Ready to Stop?

Okay, so you have decided that you want to stop smoking. That, believe it or not, is the hardest bit. If you are convinced that you want to stop you will be more receptive to the information and will absorb it a lot more readily. If you do not even want to stop, you won't want to be convinced, you will rubbish the advice and try to give arguments against it. If this is you then you are not ready for this method - you need to be totally convinced of your desire to quit before you go any further.

Well, you're still here, maybe you are ready...

When you stop, you will be mentally prepared, strong and confident and you will enjoy stopping. After you have stopped you will not avoid normally smoke-tempting situations (seeing friends who smoke, going to the pub etc.) - you will simply continue your life as normal and re-tune your mind to being a non-smoker. This will not be difficult as you will quickly start to benefit from not smoking in terms of health, confidence, relaxation etc. and you will feel an amazing sense of liberation.

It may be difficult to understand now, but you will soon look at smokers with a sense of pity, not jealousy. You will wonder why they are doing that to themselves and you will start to question why you did it to yourself for so long. But whatever you do, don't preach about how easy it is. It is easy to look from this side of the fence - from the ex-smoking side - and say how simple it is. But this will only make the smoker dig in their heels and become a more ardent smoker and less likely to want to try stopping. All you need to say is how easy they would find it, how rewarding it was to stop and how much better your life is now. You say that once and when that person is ready to stop they will ask you how you did it.

Any way, back to you - Your lifestyle will not change because that will cause you to resent stopping smoking. If you stop seeing your friends who smoke, or stop going to the pub because you think you might be tempted to smoke your social life will suffer, your perceived quality of life will drop and you will blame it on stopping smoking. This will remove the enjoyment from stopping smoking and you will start to associate smoking with happier times. What you must do is put yourself in situations where you would normally be tempted to smoke and look at those around you sucking on their cigarettes and breathing the thick smoke into their lungs. Think of the damage they are doing to themselves and just be thankful that you are no longer in that position. You need to face these situations and go through all of the reasons for not smoking and keep convincing yourself that you are not even slightly tempted to smoke again.

In the same way, do not substitute smoking with eating more. Even though the nicotine pang is very similar to hunger it cannot be satisfied with food. Also, if you eat more you will put on weight and this may make you unhappy - again you will associate stopping smoking with unhappiness and smoking with better times - thus elevating the status of smoking once more to something you would like but are not allowing yourself to have, rather than seeing it for what it is - something you don't need and are glad to be rid of.

As for nicotine substitutes - gum, patches, pills and inhalers, these show that you accept your body's need for nicotine and you are not dealing with the problem you are just moving it elsewhere. This will slow down the process of stopping smoking and make it longer, more drawn out and far more difficult. Although many people have used the SmokeWorm Plan and have been able to stop smoking without using nicotine substitutes, a large number of people have written to me saying that they simply can't suffer the initial cravings and they have used patches or gum to 'take the edge off' the intense early withdrawal symptoms. So I simply cannot ignore the fact that nicotine replacement combined with the SmokeWorm Plan does work. The fact is that different things work for different people and you should try the plan without nicotine replacement first

The whole idea behind the SmokeWorm plan is that you are convinced that you no longer want to smoke, and this includes everything associated with it - the nicotine, the slavery of having to repeat the same ritual dozens of times a day, the smell, the taste and the sensation. In short, you just want to be a non-smoker - and non-smokers do not need to find a replacement for nicotine, so neither should you.