Giving Up Smoking With Mindfulness
Friday, December 2, 2011 22:51
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Giving up smoking is never easy. I know. I tried quite a few times to give up smoking before I was ultimately successful. Here’s one tip. Forget all about so-called ‘will power.’ You don’t need it, and assuming for the moment there is such a thing (which is a dubious proposition), it cannot assist in overcoming an addiction … for the simple reason that the will is captive to the addiction. ‘Want power’ … now, that is something altogether different.
Dr Daniel Seidman is Director of Smoking Cessation Services at Columbia University Medical Center, where he is also Assistant Clinical Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry). For the past 20 years Seidman has done research on smoking cessation and operated a variety of clinics in community settings, corporations, and at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University, in which countless patients have learned to quit smoking.
Seidman is also the author of Smoke-Free in 30 Days: The Pain-Free, Permanent Way to Quit. In that book Seidman shows how mindfulness can help smokers reconnect with their senses and surroundings in ways that have been dulled and deadened by their physical and emotional preoccupations with smoking. Here is a link to a recent Huffington Post article in which Seidman lists, for the benefit of those who truly want to overcome nicotine addiction, five specific ways to ‘mindfully’ reconnect with their five senses.
Here is a short YouTube video in which Dr Seidman discusses the subject of smoking and its cessation:
In this blog I want to focus on just one aspect of the ‘challenge’ of giving up smoking … that of coping with thoughts of relapse. For weeks, indeed months, I carried round with me in my wallet a business card of mine on the back of which I had written the letters H E I S T. The letter ‘H’ referred to ‘health’. ‘E’ stood for ‘expense.’ ‘I’ was for ‘inconvenience.’ ‘S’ stood for ‘self-esteem.’ Finally, the letter ‘T’ referred to ‘taboo,’ that is, society’s increasing disapproval of smoking and hostility toward smokers. They were, at least for me, the five main reasons for my wanting to give up smoking at the time. Whenever I was tempted to smoke, I would take out of my wallet this card and interiorly say the word ‘HEIST’ several times before proceeding to recite, in a creed-like fashion, the various words represented by the letters.
Giving up smoking is not all that hard … IF you really want to give up smoking. It is damn hard, indeed well-nigh impossible, to give up smoking if you don’t want to. Now, provided at least ‘51 per cent’ of you wants to give up smoking, it can be achieved. There will always be a part of you – it can’t really be quantified – which doesn’t want to give up smoking. That is normal. You have to work with that part of you which does. It’s your want power, and it is very powerful. Whenever you feel like having a smoke, go straight to the source of your power, that is, your want power, and go over the reasons why you want to give up smoking. (NOTE. The reasons you want to give up smoking may well be other than the reasons why I wanted to give up smoking. Choose reasons that resonate with you. That is extremely important.)
Another tip. When you feel like wanting a smoke, don’t react to that thought, feeling or image with panic or terror. No, that is not the way to react. Indeed, don’t react at all. Know this … the thought, feeling or image is just that – only a thought, feeling or image. It has absolutely no power to drive you back to smoking unless you choose to ‘accept’ the thought, feeling or image and act upon it. The important think, mindfully speaking, is to observe and watch the thought, feeling or image. It will not last all that long. Nothing does. Just observe … and watch … choicelessly, that is, non-judgmentally. Do not analyse the thought, feeling or image. Do not condemn it or try to drive it away. Do not try to substitute some ‘positive’ thought, feeling or image. No, do none of those things. Just observe and watch. In so doing, the thought, feeling or image will lose its intensity and disappear from consciousness, and you will gain insight – yes, insight – into what is taking place in and around you.
For more details on Dr Seidman’s book, go to his website.
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Read more at Dr Ian Ellis-Jones … Mindfulness Training
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This needs to Apply to the HIDDEN Biggest Killer in the WORLD and it does kill others to,by the millions and not including injuries caused by this CONDONED POISON
A L C O H O L
The DEVILS BRAIN TWISTER………….Look it UP
Smoking or passive smoke don’t kill or make others go to the emergency room ,NEVER EVER…….Both my parents SMOKED,I never ever got SICK from no smoke that’s for sure,but if they drank Alcohol Shit would be flying all over the Place……..