Cigarettes are terrible indeed. That's why I spent so long building and refining the stop smoking sub - I built it for my mother. She was the most resistant person I ever met, and I knew she would only give me one go round with the sub. She had already tried live hypnosis with two different hypnotists, as well as multiple hypnosis tapes, subliminals, herbs, supplements, gums, patches, cold turkey, water, apples, you name it. 50 years she smoked, and I watched her - the strongest personality I ever met, able to do anything she wanted through sheer brute force - unable to quit time after time.
That got me doing research. Here's some of what I learned.
Different personalities seem to correspond to specific physiologies. Some people can quit easily, and some people have an extremely hard time. It depends on your personality/physiology combination; but all people can quit, if it is handled correctly, and they can quit without going haywire and they can quit without starting up again. It genuinely can be done.
Smoking/nicotine is a complex addiction, and people keep coming back to it for many reasons after trying to quit. The whole lot of them needs to be dealt with to give you the maximum chance of quitting successfully.
When I say quitting successfully, I don't mean what one of my friends said the other day. She said something about how she had quit successfully several times before. What? How can you quit several times and have been successful at quitting? Quitting means you stop, and sopping means you don't have to quit again! She had talked herself into the "It's okay for me to smoke, because I can quit whenever I want." faulty logic. Meanwhile, she's puffing away more and more every day, and talking about losing weight by transferring her uncontrolled hedonism from food to cigarettes... that doesn't sound like success to me.
That's another thing I learned: if you don't really want to quit, it's not going to happen. That's why the stop smoking sub is designed to bring all of you into alignment with the desire to stop. Once you have that alignment at all levels, it's pretty easy.
The first version of the stop smoking sub, I didn't offer it to my mother, but I sold it. Very little feedback, but one man told me he had failed to quit, and I interviewed him in-depth about why, and why he had been unable to quit in the past. Then I took that and built version 2. When someone failed to quit with version 2, I did the same thing and built version 3. Version 3 was refined enough that I offered it to mom, and after having it playing in her bedroom for 8 weeks with no effort made on her part at all, she just woke up one morning and didn't feel like smoking anymore.
The only time she smoked after that was when even morphine was not enough to kill her pain a couple days before she died. She tried smoking out of desperation, and didn't even smoke a third of the cigarette. Needless to say, she had well and truly become a non-smoker.
Becoming a non-smoker is actually much easier than we think. We get in our own way a lot of times about quitting. For instance, one of the reasons a lot of smokers start up again is that they are resisting being told what to do. They grow to resent that from non-smokers, and then they begin associating that with people who don't smoke, and resenting non-smokers. Not just because they feel like non-smokers are telling them what to do, but because they feel as if non-smokers think they are better because they don't smoke. And, because they grow to resent the non-smoker, and because we naturally resist what we resent or scorn, they subconsciously become self-programmed to resist not smoking! How's that for a snow job! (That's another thing the stop smoking sub deals with - disconnecting and releasing resentment towards non-smokers, and becoming comfortable with self-identifying as being a non-smoker.)
Physical habit? That's not hard to break either. The physical habit is quite a bit less trouble than the nicotine addiction. But even the nicotine addiction can be turned off at the source.
What I learned is that the kernel of the problem with smoking is nicotine, but that the secondary problems more than outweigh this kernel of challenge when it comes to quitting. Self delusion, self sabotage, not being in synch (part wants to quit, part does not), hedonism, laziness, fear of anxiety (!), fear of weight gain, fear of irritability, fear of failure yet again, resisting being told what to do, resisting people who seem to think themselves better than you, etc. etc. are all things the smoker does to themself, consciously or not. If those things were all gone, nicotine - as addictive as it can be for some people - would be much, much easier to walk away from. That's what the stop smoking sub does. It strips away all that self induced BS and then tries to disconnect the addiction itself, directly at the source. Every angle I could find is covered.
There are three keys to success in all things:
- Believing that it is possible to succeed.
- You must choose to do whatever it is you wish to have success with.
- You must act on your choice, with persistence and determination.
These three things are the first steps to any success, and they are where most people fall flat on their face. With these three things, thy are already most of the way there.
However you choose to quit, you have earned my respect for doing so. Do your homework, and work whatever method you choose to the end goal you want to achieve. here are so many ways to quit smoking because it's not just possible, its a lot easier than people realize once you strip away the BS!
And... a real man is slave to no-one. Especially not a cigarette. To your success!
What I’ve noticed so far with OSA is that in comparison with other subs it works quite subtle. You have this underlying sense that you have all the freedom in the world, but you only have to take as much as you need to get the job done. It comes more down gradually; it’s more relaxed, more down to earth I think then for example ASC (which is more like a no holds barred adrenaline rush compared to this). You interact only when you think it’s necessary, and have more opportunity to (rationally) think and prepare than to callously blurt out **** (emotional thinking). You’re also able to see more openings to interact with people, and the world seems more warm and welcoming (I keep picturing it orange now for some reason when in thought…).
