Riding Robust Dreams To Freedom
What is the inner source that will allow you to stop chewing nicotine, skip those once mandatory feedings, and resume full control of your life – strength, willpower, desire? It would be natural to think that it’s a combination of the three but none of us are stronger than our addiction, as is clearly evidenced by our inability to live the drug addict’s first wish of being able to control the uncontrollable. You cannot beat your dependency into submission, stand toe to toe with it, or handle one chew of nicotine and prevail. Nicotine’s chemical bond with the brain’s reward pathways is beyond the reach of strength.
Willpower? Yes, we can each temporarily muster mountains of willpower but can willpower make any of us of us endure a challenge that we lack the motivation to complete? Can you chew nicotine into your body and then “will it” to not travel to the brain’s addiction circuitry or create the chemical need for more? Have you ever been able to order or command the challenges of chemical withdrawal or psychological recovery to cease? If we are incapable of using strength to control our addiction and we cannot “will” our chemical dependency into hibernation or submission, then what remains?
As simple as it may sound, dreams and desires born of honest recognition of tobacco’s impact upon our life have the amazing ability to fuel change, but it takes keeping those original honest motivations in the forefront and driver’s seat of our mind so that they can both consciously and subconsciously guide us home.
The successful quitter finds ways to protect and safeguard their primary motivations so that they remain robust, alive and available at a moment’s notice to fuel the patience needed to transition this temporary period of adjustment called “quitting.” The intelligent quitter’s strategy combines an understanding of the law of addiction – one chew of nicotine equals relapse – with well-protected core motivations.
The successful quitter does not try to forget what their health was like while chewing, what it felt like to be controlled, the growing sense of becoming a social outcast, or that feeling as we stood at the tobacco counter and paid our hard earned money to purchase the more than 4,000 chemicals contained in each can that would slowly destroy our body and mind. The successful quitter keeps such memories – and others – in their mind’s forefront as honest reminders and motivations to fuel their dreams and desires.
The intelligent quitter realizes that if they allow their motivations to die that their freedom and healing will likely die along with them. The intelligent quitter finds ways to fuel their motivations, just one day at a time, through study, understanding, education, skills development, critical observation and honesty.
They know that they are 100% guaranteed to continue free today if they’ll only maintain and protect their original day #1 genuine desires!
© WhyQuit.Com 2003
The original article has been modified to be more relevant for dippers and chewers.