ll tell you how to beat it after this, but for now let’s move on to the next thing.
Pervasiveness. You start to think it is going to affect allthe areas of your life. When tragedy strikes you think, “This is going to affecteverything in my life.”
Psychology hasshown time and time againthat this is not true. In fact, humans areincredibly resilient – including you.
You have a tremendous capacity to bounce back, but we humans have this thing. When tragedy strikes we think it’s pervasive and it’s going to infect every part of our lives, but we know that’s not true.
Permanence. You feel like it’s going to last forever. It does feel that way, but science tells us that what we actually are doing is what they call “over forecasting”. We overestimate how long feelings are going to last, and we do this all of the time.
Those are the 3 p’s.
Now, everything that I just said about those 3 p’s is true, but just giving you that knowledge may not actually help. You still may feel stuck in it. It’s important to understand the 3 p’s though because now I’m going to tell you what you actually can do about them.
The first thing you can do about it is write it down.
What do I mean by that? Write down the belief that is underlying the feeling of something like “It’s my fault.”
So remember the three p’s, personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence. It’s my fault, it’s everywhere, and it’s going to last forever.
Write down the underlying ideas and beliefs on a piece of paper, particularly things like if you have the belief it’s your fault. Write it down. Whatever it is you write down and whatever notes you take challenge it.
This is the exercise. Write it down and then challenge it come up with ways about why it’s not true. What this does is it helps give you balance because when tragedy strikes we get out of balance so we need some perspective.
The first thing you can do, the first tip, trick, and hack, is write down the underlying belief you have about whatever has happened to you. Write down your underlying beliefs about the problem and then argue the opposite. That’s tip #1.
Realize these things. It’s likely not 100% your fault, it actually won’t affect every area of your life, and it’s not going to last forever.
Sometimes this knowledge can start the healing process. So tip #1 was write it down, and tip #2 is this.
Ask yourself this question, “How much worse can it be?”
Even if what has happened is really, really bad and overwhelming to you we know from psychology that when we ask ourselves the question of how much worse can it be we’re doing something called de-catastrophizing.
What happens is when something really bad happens like the loss of a loved one or a parent we catastrophize about how bad this is going to be on us. If instead you say to yourself, as dark as it may sound, “Well, at least I didn’t lose both parents” it starts something in your brain called de-catastrophizing. This starts to bring us back into balance. It’s kind of like realizing it’s not the end of the world.
Sometimes focusing on how much worse something could be actually helps to bring the situation into perspective. Then you can start to climb out of it.
Tip #2 is ask yourself how much worse it could be. This will start to help you climb out of it.
The little nuance I want to add to #2 here about asking yourself these “how much worse” questions is start to shift yourself towards gratitude.
Here’s why gratitude is really important. We know from the science of happiness that the people who are most happy in the world are the most grateful. It’s kind of the secret to happiness.
So when you ask yourself if it could be worse adding the thought “So I should probably be grateful,” is a way that you start to climb out and bring yourself back. Thinking about how it could be worse will make it better, but it’s hard to do these things because you’re suffering.
What do you do when you feel you can’t manage it even though you did those 2 things? If you wrote everything down and you tried being grateful, but you still can’t seem to manage it by yourself what do you do? You don’t. Don’t manage it by yourself.
Tip #3 is don’t manage it by yourself. Get support. I know it’s obvious, but it’s vital. Talk to others about what you’re dealing with.
A really good thing to do is pick somebody who you think is the best person to talk to about this particular issue. Find somebody that you can call at a moment’s notice to just talk to you. Get somebody who’s been there before and ask them to be your support buddy. You can also go stay at a friend’s house or family member’s house for a few days or weeks as you deal with these issues.
Support is the #1 way people deal with tragedy.
- Write it down and challenge it.
- Imagine it could be worse and be grateful.
- Don’t do it by yourself. Get support.
These are 3 things you can do instead of smoking to get past whatever it is you’re dealing with.
Let’s just summarize the things that you can do to help with tragedy or feeling overwhelmed.
They are:
- Not smoking.
- Remember your 3 p’s, personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence.
- Use the 3 tips to stay quit.
Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to notice what’s absent from these things I just gave you to deal with tragedy or feeling overwhelmed. Notice what is not there. Smoking!
None of these tips or things to do involve smoking. Do you want to know why? Smoking does not solve problems! There is no known problem in the world that smoking fills. None.
It will not make you feel better. In fact, it will make you feel worse!
However bad you feel now because of what’s happened and however overwhelmed you are by the tragedy in your life add smoking onto that. Now you have added on the fear of what may happen to your health because you’re smoking too. You’ve also added failure on top of everything you’re already going through.
So, if you think yourself, “My life is really hard. I need to smoke,” it’s not going to help you. It is not going to solve a single problem. It’s only going to make it worse. If this post was helpful remember I’m putting a link here at the bottom where you can put yourself into a free 15 minute phone consultation with me. Click here and I’ll get you on the right track to quitting smoking for the rest of your life.
It’s free so take advantage of it. It’s fun, too! We’ll have a good time.
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Thank you so much for your time and attention. Blessings to everyone and I wish you the absolute best.