In golf and in bowling the way to overcome a bad habit is to substitute a new-and good-habit, the same thing can be done with a smoking habit. You discover that you're holding the club or the ball incorrectly; you learn how to grasp it correctly; you practice until the new grip becomes your habitual grip.
You can change almost any habit (including a smoking habit) in the same way- your work habits, your approach to a sport, the way you drive or stand, the way you speak.
But I found that there's one thing about the smoking habit that's unique.
There isn't any other physical activity you can substitute for a smoking habit.
Sure, you can nibble on mints, chew gum, drink water, or even suck your thumb if you wish-but don't tell any cigarette smoker that anything other than tobacco will satisfy his craving for a smoke.
Let me list some of the "new habits" that didn't work for me.
- Carrying a pipe, clamping it in my teeth when I wanted a cigarette. I felt silly.
- Carrying a cigarette, holding it, even putting it to my lips, but not lighting it. (Eventually I lit it.)
- Daily use of pills that were supposed to make cigarettes taste evil. They did, and so I stopped using the pills. (The cigarettes then tasted just fine.)
- Chewing gum. Have you ever chewed thirty sticks of gum in one day?
- Eating mints. Fine for after dinner, but have you recently tried a mint with your morning coffee?
- Cutting my cigarettes in half, since that would "cut my smoking in half." I learned that the closer the burning tars and nicotine are to the mouth, the graver the danger. This seemed to be jumping from one conflagration to another.
- Carrying just three cigarettes with me-one to follow each meal. But have you ever counted the number of cigarettes offered you in one day of normal business life? It's formidable.
- Betting. I hate to admit this, but there have been many times when just one cigarette seemed worth the five dollars I thereby committed myself to paying.
- Rewarding myself. I'd make a deal with myself. "Jack, if you just give up smoking, you can have that new set of golf clubs you want." Two days later: "Your old clubs are good enough, Heise!"
There's No Habit Like the Smoking Habit
There's no use kidding ourselves. Nothing is like the cigarette habit. And it makes little difference in the long run whether it is de-nicotinized or filtered with a filter-tip-some nicotine and coal tar get in your mouth and down your throat, no matter what precautions you may try to take.
No habit is quite as demanding as a smoking habit, either. Scientists call a man a "moderate" smoker if he smokes from fifteen to twenty-five cigarettes a day. A "heavy" smoker consumes twenty-five or more a day. Many heavy smokers go through from two to three packs a day.
For a moment let's assume that you smoke a pack a day.
A cigarette "lasts" about seven minutes. To begin with, then, 140 minutes of your day-two hours and twenty minutes of your day-are partially occupied by this habit.
More time than that, however, is involved. The cigarettes have to be bought, placed in pocket or purse, fished out when desired, popped from the pack, and then lit.
Would it be fair to say that almost three hours of your day are in some part devoted to your habit, if you're only a "moderate" smoker?
Can you think of any other habit that occupies that much time?
Psychologists have long known that it's nearly impossible to break a habit unless you can substitute another habit for the old, unwanted one. The person who bites his nails is often told to substitute the less noxious habit of chewing gum. But can you think of any other habit that will fill three hours of your day?
Furthermore, smoking is not just one habit... it is, for the regular smoker, a part of many habitual things he does throughout the day.
It's Part of Our Life from Morning till Night
For some of us, a cigarette is the instrument that trumpets in the beginning of a bright new day. It is part of our habitual pattern of awaking, dressing, having breakfast, glancing at the morning headlines.
For a commuter, stepping off the bus or train or subway and lighting up are coupled actions-a habitual pattern.
When you stop smoking as the result of reading and applying the techniques in this book, you will not miss cigarettes per se-but for the first three days, you'll have a somewhat "incomplete" feeling. Something will be "missing." You’ll be glad that it's missing, and yet its absence will nevertheless be something of which you will be acutely conscious.
Perhaps I can make this a little more understandable. Suppose that for a month you were asked to guard an attaché case containing vital defense secrets.
You had to carry it with you every moment of the day-indeed, it was handcuffed to your left wrist. You felt endangered by its presence, of course, since enemy spies would go to any lengths to secure it.
