To Change Habits, Try Replacement Instead
There was an author named Allen Carr, an Englishman, I believe, who wrote a book called The EasyWay to Quit Smoking.<p>I can attest to the relative ease his method provides, over quitting cold turkey.  Essentially, he uses tools of psychology to reinforce his points, such as spaced repetition,  but he also dissects the psychology at play inside the smoker&#x27;s mind.<p>He frames nicotene addiction as a state of brainwashing, and enumerates all sorts of behavior as examples.<p>When smokers begin, usually as teenagers, there is a lot wrapped up in, or at least was 20 years ago, the coolness of it.  This is precisely why you see actors and actresses smoking cigarettes with exotic technique of holding the cigarette, or generally looking intriguing, it is an extremely effective heuristic.  Everyone who smokes their first cigarette obviously has immediate negative physical effects.  They cough, it burns the throat, they get nauseous, or just a plain nicotene buzz, etc.  Yet since they know that cigarettes are so cool, or otherwise lent social proof, all of this is rationalized and minimized, in the goal of validation of your peers.<p>A lot of the other information contrasts nonsmokers behavior to also shatter these illusions.  Smokers lie to themselves that the cigarettes are what is keeping them together.  But nonsmokers don&#x27;t seem in the aggregate less confident, or less healthy, or less mentally stable, or any of these lies we tell ourselves.  That means that controlling for the cigarettes reveals them to be the causal factor.<p>One of the low level rationalizations daily smokers make on an hourly basis or so, is that they are ready for that next cigarette.  It is time.  To the extent that they can&#x27;t close that loop, this is where the _true_ stress from nicotene addiction happens.  They&#x27;ve essentially built up experience of a heuristic for long enough, of the feeling coming, the smoking, and the feeling going away.  In the smokers mind, actually smoking the cigarette is what curbs the craving, thus, the smoking is necessary.<p>There are a myriad other rationalizations made, all in the name of not having to go through what we assume will be a hellacious withdrawal, because we wont be able to stop thinking about it.  But thats only because we trust this faulty heuristic that says stress -&gt; smoke -&gt; no stress.<p>The book simply goes through all of these rationalized fallacies, as the author smoked for 33 years, and used them all himself.  The process of reading all of this information in short succession, in addition to some of the coping mechanisms that are essentially more tricks of the mind, or ways to frame the thoughts that inevitably arise when a smoker quits, I believe has sort of a triggering effect, not unlike juicy gossip and the 24 hour news cycle.  However, the reader is triggered to parry each nagging thought with the context in which it is a fallacy.  If this can be successfully done, the normal feelings of dreading the withdrawal can be replaced with almost a sadism for the part of your mind that is receding in its influence, abstracting the sum of this brainwashing to a monster in your mind.  He is the one who wants the nicotene, he is the one freaking out, not me.  I&#x27;m breathing deeply, and smelling food again.<p>I think I understand a lot of the general underpinnings, but I have yet to find the EasyWay to do anything else.  I still contend at least part of the answer lies in this psychological realm, if not almost all of it.