subject: Stopping Smoking Tips Understanding Sacrifice and Reward [print this page] Author: Michelle Spencer Author: Michelle Spencer
When you think you can't smoke, smoking becomes forbidden fruit, and, as everybody knows, that's always the sweetest. In order to compensate for this sense of sacrifice, you will feel a great need to reward yourself. The rewards can take the form of buying extravagant presents for yourself or eating extra, especially 'forbidden' foods, such as chocolate. You can also think that you ought to be rewarded in some way by your family and friends and can get very upset with them for not being especially nice to you when you're stopping smoking. This is particularly likely if you have stopped smoking to please them.If you approach stopping smoking as a choice rather than as a deprivation, you will be able to see that not smoking is its own reward. Your health will improve and you will feel proud of yourself and more in control of your life. And if being an ex-smoker isn't a preferable, more rewarding way of life for you, then you can always go back to being a smoker! If you choose that it may, of course, cost you your health, and it's very likely that you will increasingly regret your dependence on smoking. But either way, it is simply your choice about how you want to live your life. Living your life as a smoker has its consequences. But smoking is not forbidden! You are allowed to be a smoker. You always have permission to smoke - whether you actually do it or not.If you have stopped smoking in the past and you felt deprived, then when you did finally smoke, it probably seemed like a rewarding thing to do. You may have experienced a mixture of feelings: disappointment at your failure, but also a great sense of release. This is because smoking a cigarette seems to release you from that imaginary cell of your deprivation. In as much as it relieves the symptoms of the 'deprivation', it will cheer you up, calm you down, please and reward you. This is why it's so important to overcome your beliefs about being deprived. If you don't, you may end up reinforcing your sense of dependency on cigarettes.About the Author:
I began stopping smoking about 10 years ago, but never really managed for long until I discovered how to stop smoking by changing the way you think about cigarettes. Here's what I learned.
