Four Good Reasons To Smoke
Yes you read that right. I said there are four good reasons to smoke. There are good reasons that we do any behaviour, otherwise we wouldn’t do it! If you want to change a behaviour like quit smoking, you need to find ways to overcome the good reasons for that behaviour.
Let’s take a look at smoking. Here for good reasons to keep smoking;
Nicotine is addicting - This means that you have to find ways to overcome your body’s biological addiction to nicotine in order stop smoking. Thankfully this reason is actually the easiest one to overcome! There are many nicotine supplements available such as gums, lozenges, or patches that will give your body that access to the nicotine that it’s addicted to, without all the harmful chemicals in cigarettes. You could stay on a nicotine patch indefinitely if that solves the physiological addiction problem for you. Like I said, the actual physiological addiction is the easiest good reason to smoke to overcome.
Stress management – Do you smoke more when you’re stressed? If you have a busy day at work do you find yourself reaching more often for that pack of cigarettes? Or have a fight with your spouse and reach for the cigarettes? Then smoking probably is a coping strategy that you use to help manage stress. This means if you want to stop smoking you need to find something to replace the stress management benefits. Some alternatives for stress management might be meditation, yoga, going for a brief walk, working on a hobby you enjoy (I love adult coloring books!), or anything else that helps you find a sense of calm without smoking. Unfortunately, many people replace smoking with eating to manage stress, which leads to the next good reason to smoke.
Weight management - Smoking tobacco can help manage weight. Smoking suppresses our appetite. As well, if you are using smoking to manage stress then we want to be careful about replacing smoking with stress-eating. Again, if we are going to quit smoking we need to find some way to overcome this good reason to smoke (e.g. a regular meal routine, adding regular physical activity).
Social factors - Why did you start smoking in the first place? Were your friends and family smoking? Did you want to fit in so you started smoking? How about when you smoke now. Do you smoke more when you’re around friends that smoke like at parties or bars? Are you going for cigarette breaks with colleagues and chatting? If I stop smoking this will impact my social life. Now I have to be around friends and family who smoke, I start missing smoke breaks with colleagues, or maybe I stop going to the same events I used to because I no longer smoke. Something needs to fill that social gap or we will start smoking again.
What do you think? Looking at these good reasons to keep smoking can you see why it might be hard to stop? In order to stop smoking we have to have a strategy to overcome the physiological addiction, to manage stress, to maintaining our weight after we stop smoking, and to fill the social role interaction that might be lost by quitting. The good news is because we know the good reasons to smoke and the reasons we are smoking, we can plan strategies to avoid falling back into this behaviour in the future.