The world is changing. Gone are the days where smoking was a perfectly acceptable social norm. Though in many cultures smoking is still a tradition and a norm, in the west we are taking a very different view. These days smokers and non-smokers alike are bombarded every day with messages about quitting smoking. In some cases these messages even pertain to the law. Quitting smoking is in.

This is all very well for the non-smokers, they don’t have to do anything, they can carry on as normal. For smokers this can be an absolute challenge. The most challenging part of quitting smoking is inevitably the side effects.

So what are they? Well they can come in a variety of forms and depending on the resource you look at will depend on how badly (as a smoker) it makes you feel. Here are some common quitting smoking side effects: Anxiety, Boredom, Depression, Anger and Restlessness, Dizziness.

Looking through any list there is something that is common to most of the side effects, and that is that they are “emotional”, i.e. they are manifested by your feelings and not by your physical body like for example physical shakes or blushing.

In my research on the matter I have seen time and time again that the physically addictive part of smoking, the nicotine, actually leaves your body within 3 to 4 days. If smoking were merely a physical addiction then smokers could go 3 or 4 days without smoking and then never have to smoke again. But this isn’t the case, cold turkey (the abrupt and complete cessation of using an addictive substance) almost never works.

Because of this fact we can tell that the worst part about giving up is the emotional side effects. The reason that these come about is because when people smoke they are satisfying an emotional need. In most cases this emotional need is the need to escape from a bad feeling, be it stress/boredom/anxiety etc. What most people fail to realize is that smoking is emotional and if you don’t first treat the emotions that cause you to smoke then when you give up you will be fighting an almost unwinable battle with your own mind.

The trick to stopping smoking and having no side effects to mention is balance. When quitting smoking you need to forget about the idea of quitting smoking, this seems entirely illogical but here’s the thing. If you remove the emotional foundation in your mind that creates the stress/boredom/panic/anxiety etc. then you will never get to the stage of needing to smoke. If you don’t get to that stage, smoking then becomes about choice rather than fulfilling emotional needs. It will then simply be a case of saying “no” and that is the end of that, you carry on with your day and will thus have become a non-smoker.

Source by Steve Hyde