Then, at last, the Marines and the F.B.I, arrived and relieved you of the burden. Imagine how good you'd feel!
But-wouldn't you also feel a little strange? Wouldn't you suddenly look around and wonder where the attaché case was, even two days later? Wouldn't your left wrist feel odd? Wouldn't many aspects of your day which had become "habitual" seem shockingly awry?
Cigarette smoking is something that has been "handcuffed" to you for considerably longer, I suspect, than a month.
It is not just one habit, but part of many habitual patterns.
One Big Reflex Action
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 habit 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 habits like the smoking 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.
The "Power" of Will Power Isn’t Very Powerful after All
The triumph of the subconscious over "will power" is not reserved, however, to the victims of phobias. You can test this fact for yourself. Your subconscious mind knows that failing is a bad thing. From early
* The italics are mine; the definition is from "A Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms," English and English.
infancy it has done its best to prevent you from suffering bruising or frightening falls. At times you have been able "instinctively" to gain your balance when you might otherwise have flopped. That's been your subconscious at work.
Now suppose you place a short, narrow plank of wood on the floor. Without any difficulty you walk on the plank and you walk the length of the plank.
But place that plank twenty feet off the floor, and you will find it hard to will yourself to walk its length. Your subconscious is there to stop what can lead to a fall. It keeps begging you and ordering you to stop this dangerous attempt. You inch and you crouch and you can scarcely get your legs to move.
Yes, and you know what your reaction would be if the plank were high in the air, between two tall buildings. You likely couldn't even step a foot onto it.
You may wonder how it is possible, then, for aerial-ists, steeplejacks or window washers to conquer their fears. Well, not one of them becomes an aerialist, steeplejack or window washer over night. It is a matter of gradually training the subconscious mind to accept heights, and thus to establish a habit pattern.
Will power cannot triumph over subconscious habit. Indeed, it has been found that will power and conscious attention is a considerable hindrance in the attempt to rid oneself of a habit.
If you play golf or dance expertly, you've probably noticed that the harder you try, the less likely you are to succeed. It's the relaxed, smooth player who scores. It's the relaxed dancer who quickly learns the new step, and follows it easily. Youngsters learn faster than adults simply because they have not yet gotten into the habit of consciously "trying."
Will Power Can Prevent Success
I began to see that will power is a highly overrated concept when I flipped through some of my reference books. In Dr. Matthew H. Chappel's book, "How to Control Worry," this line stood out: "Will power or effort, used to fight against or resist worry, is the very thing that perpetuates worry and keeps it going."
In other words-the more we worry about smoking, and the more we try to exert will power to defeat the habit, the less chance we have for achieving success.
Dr. Knight Dunlap, who made a lifelong study of the learning process-and was outstandingly successful in assisting patients to cure themselves of nail biting, thumb sucking, and other more serious habits-contended that there's one big deterrent to breaking a bad habit or learning a new one: effort.
And Dr. James S. Greene, founder of the National Hospital for Speech Disorders, said much the same thing when he made this comment about people who stutter: "When they can relax, they can talk."
I began to realize that will power would never enable me to give up smoking; and worse still, that I'd probably never be able to give up cigarettes permanently until I found some new habit to substitute for the old smoking habit.
Unfortunately, there's no emporium where you can shop for new habits.
But there are ways in which you can learn about them.
One evening, while I was reading a book on habit formation, I came across a reference to a number of experiments conducted by Professor Anton J. Carlson. He was investigating ways to undo old habit formations.
In the classical experiments conducted with dogs by the Russian physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, a signal-such as the ringing of a bell-was repeatedly coupled with the presentation of food. Ordinarily, when you set a dish of food in front of a dog, the dog salivates. Soon, Pavlov learned, he could stimulate this salivation process simply by ringing the bell, without offering food. It became habitual for the dogs to salivate when they heard the stimulus of the bell.
Well, said Professor Carlson, let's assume that habit formation requires a stimulus; if so, then the reverse- lack of stimulation-will break the habit.
