Smoking is at the least a habit, but more often an addiction, for many people. Unfortunately, habits can so quickly become such a routine part of your life that you stop being consciously aware of them. This is true of the habit of smoking which rapidly becomes a normal part of your daily life. An odd thing is that a habit can have a connection to a past event; especially an emotionally charged past event.

Making Connections

Since most habitual behaviours don’t require conscious thought (hey that’s why they are habits right?), we rarely spend time thinking about that habit. It can be quite illuminating to sit down in a quiet environment, away from riotous kids and niggling chores, and really reflect on your smoking habit. Go back in time through your memories and try to identify the precise moment you started smoking. As you travel through your memory banks you will probably make a connection, and not necessarily just one, with a specific event that had an impact on your smoking. It could be that a break-up with a cherished girlfriend or boyfriend in your teens started you smoking; or perhaps a negative family incident caused the habit to start.

By exploring how past events may have influenced your smoking you can determine whether in fact you need to resolve some deep emotional issue first before you can really tackle stopping smoking. If the event that is fuelling your smoking habits isn’t dealt with you will find it much harder to quit smoking.

Breaking Connections

Once you have identified one or more key past events that may have started you smoking you should seek ways to break the connections. There is scientific evidence in the realm of psychology that suggests we form memory links between the emotionally charged events that occur in our lives and our physical bodies.

You will be aware that when you recall a strongly emotional past event, whether positive or negative, there is often some physical feelings that seem to accompany the memory. This is the link mentioned previously; our thoughts produce physical reactions in our body. Fear is a classic example of this. When we think about something that frightens us we nearly always also actually feel the sensations that go with the emotion of fear even when the object of that fear isn’t near by; we are not in danger and yet we can manifest the physical feelings of our fear simply by thinking about what causes our fear. Phobias are the most well known form of this phenomenon.

When such a past event is linked in this way to smoking, for example when we remember something negative from the past our immediate reaction is to seek solace in a cigarette, it becomes very difficult to abandon the one thing that appears to help us i.e. the smoking. However, the good news is it is possible, and often very simple, to break these emotional connections and open the way to breaking the smoking habit completely.