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Stop Smoking The Easy Way

Smokers Delay Difficult Decisions

It is true that when people are considering whether to stop smoking or not, they will almost never exchange present discomfort for possible future comfort—and there's another reason for continuing to smoke. Why be nervous and tense today? Who cares about what happens twenty years from now? Heck, in ten years global warming could have a major impact and kill us all! We could cross the road and get knocked down by a bus, possibly as we lit a cigarette. Anyhow, you have to die of something. Why not have some fun today? All those were typical rebuttals of mine—and here are some of the other points I used to tick off in my mind after something or someone had challenged my smoking habit:

  • Item: Tension is a bad thing, and is known to be responsible for physiological damage. It contributes to heart ailments. It can cause ulcers. Smoking, on the other hand, seems to relax people. When a man is faced with a decision, when a woman is caught up in a whirl of nervousness, a pause for a smoke seems to have a reliably relaxing effect. The "butterflies-in-the-stomach" kind of anxiety which people experience in social or business situations is frequently eliminated or at least subdued by smoking. In other words, a cigarette is a sort of drugless tranquilizer.

    • A good thing— score one for smoking.

  • Item: Besides, there are now good filter cigarettes. Some of that "health propaganda" may be accurate, and perhaps a number of people can be harmed by smoking, or are allergic to it—but fortunately, there are now cigarettes which filter out many of the possibly harmful irritants. The new filters are quite advanced, and in some vague way are similar in content and efficiency to the filters utilized on airplanes and in the production of atomic energy; in other words, able to filter almost anything out of anything.

  • Item: Furthermore, practically everybody smokes. For every ten adults you know, you can think of six or seven or eight who smoke. That could be quite true in your small social circle because like attracts like, however the true figures show a marked decrease in the number of smokers of both sexes to around 28% of the UK adult population and In 2005, an estimated 45.1 million, or 21.0 percent of, adults were current smokers. The annual prevalence of smoking has declined 40 percent between 1965 and 1990, but has been unchanged virtually thereafter. Males tend to have significantly higher rates of smoking prevalence than females.  In 2005, 23.9 percent of males currently smoked compared to 18.1 percent of females.

    • You can think of athletes and coaches and actors who smoke (and you don't see them dying all over the place, do you?). People "in the know"—statesmen and politicians and newspaper editors seen on television—are invariably smoking. You can even name doctors who smoke! If they were really so concerned, wouldn't they just use a little will power or self-control and stop? Yes. Obviously then, they realize that there's a mighty difference between dropping tars from a cigarette on the shaved back of a rat and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

    If you look back over these fairly typical responses, you'll see how nicely they cloud the issues. Even I used to have to laugh at my own excuses for continuing to smoke, and even I was amused at the fact that I could transform an AMA report about cancer in men and women to cancer "on the shaved back of a rat" in a few hundred words. So do we really ned all those patches, lozenges, gum to replace the nicotine that has us craving to light another cigarette, I wonder why it was years ago they called them 'Jack Tars' Hmmm! Perhaps they knew somehow about future medical research.

    Why should we stop smoking after all cigarettes are a status symbol, aren't they?

    This is based on an extract from the book "The Painless Way to Stop Smoking"

    Stop Smoking The Easy Way