Читать книгу Art of quitting smoking. Quitting smoking is easy - Dmitry Zubenko - Страница 6

Don’t try to take control of what you don’t fully understand. Your support is your inner voice and attention. Throw aside your external means. Nicotine patches, chewing gums and pills are just temporary supports, crutches that will have to be abandoned sooner or later. The real path of rehabilitation begins with the first independent steps, until then you remain disharmonious, separated. Imagine a person taking the first steps after a serious injury. After all, he either doesn’t start running right away, or he just walks with confidence. No. First you have to get up, listen to the pain and discomfort, find a comfortable position, move one foot, then the other, etc. It is the same here – listen to yourself while smoking. Try to assess whether you are comfortable at this point and if not, why? Ask yourself questions. A lot of questions. Pay attention to your wishes.

And once you listen to the nature of your smoking, nine out of ten problems will resolve as if they never existed. The nervousness, anxiety, and discomfort of self-censure, there’s simply no room for it all. After all, negative emotions are one of the basic components of smoking. It’s more logical to start with them than a smoking ban. Everyone will have their own points, but you can combine them all in attention to yourself. All of them become clear only when you listen to the nature of your smoking.

Perhaps very quickly, even before seven days, you will see a new side to smoking because of the anxiety and bustle of your internal dialogues. One that you have not noticed, wasting your time on self-loathing and anger. Your body itself can tell you, «Stop it! Don’t smoke now.» It is quite possible that you have never really wanted to smoke, did not feel comfortable with this activity. It’s just that you didn’t see the whole picture, you didn’t pay attention to your own desires. Once you start to understand your desires, nine out of ten reasons to smoke will disappear by themselves.

Since childhood, the culture around us, the ethnic characteristics of our society, even our parents and close relatives have taught us more than just the language and norms of adult behavior. But also how to forget about ourselves, how to forget about our desires. One of the greatest delusions of our society is that we consider culture to be a kind of filter that only conveys the best from those around us. This is not the case – together with the norms of behavior and language, we learn about mistakes, biased opinions, everyday patterns of behavior, etc. Act according to a pattern, schedule and template. The child can cry, ask for food simply because he or she gets the joy of the process. For him, it’s a game. Sometimes even the opportunity to be alone, to take care of themselves, because children live under constant supervision, do not they? But Mom says it’s early to eat, that lunch is only in a couple of hours, and to be healthy, you have to eat on time. And the child agrees… Day in, day out.

And in an infinite number of little things like that, we see for ourselves how we learn to act according to a schedule, a pattern. Not because we want to, or we’re interested, but because it’s the right thing to do. As an example, the banal situational smoking, when a person takes a cigarette in his hands just because everyone around smokes. Our immediate environment and society never makes an adjustment to our desires. Each individual person is guided by some kind of metaphysical Clock and Schedule. Each individual is acutely short of personal growth, but together we act as a crowd moving in tune with the invisible conductor.

All this is also true for smoking. The people with whom you go out for a smoke look at you, looking for approval of the individual act of smoking a cigarette, and you, in turn, look for support in their desires… and no one listens to their own desires.

It’s a closed circle.

The funny thing is that the hopelessness of this situation is also an illusion – our self-deception, held on the same foundations and located within the boundaries of this circle itself. Living within its boundaries, you distract from yourself, break the connection with your desires, and continue smoking.

Scheduled smoking is a separate topic of conversation, but it fits perfectly well with the example of our tendency to deny our desires. Cigarette smoke is harmful, dangerous, and we do not resort to it for rational reasons. But even in what goes beyond reason and logical explanation, we manage to act on a schedule – morning cigarette to 9:00, pre-dinner cigarette, the tastiest dinner, etc. Acting in this way, day after day, you are completely confused about your desires. You just refuse to listen to yourself. Some people don’t smoke in the morning, some don’t smoke after work, some don’t smoke with coffee, others only with coffee – so different but they all refused to smoke when they really wanted to. So after five or ten years they completely lose contact with their desires. Think about it – if you only smoked when you really wanted to, it would probably only be one cigarette a day or even a week, a month! Surprisingly, by creating imaginary self-limitations we sometimes increase the number of cigarettes smoked.

Smoking on a schedule is stupid. This kind of smoking can’t be complete. Out of two forms of morbid attachment, isn’t it better to choose the one that is less destructive? And this smoking is completely destructive. There’s a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in your pocket. And for some reason you decide that since they are there, today you just have to smoke. Why is that? Don’t forbid yourself to smoke, but don’t make me. If you don’t want to, you can smoke tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, next week – that’s no problem!