Preventing Smoking Addiction - Is There Such A Thing?

Preventing Smoking Addiction – Is There Such A Thing?

My first contact with cigarettes was at the age of five. I opened the big antique closet that my parents had in the living room and took out a big cigar. I ran up back to my room, opened the window and “enjoyed” my first cigar. It was an awful experience and I coughed up my lungs.

I spent the next two days walking from my bed to the bathroom and back. It was the most awful, disgusting experience ever! So, after that experience I “quit” for a couple of years. The reasons were obvious. First, I had a very bad first experience, my body suffered for quite a while. Secondly, I didn’t get my parents’ permission to smoke, obvious since I was only five. Thirdly, they started hiding the key to the closet a lot better than before.

By the time I was eleven years old I fell for the temptation of “becoming a real man.” I wanted to be cool and belong to the in gang. It happened when I was at boarding school. It was a school run by Jesuits, who, as you’ll later see, played quite a considerable role in my smoking education. Spending the first night with three other pupils all around 11 years old, and sharing a room was quite a lot of fun. It was a new experience for all of us as we got to know each other and found out who already smoked. Marc was one of those guys who didn’t just talk about having done it, he actually smoked and he showed us his cigarettes, Blue Belga with a filter.

The next morning, after introductions to the class and teacher, a few of us escaped into the woods. There we would meet and smoke. The trip was an experience in itself; we felt like we were in a movie, it was a little bit scary. There was always a potential risk of being caught, but what a challenge! I guess we were in a group of six or seven kids, hiding behind some big bushes while Marc and Rob were distributing the cigarettes and then lighting them. It didn’t take much to convince me to go along with them because I wanted to be a part of it; I wanted to belong to the group. Just that sensation was a big adventure that I didn’t want to miss.

See you soon,

Eric Eraly

Author of the Painless Stop Smoking Cure

Everybody can stop smoking – including you! Stop today with the free web clinic on this site.

 This article is about: Preventing Smoking Addiction – Is There Such A Thing?

Preventing Smoking Addiction - Is There Such A Thing?

A Way To Quit Smoking Fast

A Way To Quit Smoking Fast

So when the balloon is inflated we believe that we feel better than a non-smoker does. Well, my parents were also admiring the view and the nature of Monument Valley and they felt at least as great as I did. They weren’t smoking! I could see my sister was enjoying the view and she wasn’t smoking. At that time I didn’t think about this, it took a lot of reflection, and thinking before I finally realized how I, as the smoker, was fooling myself.

I started to realize that I was actually smoking to gain back the feelings and condition I had before I started smoking. Once you become a nicotine addict and you start smoking a pack a day, the balloon soon gets worn out. This means that no matter how much you smoke, you are never able to regain exactly the same level of comfort as when you were a non-smoker.

So no matter what you smoke, when you smoke, you’ll always be left with a slightly uncomfortable feeling, those butterflies never go away completely. This is one of the reasons that eats at the self-esteem of a smoker.

You’ll get the feeling that you’re constantly missing something, no matter how much you smoke. The moment you stop smoking, this feeling becomes bigger and therefore you’ll light a cigarette even more quickly than before.

As we have seen earlier, this is what we imagine! The reality is that there was nothing missing before we started to smoke. The missing feeling, the hungry feeling, the butterflies, the balloon effect is created by smoking that first cigarette! Before you smoked that first cigarette, you were missing nothing. We didn’t have this hungry feeling or anything like it. So this balloon effect describes how the nicotine is working in our body. In addition, it does this very, very slowly so that we are not aware of the fact that we have become addicted to it.

See you soon,

Eric Eraly

Author of the Painless Stop Smoking Cure

Everybody can stop smoking – including you! Stop today with the free web clinic on this site.

 This article is about: A Way To Quit Smoking Fast

A Way To Quit Smoking Fast

Best Way to Stop Smoking

Best Way to Stop Smoking

When you smoke a cigarette, you take yourself back to the same condition you were in before you started smoking! What are the effects of this? How do we understand this? What are the causes? First, do you agree with what I’ve said above? Maybe you don’t and I politely ask you to reread what is written.

Most smokers believe they gain something when they smoke. They believe that by smoking they get something extra that non-smokers don’t have. As a smoker, you have the feeling of certainty when you smoke, a feeling of power in a difficult situation, a friend in a difficult moment, a relief when stressed. All feelings we believe that we have and non-smokers don’t have.

