Often smokers deny they are addicted even though they smoke daily for years. You hear them say: "I'm not addicted -I enjoy smoking," as if the two were mutually exclusive. These are the smokers who claim they can stop easily any time they want to. But, you may notice, they don't stay stopped.
Other smokers are all too eager to admit to being addicted because they use that to justify their smoking. Being addicted is their way of explaining - to both themselves and others - why they continue to smoke, with the implication, of course, that there is nothing they can do about it
Then there are smokers who take such a severe moral stance towards any drug addiction that they are very reluctant to think of themselves in that way. These people have a stereotyped image of the 'drug addict' as a deviant and dangerous character. Each drug addiction has its own unique qualities, but just because a drug is legal doesn't mean that it isn't just as addictive as one that is illegal.
Millions of people have become dependent on relatively socially acceptable drugs such as nicotine, sugar and caffeine.
So what is an addiction?
Is it in your mind or in your body? And what can you do about it? Understanding addiction, and especially this one, is your first step.
Nicotine in Your Body
Here is an important question to consider. If you have found stopping smoking to be intolerable, or if you find you can stop but you keep going back, is this because your body has developed a need for nicotine, a physical dependency that must be satisfied at any cost? Let's start by looking at what happens in your body and in your mind when you smoke.
First and foremost, smoking a cigarette is a way of administering the drug nicotine. Some gets absorbed slowly through the inside of your mouth but most of it is inhaled into your lungs where it is very rapidly taken into your blood stream. It is then carried in the blood all round your body, and especially to your brain.
Many people think that the reason they smoke is to maintain the amount of nicotine in their blood. This, they think, is what drives them to light cigarette after cigarette. However, if you carefully examine your own experience of smoking, I think you will see there is actually something else far more important to you.
Look at it this way. What if, unknown to you, somebody, somehow, put nicotine into your blood stream? Would you really have any way of knowing it was there? And, even more important, would you then lose your desire to smoke?
I think you would still want to smoke, for the same reason that you sometimes still want to light up another cigarette even when you've just finished one. For the same reason that people still crave cigarettes while they are chewing nicotine gum. A number of scientific experiments demonstrate this point.
In one, smokers who had stopped smoking overnight were given an intravenous injection. On one occasion it contained saline and on another it contained sufficient nicotine to reach concentrations in the blood stream comparable to those achieved by smoking. They were not told which was which.
"Subjects were unable to discriminate between conditions. At the end of the infusion there was no difference in self-reported desire to smoke, nor in latency to lighting up a cigarette when this was permitted. Complete nicotine replacement was therefore not accompanied by complete suppression of smoking behavior"
These smokers still wanted to smoke - and did smoke - regardless of whether or not they had adequate amounts of nicotine in their blood stream.
So it's not just the nicotine that we are addicted to as smokers - you also need to learn how to control and change your habits if you truly want to learn how to stop smoking.
Having the courage to learn how to quit smoking is not enough to help you give up smoking for good. To make it easier, you need a route map that shows exactly how to stop smoking, with a list of all the pitfalls and hazards to avoid along the way.