1) Telling Everyone

When trying to quit a habit such as smoking, a lot of people make it their first step to tell everyone around them. Whether they start doing this before they quit, or after and during, they go around to friends family and co-workers and start to tell them how they have made their decision. This seems to make sense because we want others around us to be supportive proud of us. We feel that people around us might stop offering us smokes or whatever our addiction is, and they might clear the path for us to change our habit.

I think this is a mistake simply for the reason that it puts added pressure on us in various ways, and this pressure begins to play with our emotions. When we get irritable we start to blame others for our weakness and resentment grows. Eventually, we might even get set off and direct our anger and our weakness at others. Meanwhile, we come across someone on the side, that offers us our addiction, with full support in participating, and this feels good in the exact way our logical mind would disapprove of.

Quitting means quitting, and it shouldn't rely on others' support and sentiments. If you have struggled before with addiction and haven't been able to master yourself in this regard, trying NOT announcing it to anyone. If someone asks “Oh, are you quitting x these days?” Just answer, “Meh, I dunno, just cutting back I guess, maybe.”

2) Trying to Quite Cold Turkey

This one I think is a killer and silly. It is quite hard to quit things cold turkey, and I mean this especially in the biological sense. Whether its coffee, smoking, or all the way to opiates, the body fares FAR better when we are a light to moderate user, rather than a heavy or high-level user. The withdrawals are far less severe, which means we can have more energy and mental power to concentrate on the other important things that can help us continue in our intended direction.

Often addicts mistakenly decide they have to use heavily before their intended date of stopping. This is an irrational approach, which is basically an excuse to partake more in our bad habit, and it makes quitting all the more harder. It's true some people have quit cold turkey with various difficult habits, but I don't think that it is evidence that this is beneficial or optimal.

Truly, especially with opiates, it is difficult for people to ween themselves down, but this is really part of the root difficulty of getting clean and sober in the first place. Once one learns the “habit” of doing less, we begin to naturally quit our habit without much more effort. The direction of slowly doing less, is in itself the path to control in this regard.

To me this is a very strong insight.

3) Trying to Change Instincts Rather Than Preferences

I sometimes read some intelligent people talk about psychology, and they like to discuss the importance of the division between instinct and preference. The idea is instinct, for example, stops us from being able to eat “poo” (try it if you think you can do it!). In contrast a preference is like not wanting to jump into cold water. Even though its uncomfortable, we can usually force ourselves to do it by our own will.

A strong addiction is closer to an instinct. Very difficult to use the mind and will to control. I think rather we should work with our weaker addictions, or subsets of our strong addictions, and practice exercising control over them.

This is helpful to understand with the above section. Perhaps we cannot stop smoking cold turkey, but we MIGHT be able to smoke one less smoke per day. Maybe one smoke less is too difficult, but we might be able to wait 1 minute before we have that smoke.

It seems to me we are always trying to take on mountains, and trying to create long lasting change in an instant. Strong, long-lasting change, doesn't happen in an instant in my opinion (unless by chance). Rather, over time, we can change the small things in our life and gain momentum that lasts long enough for us to have a real change in our brain and our lifestyle.

I really think this is key.

For some people, any change around our lifestyles or addiction is nearly impossible. Furthermore there are some people that just have no control whatsoever over their preferences. For these people, they should look for habits in their life that they wish to change, but they don't any emotional attachment or difficulty tackling. Perhaps eating a healthy food they normally avoid, but that doesn't exact make them gag. Adding a walking routine might be another easy change one can make that might eventually bring about bigger change over time.

The trick is to pick easy things to change that don't create any mental friction or waste any mental energy. Over time I think this creates plasticity in one's life and mind.

4) Making a Date and Counting the Days

I think this is a big killer. Much like telling all our peers we are quitting, making a date and counting the days puts added pressure on ourselves that I feel is unnecessary. Counting our days is often the core part of addiction counseling programs and group therapies. I don't meant to completely re-write the system, but I can't help but feel only the lucky ones get through these with success and so we feel that this is an important aspect of recovery.

The truth is that change takes time, and perseverance. That means that we should expect to fall off the horse, and rather than trying make great change in one shot, we should be training ourselves to pick ourselves up each time and try again. Once we have this mind set, failure doesn't set us so far back.

Do we understand why this is important?

It's because when we quit initially its often near the cold turkey way. If we are strong for a few weeks and fail, rather than give up and let go, we might pick ourselves up after a few days, and then we are already somewhat weened down biologically or chemically from our substance. This becomes a very powerful cycle for change.

Furthermore, this creates a new habit of failing but then trying again. Rather than concentrate on getting RID of an existing habit, we begin to grow a new one.

When we don't count the days, or making a starting date, we don't feel so guilty if we fail, and there is no pressure from ourselves and others in this regard. Any change we make, no matter how small, becomes true change, and it comes out of itself, rather than something external that we might be leaning on.

5) Religion Versus Science; Will Power Versus Chemistry

This all leads us to what I refer to as the science or religion of addiction and quitting, which is also really comparable to dealing with will power versus chemistry. Quitting addiction, or making changes in our thought patterns and daily lives, is not about will power. I think we should not approach the subject mentally, and instead we should take caution to approach this game scientifically.

Change Takes Time

I think if we use some of the methodology above we can understand the truth and power of this. We shouldn't be telling ourselves we need to be mentally strong, instead, we should be tending to the chemical changes our addictions instill in our bodies.

Change takes time, and once we change our habits, our thought patterns and brain will change with them. We shouldn't expect change to happen in a moment, and we shouldn't expect the brain to effect our daily routines by “will power” alone. We can make small strides in the direction we wish to go and peel away some of the easier challenges that are related to the bigger changes we wish to make. This kind of change is easier to make, and the success we have will give us strength and plasticity to take on bigger and more important problems we wish to solve in our lives.