Quit smoking hard? Quit smoking easy!

I believe every smoker had the experience trying quit smoking, and 99% of them failed. We think quit smoking is hard but we never know why it is hard. We often heard people saying: Mr. X quited for 3 weeks then resumes smoking. We are surrounded by quit-smoking medicine, nicotine substitutes, psychotherapy, cigarettes' tax-raising, world's no tobacco day, etc. It makes us believing that there is a war happening between the world and the tobaccos, a very difficult war.

However, we never realize that proposing the war makes it so difficult to fight. It is the over-emphasize on the difficulty makes quit-smoking so hard. It is like a monster, that we beat it harder, it gets stronger. The only way to defeat the monster is to leave it alone. Sounds contradictory? But it is the truth.

An old story is inspiring: A traveler visited an ancient tribe decades ago. One day when he left, he got all people in the tribe together and told them: Don't try to remember twelve strange monkeys, they are curses to you guys. The people around him all laughed and replied: what a joke! What the hell is "twelve monkeys" and why would we remember that? Several years later, the traveler revisited the tribe, and find without surprise that the only thing the people were doing there was to try to forget "twelve monkeys". What is your take away from this story?

We should also learn from a famous Buddhism story in China, in which there are two monks, presenting their understanding of Buddhism to their tutor. The first versed: Clean it frequently so as to get rid of the dust. While the second said: As there is nothing from the beginning, where does the dust collect itself?

In terms of quit smoking, we should study from the spirit of the second monk. We should not "fight" with it, that will only make our opponents stronger, make the claim "quit smoking is hard" more impressive in our subconsciousness. The only truth is that: Quit smoking is easy, both physically and mentally, we think it is hard because of our self-brainwash and social teaching.

The more you use those complicated methods such as nicotine substitutes, psychotherapy, and the more the media publish those quit-smoking-now-otherwise-you-will-something articles, the harder the war against smoking will be. You will fall deeper in to the trap and recognize the "difficulty" of quit-smoking in your subconsciousness, which does not exist from the very beginning.

I would also recommend a book "The easy way to stop smoking" by Allen Carr. You can get it from any book store for several bucks, or even freely from internet. I quit smoking by reading that book.