What were you learning?
You were learning to suppress your body's normal protective
reactions to hot, polluted smoke entering your delicate lungs.
Lungs designed for clean air only! You were learning to control
your body with your mind!
The Body's Protective Reaction to Cigarette Smoke
Cigarette smoke is hot, caustic, chemical pollution. If it gets
in your eyes, it makes them burn and water. It can make your
skin itch in really sensitive people. If you inhale the hot
smoke, it makes you cough, gag and gasp for breath. This is the
body's way of telling you smoking a cigarette isn't really a
good thing to do.
This reaction is what happens to the smoker to be with the first
series of cigarettes. But the person really, really wants to
smoke so they persist. Over and over, they subject themselves to
the harsh cigarette smoke. As they do so, something begins to
happen. The coughing and gasping begin to fade away until
finally, they can smoke an entire cigarette without the body's
defense mechanism kicking in. How is this possible?
They have focused their WILL POWER to interfere with the body's
defense mechanism. In other words:
You Can Smoke because You Will Yourself to Smoke
As a smoker, you use an incredible force of WILL POWER that
stops your body's normal defense responses to hot, polluted
smoke entering your delicate lungs. It is powerful MIND over
Matter that allows you to smoke!
Over time, you as a smoker have used your MIND to suppress your
body's protective mechanisms. By your WILL POWER you have
created a system that shuts down your built in protection and
allows the damage you do to yourself every time you smoke a
cigarette. It does this because you want it to; YOU WILL IT!.
Have you destroyed your body's protective mechanism? No, it's
still there. You just selectively turn it off for cigarettes.
This example will illustrate:
You are a smoker but what happens when you've been around a
smoky fire of any sort? Perhaps your fireplace if you forget to
open the flue. You get your cozy fire going but with the flue
closed, smoke quickly fills the room. What happens? Your eyes
start burning and watering, you start coughing and gasping for
breath immediately until the source of the irritant, the smoke,
is removed. Even with the smoke gone, it takes you a while to
fully recover. This is the normal body defense mechanism
response. It will happen to you even if you are a multi-year
smoker.
Yet, you can smoke a cigarette without those reactions. It's
still smoke and you are intentionally pulling it into your
lungs. The only difference is that you selectively turn off your
body's protective reaction to allow yourself to smoke a
cigarette with your WILL POWER. Did you realize you had such a
strong mind?
Why It's Hard to Quit Smoking
When people think about quitting cigarettes, they know it's in
their best interest to do so. Intellectually, they know the
health dangers of smoking cigarettes. They know how much money
they have to spend these days on smoking. They have every good
reason in the world to quit smoking cigarettes. Yet, many can't
do it!
Why? Because smoking the cigarette is an end result. It is
actually the mechanism, the repression of the body's defense
system, that the smoker has spent years creating that allows
them and now compels them to smoke. If you manage to quit
smoking but don't remove the Psychological Smoking Mechanism,
the best you can hope for is to be an ex-smoker. What is an
ex-smoker? A smoker who isn't smoking right now but could pick
up a cigarette and start smoking again without missing a beat.
The mechanism that you spent years creating is still operating.
It has become your Frankenstein monster that you've forgotten
how to control! Not only that, you've forgotten why you created
the monster in the first place because it was so many years ago!
You may overpower it and get it strapped down to the table for a
while but it's constantly straining to break loose. Eventually
it will break loose and you are smoking again.
The cigarette is not the monster. It is the Psychological
Smoking Mechanism you've created with your MIND that allows you
to smoke the cigarette that is the monster.
Is There a Solution?
Yes. The solution to removing cigarettes permanently from your
life is not control of the monster you have created, but to
remove it! Overpowering the monster and restraining it which is
what you do when you forcibly quit cigarettes, will only work
for so long. The Psychological Smoking Mechanism you've created
will constantly work to assert itself and eventually, it will do
so; you will be smoking again as if you never stopped. An
ex-smoker is just a smoker who isn't smoking cigarettes right
now.
Fortunately, there is a way to systematically remove this
mechanism you created many years ago so that it never compels
you to smoke again. When you remove the Psychological Smoking
Mechanism you've created, you eliminate cigarettes from your
life without trying to quit. When you remove the mechanism that
allows you to smoke, you become a non-smoker again!
© Copyright 2009, R. Michael Stone |
You
Didn't Always Smoke