subject: Why Is It So Difficult For Most People To Stop Smoking Cigarettes [print this page] For some tobacco smokers it might be hard to count the times they have attempted to stop or at least thought about it. Many have made sincere attempts to quit for days or weeks at a stretch only to fail in the end. Once you have put yourself through this torturous agony several times, you begin to lose your taste for trying. Some smokers just resign themselves to the fact that they will likely always smoke until it kills them because it seems to have some sort of unseen hold over them that they just can not break free from.
Why is it so difficult to stop smoking tobacco? In all honesty, it is not always the nicotine itself that people are so addicted to, but just as much the fact that they have so accustomed themselves to the act of smoking that they simply can not seem to cope with an hour or two at a time unless they get to do it. Just consider that you are used to engaging in a particular thing twenty or more times a day, every single day, year after year. This is the way it is for tobacco smokers. They light up a cigarette so many times everyday that it is almost as natural to them as breathing every few seconds.
Breaking a habit like this that a person has had so long is difficult to do all at once. This is one reason that many doctors and therapists suggest that smokers use the stepping down method when they want to quit. Of course, going cold turkey and quitting all at once without any help at all is entirely possible if a smoker possesses that kind of willpower, but most smokers do not have this kind of willpower or they likely would never have become addicted to smoking tobacco in the first place.
There is also the fact that nicotine is an addictive substance. Even though it does not usually take more than a week for the substance to be cleared from your physical system, it is the emotional craving for that adrenaline rush that occurs when the nicotine causes that dopamine release that smokers are accustomed to. Some ex-smokers say that they got over their addiction to the nicotine itself eventually, but that strange desire to hold and to smoke a cigarette seemed to stay with them for a very long time after they quit and for some it haunts them still. Such is the case with addicts of all kinds. You become as addicted to the process of using a drug or other substance just as much as you do the substance itself and this is why it is so hard for most people to stop smoking tobacco.
