Quit smoking now – a motivating approach

Quit smoking now – a motivating approach

After teaching motivational psychotherapy at university for many years, I believe this is probably one of the best ways to quit smoking. It doesn't rely on teaching you things you already know or assuming you don't know how to quit, but instead aims to boost your intrinsic motivation so you really, really want to quit smoking.

Let me ask you a very important question; What do you like about smoking? Think about it carefully and don’t say “nothing.” If that were true, you would have given up already. The reason for this is that you still get something from it, be it the nicotine rush or the relaxation or a hundred and one of the other things that cigarettes offer. Write down or think about a list of what smoking brings you and be honest with yourself. Include all the things you think you shouldn't admit; be as honest as you can.

Once you have your list, start thinking about the other side of the argument, what does smoking take away from you, what do you not like about it? Again, be honest and don't just write things that sound good but that you don't really have anything to do with. Write down the things you really don't like.

Once you have all of this information in front of you, you will have a much clearer idea of ​​what is going on. When we really want to change something we usually do it, when we don't really want to change we usually don't. It is this simple idea that underlies most approaches to motivation

Another useful motivational strategy is to ask yourself, on a scale of one to ten, how confident you are about quitting smoking and how important it is for you to quit. The higher the number (ten being very confident and very important), the better you are at quitting. Research shows that if you don't score at least an eight out of ten on both scales, it's unlikely that anything will change.

If you score lower, ask yourself what would have to happen for your score to increase by a point or two. What would make you more confident about quitting smoking or more important to you?

The final strategy is to imagine that you have quit smoking. That you finally stopped. It's now a few years in the future and you're looking back at that time when you finally managed to quit smoking. How did you do it? What exactly did you do that made the difference this time compared to all other attempts?

This hindsight thinking allows you to access your own advice and proper self-help. If you do this correctly, you can tell yourself exactly what you need to do to quit smoking, whether it's avoiding certain situations or getting nicotine gum or patches.

I hope these ideas help. There are many, many other strategies and ideas from motivational psychotherapy that are used every day around the world to help people quit smoking and make all other positive life changes. Remember, you will quit smoking as long as you keep trying. The most important thing is not to give up.

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