Think different
Every time I had thought about quitting smoking before, I had considered that I was in some way losing something, that life was going to be the same as it was but without the cigarettes.
Certainly, that’s one way to look at it. But I’d never once considered that it’s possible to see the situation round the other way. That you’re not giving up or quitting something – rather, that you’re going back to the way things should be.
Apple’s grammatically incorrect slogan sums it up for me – it’s a question of thinking differently: quitting smoking is to smokers as quitting prison is to inmates.
Absurd as that might sound, it’s not too bad as an analogy. Smoking is a prison of the smoker’s own making – the reason the smoker is in the slammer is because he/she was caught by the addiction. Smoking cigarettes is the sentence you serve when you’re caught. But the big difference? The smoker decides their own release date!
Some re-offend within the first week of being released. Some within a few months. Others were inside for so long that life on the outside is just too alien – they actually want to go back to what they know, what’s comfortable – back ‘inside’.
Me? I’m glad to be out. As I understand it (I haven’t read it myself yet), this is one of the ideas that is presented and constantly reinforced in Allen Carr’s famous book: The Easy Way to Stop Smoking
It might teach me to think even more different – and stay on the straight and narra’.