I tried to apply this theory to smoking. It isn't hard to recognize situations that stimulate the desire for a smoke. In the theatre an actor lights up and inhales- blppp! you want a cigarette, too. You sip your breakfast coffee-blppp! out shoots your hand for matches and cigarette. Your husband says, "Honey, the checkbook doesn't balance"-and blppp! you rush for a cigarette.
But how on earth can we avoid such stimuli? Answer: Not even in a spacecraft 700 miles above the earth.
How Do We Ignore These Situations?
Nevertheless, I continued to think about Professor Carlson's theory. There's something appealing about 'lack of stimulation" to a fellow who's basically lazy. Now I realize that when a psychologist uses a phrase like "lack of stimulation," he's referring to the absence of such things as "conditioned stimulus," "Type-S conditioning," "reinforcement," and so on, whereas when I roll such a phrase around in my mind, what I think of is "relaxation." A script editor on the phone, bellowing because an assignment is a wee bit late-that's "stimulation." Flat on my back on a sunny beach, away from such grating "stimulants"-that's "relaxation."
I knew that the vocabularies of Professor Carlson and Jack Heise were different-but suddenly it seemed to me that this made no difference whatever. If, somehow, I could keep myself from responding to a stimulus that triggered the desire to smoke-if I remained relaxed, rather than impelled to reach for a cigarette- if there were a "lack of' reaction-wouldn't that do the trick? Suppose one of Pavlov's dogs had been deaf -would the poor pup have salivated when some lab technician tinkled a bell?
No. Well then, suppose I could remain "blind" and "deaf" to the things that stimulated my desire to smoke?
Suppose I could achieve this by relaxing, instead of reacting? Wouldn't that work?
Sure. It sounded fine. But so does perpetual motion. Then, weeks later, while I was reading a few paragraphs written by Sigmund Freud, I came upon the answer I'd been seeking:
"Psychologically, every human being lives on the basis of the pursuit of happiness," Dr. Freud wrote. "This is the desire of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
"To thwart this, the subconscious must learn to find imaginary happiness in unhappiness.
"The only pleasure one can derive from displeasure is to subconsciously make that displeasure a pleasure."
A psychiatrist, reading this paragraph, would think of its implications for the sadist or masochist; he'd think of "repression," and of the "pleasure and pain principles."
Could Freud's Theory Be Applied to Smoking?
I could think only in terms of smoking. Freud, I remembered, was a devotee of cigars. And his life had been cut short by a tragically painful cancer of the mouth and the throat.
"If only he'd applied his ideas to his smoking bit," I thought to myself. "If only he'd somehow considered the pleasure of cigars an unpleasant, nasty thing-and the displeasure of abstinence from tobacco a good and pleasing thing-his Me might have been longer."
It would be nice to note for posterity that I thereupon leaped from my seat, shouted "Eureka," and Stopped Smoking Forever. Actually I thought about all this while rummaging through my desk for a cigarette. But I did begin to follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion. Could we reverse our feelings about the smoking habit?
Could you, for example, be psychologically pleased by giving up cigarettes? Could I somehow be displeased by the taste, smell, and ritual of smoking? Could we find "happiness" in "unhappiness"?
If we could, then we'd have psychological law on our side.
But You Can’t Pull the Wool Over Your Own Eyes
I knew that this was a big order. People can't fool their subconscious minds. You can't decide right now, as your eye scans these lines, that you "won't like" smoking any longer. You can't just up and tell yourself that in the future you'll derive your "real satisfaction" from not smoking. You've got a built-in lie detector in your subconscious.
No-it's got to become habitual with you to feel displeasure with cigarettes. Your mind must react to those old cigarette-stimuli with an instant "No!" Somehow, you must by reflex feel pleasure, self-esteem, security by not smoking.
Well, from my own experience I can tell you that it can be done. I tell you again that you will achieve this new feeling easily.
-You will not be tense, nervous and irritable.
-You will not start to eat your way through the supermarkets.
-You will not miss cigarettes.
-You will enjoy not smoking.
One of the things that we have on our side is a fact that you'll find unbelievable now, even though you will definitely come to agree with it.
You do not enjoy smoking.
Okay-laugh if you will. But if you've bought this book and you've read this far about the smoking habit, you're an easy one. You do not really like to smoke.
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