In spite of all the aids and professional resources to help you to stop smoking, such as patches, gum, lozenges, hypnosis and other methods there is still a disbelief that smoking a cigarette can kill from heart disease and lung cancer.
One impulse was to quit smoking. The other was to wait for something "definite." After all, why go through so many nicotine withdrawal symptoms and so much frustration if later it might turn out that there hadn't been any real need to do so?
Well, the period of uncertainty is over in the minds not only of most experts but even for most smokers. Vast numbers of people who smoke now readily grant that there's no longer any question but that cigarette smoking is a dangerous habit. The majority of young people believe smoking reduces the attractiveness of the opposite sex, a poll revealed. Two Thirds (69%) of young men and women over 50% of whom were smokers thought that seeing someone with a cigarette hanging out of their mouths was a turnoff. A fifth said that if they were looking for a new partner they would turn down someone who they had found attractive if later they discovered they were smokers.
A major dating site has also agreed with this survey by stating that smoking appeared to be reducing people’s pulling power, this is reflected by the increasing number of requests for non-smoking partners.
Suppose, to put it in perspective, that seventy million Americans regularly drink a beverage named "Grggssshh" (a name my attorney insists I use in order to protect the innocent). And suppose that an eminent medical group suddenly declared: "The moderate drinker of 'Grggssshh'—ten to fifteen swallows a day—showed up five times more often as a cancer victim than the non-drinker." How long do you think good old "Grggssshh" would remain on the market? Even if the government didn't ban it, how long would Mom buy it at the supermarket? Indeed, how many supermarkets would even stock it?
Well—surprise!—there is no such statistic about "Grggssshh." My figures are borrowed from a report on the effects of cigarette smoking. The American Medical Association summarized a five-year study of the death rate among men from lung cancer as linked to cigarette smoking:
The smoker winces when he reads this kind of look into his future—but it doesn't stop him from smoking. In spite of all the resources to encourage him to quit smoking the health staistics show little improvement.
It didn't stop you, did it?
And do you want to know why? Well, for one thing, part of your mind doesn't believe it. We protect ourselves by thinking that Cancer happens to other people just the same as car drivers believe that accidents only happen to other drivers. Part of your mind thinks that smoking is just swell for you, that it makes you happier and healthier and nicer-looking and maybe even richer and stronger and more glamorous, you may have a bit of a cough first thing in the morning but doesn’t everybody? —and this part of your mind flatly refuses to pay attention to anything in conflict with its beliefs.
More and more smokers find that they keep delaying the difficult decision to stop smoking altogether.
This is based on an extract from the book "The Painless Way to Stop Smoking".
