There are many books & courses that claim to have a solution to stop smoking, however, none provide a complete solution. That’s where TrueQuit is different.
In this video, I will be talking about some of the other methods that you might come across in a course, book or DVD series. There’s quite a large variety of them, but I’ll categorise them into a couple of different groups.
The first group is where they’re trying to convince you of using some logical reasoning, and I’ll put Alan Carr’s way to quit smoking in that category. I’ll also put Smoke Enters? to some extent, and there are quite a number of others.
Now essentially, what they’re trying to do is convince you that all the things that you think of, the reasons why you think you’re trapped and can’t quit, are not true. They’re saying these are the list of reasons why you think that you can’t stop. They look at each one and they basically debunk each and every one.
Probably the best-known one is Alan Carr. Now that’s great, and what I call background information. But when it comes to defining what the actual mental craving is, that doesn’t happen and you’ll find that when talking about Alan Carr, he defines a mental craving as a little monster in your head or an uneasy feeling.
Fight or flight reaction
The uneasy feeling is the fight or flight reaction, which I can talk about another time, which we address fully. But the little monster in your head, that’s just a personification or making a concept into a little person. It’s certainly not accurate. The mental craving is not that it is something very specific and we completely define it.
When you define it, you can see how a technique could be used to address that and make that craving disappear. So there’s an attempt to use logic now that has some effect in changing your belief about whether you can quit and frees you up a bit to take action.
You need an actual method to get rid of the physical cravings and get rid of the mental cravings.
There are some other methods, let’s say courses that you go through that often work on psychological generation of belief; belief that you are empowered to do whatever you want to achieve in your life.
I believe that is true. It gives you a huge amount of confidence that you can go and take action. Now often what that’s directed towards when it comes to quitting smoking is actually giving you this huge motivation to go ahead and try some method and use willpower because that’s what you end up having to use and having this confidence that you can succeed by using willpower.
Again, I would question that is not the best method. Why?
It’s great to have confidence, but using it in the wrong direction, you don’t need to use willpower to quit smoking.
Certainly, we don’t want to accept that the cravings are going to be there for the rest of your life, where you have to use willpower. That’s not a good idea.
You need to understand how to stop cravings from even being generated and none of these courses or books that I’ve come across and I’ve read extensively address this.
Relaxation & Calming Techniques
Another common category of self-help education is using relaxation techniques, and calming techniques to help you stop smoking.
Now that’s a great skill to have, and I certainly encourage you to learn those things. But the thing is that that has some effect on quitting smoking is that it helps you from the fight or flight.
The fight or flight is that nervous, minor, panic, or irritability that occurs when you start quitting, often that is very much tied up with needing to use willpower, and you get annoyed or frustrated with having to use willpower because it seems endless and also you get this internal fear, this subconscious fear that if you don’t smoke, it’s going to be distressing. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Having these calming techniques really can help with it. But again, it’s helping with one component. It’s not addressing all the problems. You have to deal with the fight or flight, but you certainly want to just use those calming techniques in combination with willpower. It’d be nice to be able to use those calming techniques in combination with a technique that made the mental craving disappear.
But guess what? Something even better – once you use that mental technique that we teach, the fight or flight disappears because the subconscious no longer experiences or perceives danger. So you when the cravings are there, the subconscious perceives danger. So it brings up this fear and this anxiety to make you try and take action.
When the cravings are gone, all of that fight or flight disappears, so you don’t need to use any special calming techniques. It’s taken care of for you.
So those are the three categories. There are other others, but I will summarise and say that none of those methods has an understanding of all the problems and therefore they do not address all of the problems at once without using willpower.
I am so ready to stop smoking