The Mindful Approach to Quitting Smoking, part 1.
Welcome to the series of 3 blogs where I am sharing everything you need to know to quit smoking without fighting cravings and by instead using your imagination to build your motivation so that saying “No” to a cigarette/vape is NO-BRAINER!
The process of quitting itself is made of three steps:
Disenchantment.
Enchantment.
New Habits.
But before you dive into the first step, you need to know why WILLPOWER often fails when it comes to quitting. So you stop banging your head against the wall with it!
This is why this blog post is about:
Smoking as a Toxic Coping Mechanism for Anxiety
Why is Willpower destined to fail?
Mindfulness to the RESCUE!
Smoking as a Toxic Coping Mechanism for Anxiety
We all know that physical health suffers when we smoke, don’t we?
But we do not talk nearly enough about how mental health also suffers if we use smoking as a crutch in place of proper self-care.
This is why I can't stress it enough:
Understanding the relationship between anxiety/stress & smoking is CRUCIAL
to break free from EITHER one of their feedback loops!
You will see that they have a lot in common and this is why it is absolutely necessary to heal them both at the same time.
The first thing we need to know is that anxiety and smoking both follow the same pattern, called the AVOIDANCE CYCLE.
The Avoidance Cycle
Let’s first take a quick glance on how Anxiety is perpetuated as a type avoidance cycle and then move on to Smoking.
When we are anxious, we feel a lot of discomfort caused by fear.
We want to reduce the discomfort, understandably so.
Ever wonder WHY we worry when we are anxious?
What kind of function the mental behavior might serve?
It does not just happen.
In reality, we use the mental behavior WORRYING to AVOID feeling the fear.
Unfortunately, it leads to our well-meaning brain latching onto WORRYING as a helpful strategy because it equates us having relief from fear with SURVIVAL itself.
(I didn’t just imagine this! Check out the book by “Unwinding Anxiety” by Dr Jud)
A truly helpful strategy is PROBLEM - SOLVING, not worrying.
But please tell me:
Do YOU know the difference between when you are problem-solving vs when you are worrying?
It is an important distinction to make because often we think we are solving something, while we are actually Worrying instead!!!
When does Anxiety usually come around?
It is when we are grappling with UNCERTAINTY of some kind, right?
To create more certainty, we start to problem solve, of course! If we come up with a solution, our fear reduces, WE FEEL BETTER!
Our brains like that!
They remember “problem solving” as a helpful strategy for survival, because in the language of our brain feeling better = survival.
BUT…
More often than not, we actually WORRY instead of problem solving even if we think we are problem solving.
Worrying rarely leads to good solutions, but it can make us feel MORE IN CONTROL of the situation.
It gives us a sense of MOMENTARILY RELIEF from the discomfort we feel faced with sheer Uncertainty.
As a result of that, we end up reinforce our ANXIETY because our brain latches onto WORRYING as a a useful behavior.
Because the avoidance of DISCOMFORT means SURVIVAL in our brain’s language.
So why is Willpower destined to fail when it comes to quitting?
Yep, I am definitely getting to answering this question but for you to understand it fully, we first need to see how come SMOKING is an avoidance cycle as well!
When we smoke, our brain, just like with the mental behavior of worrying, latches onto the behavior of smoking, because it associates the momentarily relief it provides…with SURVIVAL, of course.
How ironic?!
When we smoke to take a pause - we use smoking to AVOID stress and tension.
Understandably so!
Fear and stress are uncomfortable.
However, it takes only a few rounds of smoking when you are stressful/anxious for your brain to remember:
”Smoking when anxious gives me relief = must be good for my survival.
Let’s do it again!”
This is an ancient learning mechanism in play called “reward-based” learning.
It has helped our ancestors to remember where the food was and to avoid danger.
However, in the modern world, it is being hijacked by various habits and an mechanism for our SELF-DESTRUCTION, not survival.
Wait, what? Yep, our brain is simple:
It repeats behaviors that give it pleasure and take away discomfort, however temporary their effects are, because EVOLUTIONARY it has learnt to associate those effects with survival!
Unfortunately, when we habitually smoke or worry in reaction to challenges, we do NOT get any more prepared or skilled to face them. Neither do these habits teach us to connect with the safe and calm center within us.
THIS IS THE BOTTOM LINE:
Smoking and worrying do neither of those things.
They only perpetuate themselves as habits.
Are you getting a bit more convinced to QUIT worrying AND smoking? If your answer is YES, then I consider my job half done here.
Because before you go, I need to make sure that you will not give up half-way in the process.
For that, you need to STOP relying on Willpower alone and learn to unwind habits from their very core by LEVERAGING the mechanism that creates them AGAINST it!
Read on!
Willpower as a finite resource.
This is all the neuroscience you need to know to start, right here:
Where do habits lie?
In the so-called emotional/limbic part of our brain.
Where does our willpower “reside”?
In the part of our brain that is hundreds millions years younger than the emotional part of our brain, and that is our rational brain, Prefrontal cortex.
So if the emotional part of our brain is hundreds millions years older, evolutionarily speaking, than our rational brain, it means that it is much more developed and robust!
That means that in the battle in between them two or between the habits and willpower, the older, emotional part is bound to win!
It is especially likely to win when you are stressed or anxious, because those are the times when our rational brain tends to fail under the pressure of all the emotions storming in!
Ironically, this is when we tend to have cravings to smoke ESPECIALLY if we have been using smoking as a toxic coping skill.
Remember, that when the brain forms a habit it is created by the mechanism called the reward-based learning which original purpose is to INCREASE our chances for survival
So when you are trying to TALK yourself out of smoking, you are using a weaker part of your brain to effect a mechanism that is located not just in a stronger and more developed part of your brain but according to it, that mechanism serve its SURVIVAL!
What really needs to happen is that instead of fighting with the emotional part of the brain, we need to GET IT ON BOARD with our mission!
How?
Mindfulness is the answer!
Let’s begin exploring it in the section below and continue in earnest in this blog’s part 2.
Mindfulness to the rescue!
So if you have been reading this blog post, you know now that relying solely on willpower to quit smoking is a common misconception that set us for disappointment!
This is why it is even more important to realize that breaking free from smoking is not about suppressing the urge but having our emotional brain UPDATE the value it associates with smoking.
Basically, we need to show our brain that smoking actually is NOT as rewarding as it seems to be!
It is not beneficial to our survival and we KNOW that.
But we know that RATIONALLY not emotionally.
Rational knowledge is great but if it was enough for us to quit smoking, we would have already done it.
What our brains needs is an EXPERIENCE of how truly unrewarding smoking is.
This is where we can use MINDFULNESS to deliver such an experience!
Are you ready to learn about HOW you can apply Mindful Attention to teach your brain to give up SMOKING without having to fight for it with the willpower, read on!
Part 2 of “The Mindful Approach to Quitting Smoking”