I can still vividly remember making a trip through the USA with my parents. I was 21 that summer and in those days it was a big deal for a family from Belgium to go on vacation to the USA. The whole family was looking forward to it; I would finally visit my dream country! We were going to the areas I wanted to see the most. We were going to go to the West Coast. California, Arizona, Nevada, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park and Marlboro Country–Monument Valley.

My room at home was already filled with every possible poster about Marlboro Country, so I could imagine how the countryside looked. When I looked at the pictures of the cowboys and the horses, I could feel the breeze and the sound of the birds in the sky.

Then I was actually standing in Monument Valley! So I lit a cigarette with my Zippo and took a deep pull. What a feeling. I felt I was in control of the whole world. I was calm, relaxed and enjoying the wonderful view over Monument Valley. And I was thankful that I could share this moment with a cigarette in my mouth. Without this cigarette, the experience wouldn’t have been as nice, at least that’s what I thought then and there.

It’s the balloon feeling that gives us this impression. When the balloon is inflated, we feel great, when the balloon is empty, we feel like we are missing something, we feel hungry and we feel the same as when we are in love. We have butterflies in our stomach. Remember this feeling for later on because we will come back to this when we speak about withdrawal pains.

See you soon,

Eric Eraly

Author of the Painless Stop Smoking Cure

Everybody can stop smoking – including you! Stop today with the free web clinic on this site.

 This article is about: Best Way to Stop Smoking – Quit Smoking Now

Best Way to Stop Smoking

Start of Smoking Addiction - Quit Smoking Now

Start of Smoking Addiction – Quit Smoking Now

Imagine that your body has a small balloon inside it. Let’s say that we have a balloon for each addiction that exists. The balloon is just lying there. It doesn’t cause any harm since it’s not inflated. For the same reason, we don’t feel anything because it’s not inflated.

When you smoke your first cigarette, what happens? Nicotine is a very fast drug. It goes through your veins and blood and in no time, the nicotine has found its way to the nicotine balloon and starts to inflate the balloon for the first time. By inflating the balloon, the balloon is pushing aside some of your intestines and fighting to claim his spot in your body. Because the balloon is inflating gradually, you are not aware of this change in your body.

From the moment you extinguish your cigarette the balloon starts to deflate again leaving behind an open space. Every time you light another cigarette, the balloon inflates again, and becomes a support for your intestines. When your cigarette is finished, the balloon starts to deflate again and starts creating an empty feeling in your stomach.

This empty feeling is caused by the deflated balloon now is no longer supporting your intestines. The balloon has created a vacuum in your body and your body wants to fill up this vacuum again. This is a way to describe the empty feeling you feel when you haven’t smoked for a while.

Your body starts creating a need for a cigarette and nicotine. Without nicotine, without the inflated balloon inside, you start feeling uncomfortable because of this vacuum, this hungry feeling you have inside. From the moment you light a cigarette, the balloon inflates and you feel comfortable again. You feel sure and supported because of the inflated balloon.

Actually, when you smoke, you feel the same as the moment before you started smoking. This is important to understand. When you smoke a cigarette, you take yourself and your body back to the condition it was in before you ever started smoking! If it’s not clear or if you are still confused about this sentence, read it again and think about it for a while. Let it really sink into your mind and make sure you fully understand what we mean here.

See you soon,

Eric Eraly

Author of the Painless Stop Smoking Cure

Everybody can stop smoking – including you! Stop today with the free web clinic on this site.

 This article is about: Start of Smoking Addiction – Quit Smoking Now

Start of Smoking Addiction - Quit Smoking Now

How to Quit Smoking - Tips to Kick the Habit for Good

How to Quit Smoking – Tips to Kick the Habit for Good

Let’s now have a look at who has provided you with suggestions about cigarettes and how you are brainwashed by the smoker’s society. Most of us started smoking under some kind of social pressure. This social pressure came from a group of people, friends or family who were smoking at the moment when you reached for your first cigarette. When you are a young smoker you probably started smoking in order to belong to a group, feel cool, feel like one of your heroes, feel more charming or lose weight.

If you were older, you probably started due to a stressful situation, a relationship that ended, a difficult exam or a new job, even a baby in the family. Perhaps you wanted to do something exciting, you wanted to feel more alive, or you needed to concentrate on something and then you were offered a cigarette.

