Breaking the Psychological Addiction to Cigarettes

Breaking the psychological addiction too requires just a little bit of discipline and a lot of patience.

The first step is the most difficult for the heavily addicted smoker. However this baby step toward quitting smoking is also the most potent. The technique requires that you simply wait five minutes before having your cigarette. This is a huge step, it's so important that the name of this article is based on this simple step. Can you wait five minutes? If you can, keep reading.

Now, this doesn't count if you can't have a cigarette, anyway. If you're on an airplane or in a restaurant or any other location where smoking is not allowed, then you're really not waiting five minutes, you're simply not allowed to smoke. While being on an airplane prevents you from smoking for a period of time, it does not help you to break the psychological addiction, except perhaps as proof that you can live without a cigarette. Still, it is the act of waiting because of your own choice that matters.

Research has timed out a typical cigarette craving and found it to be a surprisingly short time, ninety seconds on average. That's a minute and a half that you'll be a little bit uncomfortable. Waiting five minutes to have that cigarette isn't about enduring the cravings, its about taking control over them. One of the essential core realities with addictions is that something has control over you. Your cravings decide when you'll have your next cigarette, not your own choice. Waiting five minutes simply puts you back in the driver's seat and that makes all the difference in the world.

I have to tell you, when I quit smoking, I learned somewhere that the average period of craving was around ninety seconds. Now that I'm committing my thoughts to an on-line article, I've been looking for some corroboration on this statistic, but I haven't really found much. Out of the 50 sites I looked at, only one mentioned that the period of cravings is said to last only "a couple of minutes". Somewhere out there is a more definitive answer, but for now it is enough to understand that the cravings last nowhere as long as you may think.

To me, waiting five minutes is much like the Boston Tea Party where American rebels threw a bunch of tea from England into the Boston Harbor to protest England's King George's taxes. It is a little bit like Ghandi removing a grain of salt from the ocean to break the monopoly that the British had on salt production in Colonial India. Waiting five minutes is a small act with big consequences. You learn that you can control yourself, you learn that you CAN do it. You poke a hole in the control that cigarettes exert over you, and it only takes five minutes.

Again, this five minute period only applies to those times when you can have a cigarette. It doesn't count if you really can't have a cigarette like when you're in a non-smoker's home or some other limitation. However, when you're in your car, in your home, or wherever else where you can freely smoke, THAT'S when you'll want to wait your five minutes.

Once you're convinced that you have control again over when you smoke, you can start to lengthen that five minute period. Remember, once you start to wait five minutes, you'll quickly come to understand that the cravings are not lasting the entire five minutes, they last much less than that. When I was in this phase of quitting, I found that sometimes I would forget to have my cigarette. It kind of depends on what you're doing with your time. If you're just sitting there, watching the clock, waiting for the five minutes to pass, chances are you're not going to forget to have your cigarette. However, getting busy with some other activity instead of having your cigarette can easily give rise to forgetting about it entirely. I might add that this selective attention is enhanced by meditation which can also have profound effects on your life in general (but that's a whole 'nother story.)

After you've taken back control over your cigarette intake, you can begin to lengthen that five minute period. I myself found the knowledge that I can have a cigarette in the future to be quite comforting during this period. Knowing that you CAN and WILL have a cigarette sometime in the future is going to be the last crutch that you can lean on, and that's okay.

The next step is to start poking holes in the physical and psychological addiction simultaneously. This can be done by only smoking during the odd hours. If you have some superstitious issue with odd hours and would prefer to smoke only during the even hours, you have my blessings. It doesn't matter really. Just don't go changing the rules once you've begun the process. Cheating doesn't help you and only you will know if you're cheating.

If you haven't yet begun to even act on the suggestions found earlier in this article, these ideas here may seem daunting, however the whole idea here is to remember that we became addicted to cigarettes in baby steps and we can quit smoking with baby steps.

At this point, you've done some excellent work to lower the amount of nicotine that you're getting from your cigarettes to break the physical addiction. You've found that you can actually control when you have that next cigarette by waiting five minutes, and you've even been able to stretch that little hole much larger by only smoking during the odd numbered hours.

At this point, some people may feel ready to take the plunge, get some acupuncture treatments and put down those cancer sticks. However, if you want to stretch this addiction hole out a little bit larger, you can continue to back off your cigarette usage to one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening.

If you're down to three cigarettes per day, you're more than ready to put them down. Now, it is only a crutch, not an addiction. You've done it, you've quit. All you have to do now is stop smoking. The irony in this statement has not gone unnoticed. : )

Page One: Quit Smoking in Five Minutes
Page Two: Breaking the Physical Addiction to Cigarettes
Page Three: Breaking the Psychological Addiction to Cigarettes
Page Four: Acupuncture
Page Five: A few stray ideas