Stop Smoking Help...Change your subconscious

A habit is a subconsciously controlled activity. When you do things habitually, you do them without conscious thought or conscious direction. You don't have to do any purposeful thinking in order to light up a cigarette. It happens as automatically as the movements that enable you to walk up a flight of stairs. You smoke as naturally as you breathe.

All that is required to start you reaching for a cigarette and match is the appropriate impulse, and then your fingers, lips and lungs take over. If you are ready to accept the fact that your entire smoking ritual is just as subconsciously controlled as such other daily activities as tieing shoe-laces or combing and brushing your hair, then you are ready to see why silly "substitutes" won't work and why will power can almost never accomplish more than temporary results.

Substitutes do not work because they-do not "relax you" the way a cigarette relaxes you, -and do not logically fit into your many "smoking patterns." In other words, chewing gum cannot be part of the pattern of getting dressed or reading your morning paper over a cup of coffee. And will power doesn't work because it doesn't come up with anything that relaxes you or that supplies a logical substitute in your "smoking patterns."

But that's only part of the story. "Will power" is conscious direction. And when you set up a contest between conscious will power and subconscious habit, you create a conflict that results in mental anxieties and tensions. In this conflict, moreover, the subconscious and habit are almost always victorious.

In phobias, for example, there is usually "excessive fear of some particular type of object or situation; fear that is persistent and without sound grounds, or without grounds accepted as reasonable by the sufferer."* The sufferer doesn't accept his phobia as logical; he'd like to use will power-i.e., conscious direction of his mind-to escape its consequences; but he can't.