Just in this variety of reasons, you can find contradictions. Smoking to concentrate and smoking to alleviate boredom, smoking in stress situations and smoking when relaxed. You hear them tell you how tasty a cigarette is after dinner. How they light a cigarette first thing in the morning and how they enjoy it. How they have a puff when they have to think and concentrate, how a cigarette helps them to get fantastic ideas, how they have seduced a partner by blowing smoke in their face!

Unbelievable isn’t it?

You hear all the good things about smoking from those people who know it, smokers.

Moreover, and this makes the cigarette trap complete, you also hear many warnings from smokers, which are meant to discourage you from starting smoking. They tell you about the downside of smoking. It will destroy your health, cost a lot of money, limit your social freedom, and make you hooked for life, and so on.

When it comes to quitting smoking, the stories you hear are clear. Quitting is very difficult and you suffer doing it. It’s impossible to quit. It’s the hardest thing to do if you smoke more than a pack a day. Without medical help, you can never quit. Even if you quit, you’ll restart one day. Your body will shake because it needs nicotine. You’ll become angry with friends and family. You’ll have problems concentrating and you’ll finally start smoking again. You’ll hear from people who have tried a number of times and failed every time. Others have used all the pills and patches available and still smoke a pack a day.

These are the kind of hetero-suggestions we get from the smoking world.

All these suggestions are stored somewhere in your mind. These suggestions then become the pillars for certain beliefs in your mind. Beliefs are very powerful and they work in our subconscious mind. This means that we don’t notice that they have an influence on our daily behavior. They do, however, and in a very convincing way.

Just as an example:

It was accepted for thousands of years that no human being could run a mile under four minutes. So, for ages and ages, nobody did. Until there was an athlete called Roger Bannister who ran the mile in 3:59! Amazing!

See you soon,

Eric Eraly

Author of the Painless Stop Smoking Cure

Everybody can stop smoking – including you! Stop today with the free web clinic on this site.

 This article is about: How to Quit Smoking – Tips to Kick the Habit for Good

How to Quit Smoking - Tips to Kick the Habit for Good

Quit Smoking with Nicotine Patches - Does That Work?

Quit Smoking with Nicotine Patches – Does That Work?

When you enter the school building, you see a big sign telling you smoking is not allowed and you see giant posters informing you that smoking kills. You have biology this morning and the teacher begins a lesson on smoking, the causes of lung cancer and its consequences.

All this information is penetrating your mind on a continuous basis. This is very confusing, even for the brightest minds. Even if you are older, man or woman, the information is contradictory and penetrates your mind from the day you are born. The tobacco industry makes sure they have appropriate commercials for all age groups and sexes. They make clear differences between, for example, male and female commercials.

Over the last couple of years, there have been visible changes in advertising trends, which focus more on the female audience. The reason for this is quite simple. They noticed that more and more men are quitting and they want to keep their market share. So, they are looking for new markets and women seem to be a very attractive and successful target.

It’s a pity that they play on the weak points of their future customers to seduce them. Many advertisements clearly imply that smoking keeps your weight under control or even makes you lose weight! That way it’s easier to attract more clients. Once these messages have penetrated into the minds of hundred of thousands of women, it becomes much more difficult for them to quit. More on this particular topic will be discussed later.

Let’s now continue with the contradictory messages or suggestions you receive from our society on a daily basis. It’s important to realize that these suggestions are a part of your daily life. This means that you don’t actually hear them in a conscious way. These contradictory suggestions have become a part of your general belief system. This makes this society brainwashing even stronger and more powerful.

These contradicting suggestions are a danger and one of the main reasons why it’s so difficult to stop smoking. It’s also the main reason why you actually started smoking in the beginning. I’ll explain why later.

See you soon,

Eric Eraly

Author of the Painless Stop Smoking Cure

Everybody can stop smoking – including you! Stop today with the free web clinic on this site.

This article contains information on: Quit Smoking in Split Second

Quit Smoking with Nicotine Patches - Does That Work?

Quit Smoking in Split Second

Quit Smoking in Split Second

So, if I really wanted, I could quit in a split second. I was in control, and at that moment in my life I wanted to smoke. The worst thing was that I was not only telling these stupid lies my friends and family, but also to myself! As long as I was telling these lies to myself, how could I ever quit? I had to be honest with myself. I had to tell myself the truth. Why did I smoke? How did it happen?

