Let’s talk about breaking the quitting cycle. Some events don’t cause you to smoke, and they don’t cause cravings to happen. The same counts for certain thoughts and psychological issues that don’t need to be changed because they don’t make you have cravings. They don’t make you take action because you need belief.
However, when we talk about habit ( which is an umbrella term) we have the more specific cravings and they can make a habit or the regular behaviour out of control.
There are other methods of quitting smoking and most of them don’t address these problems. For example, nicotine replacement, which is the method of putting nicotine in your body via another way, whether it be vaping, through patches, chewing gum, or through lozenges or spray.
The theory is that you take that nicotine in a different delivery method, and then you gradually wean yourself off. So let’s look into that a bit further.
Weaning Off Nicotine
Let’s say that you could wean yourself off nicotine. That you turn down the taps slowly. But why is it then that nicotine replacement is only 12% effective or less? That would mean that 90% of people don’t quit with this smoking method.
The reason for this is that the totality of this method does not address all the problems and most importantly, doesn’t address the mental cravings. Now this is an extremely important factor. You actually need to get rid of the mental cravings. Why? Because these cravings go on for years after all the nicotine has gone out of your body.
Mental Cravings for Nicotine
So when using nicotine replacement we do not address mental cravings. Llozenges, gum patches, spray vaping – it’s not going to solve the problem. You’re still going to be addicted to nicotine, and you’re still going to have cravings for nicotine because they’re going to be mental cravings.
Even if you get the nicotine out of your body and you have weaned yourself of. After 10 days, there will no nicotine left in you. You think you are now ok, so why do people, years later still having mental cravings?
Often you will meet people that have quit years ago but still are experiencing cravings. What are they? Mental cravings! Nicotine replacement does not address mental cravings. And guess what happens? You probably already know as soon as some strong emotional event occurs, stress or some shock, people respond to one of those mental cravings by smoking. And if they don’t respond with smoking then what happens? They use willpower to resist that mental craving every single time it comes up. They could be for years resisting mental cravings with willpower and that is a lot of suffering.
You don’t realise how much freedom you will experience when you don’t have to do that anymore. It wasn’t until I understood this method that I got rid of those mental cravings by using the True Quit technique. My brain has retrained, and I don’t have mental cravings anymore.
With nicotine replacement, you will either relapse or you will be using willpower for the rest of your life. That’s not a solution, and that’s why it’s only 9% effective or less.