Why Stop Smoking Is Hard
There are various reasons why it is so difficult to stop smoking. One reason is that smoking can simply become a habit. Once you do something long enough, the neural pathways in the brain become paved for a certain behavior and it becomes difficult to stop it. Most people understand that habits are difficult to break and this is partly because our brain’s make it difficult to stop a particular behavior once we have engaged in it long enough.
There may also be some emotional connection to smoking. Maybe you smoked because your favorite actress or actor, your mother, father or a beloved aunt or uncle. Sometimes smoking just has in emotional pool on us and those ties are hard to break even when we know that to stop smoking is the right and healthy thing to do.
Smoking also can become routine. Smokers often build their lives and schedules around smoking. If you wake up every morning, smoke a cigarette, go to work, take a break, smoke a cigarette, etc. It simply can become routine and routines can become comfortable and fell safe for us. We often times resist breaking a routine even if it is bad for us because at least we know what we can expect day-to-day.
Probably the biggest reason most people continue to smoke is that nicotine is extremely addictive and its’ pull is a very powerful. The National Institute on Drug Abuse performed a study and found that nicotine contains all of the addiction of power of illegal drugs such as cocaine or heroine, and when people attempt to quit, there are both strong physical and psychological effects.
What makes cigarettes even more dangerous is that they are so easy to obtain. A cigarette addiction is also cheaper than perhaps an addiction to cocaine or crack. And because it is so easily accessible, the more nicotine you have the opportunity to take in, which makes it harder for your body to flush out of your system. The physiological addiction makes people override the very common knowledge that they have about smoking. Namely that it kills, that it leads to various types of cancer, that secondhand smoke can hurt those that they love as well as those that they come into contact with. The addiction and its’ pull can override logical thinking and behavior. This is why it is so important to either go cold turkey or to follow a prescribed plan that takes all of the above reasons into consideration.