That brings me to a point around which I believe a lot of brainwashing and mistakes are associated. When did you take the decision to become a smoker? When was it? Do you remember the place, the specific moment? Silly question? Just think about it, did you ever consciously choose to become a smoker?

Unbelievable isn’t it? Personally, I can’t believe that there is one smoker in the world who consciously wanted to become a smoker. It’s something you grow into, because of all the traps that are set for you. The nicotine trap, the society trap, the habit trap. Before you know it, your body is addicted to the nicotine and you become an addict. You didn’t choose to become a smoker. It just happens in the process.

Of course, you shouldn’t use that argument to feel sorry for or excuse yourself. On the contrary, it should give you even more reasons to free yourself from a situation and condition you never wanted to be in. You didn’t choose to become a smoker but you can and will choose to become a non-smoker!

The fact that you have admitted to yourself and others in your close circle that you have a drug addiction is a very important step forwards. From now on, you know where you stand. This is important because without knowing it you can never be sure if you have made any progress.

The other major advantage is the fact that you can start looking for the proper tools to fix the situation. As long as you believe it‘s just a bad habit or something you choose to do yourself, you’re likely to look for solutions in that specific field. As you saw earlier, the fact that you believe smoking is just a bad habit makes quitting smoking much more difficult. That is because you know that it’s difficult to break bad habits.

The fact that you believe this makes smoking your top bad habit example. Unless you admit what you honestly know, namely that you are a drug addict, a NICOTINE addict, it’s a vicious circle, which you won’t escape.

The beautiful thing in admitting this is that now you can choose to set yourself free and become a free person again. You can now take the necessary steps to go back to that moment before you became a smoker.

By the time you know what the best moment is to set yourself free, you’ll already be in a completely different state, in which you’ll no longer desire a cigarette. Before you achieve this wonderful moment it’s important that you understand how you are brainwashed into smoking and how you can control it.

See you soon,

Eric Eraly

Author of the Painless Stop Smoking Cure

Everybody can stop smoking – including you! Stop today with the free web clinic on this site.

This article contains information on: Quit Smoking in Split Second

Quit Smoking in Split Second

Stop Smoking Easy Way

Stop Smoking Easy Way

Are you still with me? Good. This is something you must realize and agree with. You have to recognize that you have a drug addiction. As long as you don’t admit it to yourself, there is no solution for you. It was a real eye opener I had to accept. I’m not saying that you ARE a drug addict; I only say that you have a drug addiction. The difference is that in the first phrase you would have to deal with a done situation. In the second phrase, you are in a situation that you want to change. You suffer from this addiction and you want to get rid of it.

There is some good logic in understanding why smokers and non-smokers want to believe that smoking is just a bad habit. First, we have many habits in our lives, good habits and bad ones. If smoking were just a bad habit, it would be so easy to quit! I wouldn’t have to write this book. You could quit just like that! We break good and bad habits every single day. The main reason we believe smoking is a bad habit is that we are brainwashed by society telling us so.

Because we believe that smoking is a bad habit and because we believe that it’s difficult to break bad habits, we find it difficult to quit. Do you follow this?  Why is it then so difficult to stop smoking? Well, first of all, it’s very easy to quit, that’s the purpose of this whole book. But the reason is because smoking is an addiction to one of the most refined drugs we know, nicotine!

As long as you believe that smoking is just a bad habit, you’ll continue to find it difficult to quit. Once you understand it’s an addiction, it becomes easy. Of course, nobody likes to admit to being an addict. It sounds pretty lousy and weak to admit to your friends and family that you are an addict, a drug addict. It sounds much better to say, “Well, everybody has their bad habits, mine is smoking.” Or you brush off the idea that you are addicted by claiming you are fully in control of your smoking habit.

Telling your wife that you are an addict is not easy. It’s even more difficult to admit it to yourself! I remember how I pretended for years and years that I wasn’t an addict. I really did! Smoking over 100 cigarettes a day, I was still claiming that I was smoking because I wanted to and that I was fully in control. I proudly told my friends I could smoke three packs in one night and then refrain from smoking for six hours the next day because I visited my parents, where of course I couldn’t smoke.

See you soon,

Eric Eraly

Author of the Painless Stop Smoking Cure

Everybody can stop smoking – including you! Stop today with the free web clinic on this site.

This article contains information on: Stop Smoking Easy Way

Stop Smoking Easy Way