Erase the Urge to Smoke

ERASE THE URGE TO SMOKE

Changing a habit is hard work—unless you know how.Your Right Brain can supply short-cuts that most people do not know. The change work is hard because we are designed to conserve energy, and it takes more energy to start a new brain pattern than to run an old existing habit.

So we keep doing the same old, same old, even though we wish to stop.

By learning more about your own brain, and particularly your own Right Brain, you can make changing a habit much easier.

The key is to interrupt the old pattern often enough so that it simply gives up.

Here are a series of steps you can use to engage your Right Brain to make any change you want.

Step 1. TAP YOUR RIGHT BRAINThis is as easy as putting your attention into your big toe. Once your attention is inside your body, your Right Brain is in gear. Now if you will move your attention around inside your body for 90 seconds, the urge to smoke will be gone.

It will come back but now you are ready for an easy shift. Any time you want to erase the urge temporarily, attention goes to your thumb or neck or ears, wait 90 seconds and resume your life.

The more you interrupt the process of awareness-urge to smoke-light up, the shorter time your attention will need to be inside your body. Eventually, the interrupting of pattern becomes unnecessary. The urge is gone. This happens at different times for different people.

Step 2. You can add this step to step 1. for an extra zap. Take deep breaths while you are moving your attention around inside your body. One good thing smoking does is make you inhale deeply. However, you can inhale deeply without the nicotine and this is a whole lot healthier. So here’s the sequence.

Step 3. Anxiety is the first trigger for many people who then “need” a cigarette to dull the anxiety . If you can quickly move from Anxiety to Right Brain to Deep Breaths, you are moving fast away from the habit you wish to change. Your new habit is simply Awareness-Right Brain access via the big toe or whatever-Deep Breaths.

Now you are ready for variety.

Step 4. Visual focus on the objects in the world around you works just as well as putting your attention “inside the body”, in order to tap into your Right Brain. So whenever you are ready for an alternative strategy, look around you carefully. a. Count the reds in the objects around you b. count the number of circles you see c. notice the textures of the materials around you d. touch something and notice the feeling it evokes in you. Continue taking mental photographs of the objects until 90 seconds have passed. Probably the urge to smoke is gone. If you have forgotten to breath deeply while looking at the objects, take a deep breath now.

Step 5. If you have a communication partner present, you can erase the urge to smoke and learn a lot about your partner all at the same time. Pay careful attention to the eye movements of your partner. This can give you “inside” information on how the other person is thinking…the data they use, and which data is important to him/her. This is called “A Double Dip Learning . ” We’ll give you more details on this later.

Step 6. If you are fairly comfortable with the interrupting your urge to smoke pattern, and are using the Awareness-Shift to Right Brain-Wait 90 seconds with some regularity, then you are ready for this piece of esoteric information that may save you lots of time in Doctor’s offices. If you are in physical surroundings where this is possible, meditate. If meditation bores you, Steps 7 and 8 present ways to stay entertained. Meditation is simply another way to activate the Right Brain. As long as you are using your Right Brain the urge to smoke does not appear. If you have your own favorite meditation ritual, use it.

Step 7. Before trying this new mental gymnastic, only a few thousand years old, you will want to “ground yourself”. This phase means you are setting your own body’s vibration with the same vibration as the earth’s. How do you do this? Intention is all you need. First, you imagine a ping pong sized ball in the middle of your body, right behind your navel. Make it red. Then drop a plum line down to the center of the earth which is a big ball of red, molten energy. Connect the small ball with the enormous ball and, in your imagination , draw the earth energy into your body. Notice as you do this, that the urge to smoke is non-existent. You are using your Right Brain to imagine all these pictures.

Step 8. If you would like a new meditation sequence, imagine these colors, one by one, filling up your body and extending three feet out around you: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo (deep blue with some purple), and White. The traditional way to turn this imaginary experience into a healing meditation is to imagine a funnel for each of the colors spilling the colors into your body. If you like this idea, you may want to look carefully at the diagram. You will notice after completing all the colors that you feel quite relaxed and maybe, even, energized.

Step 9. Now you have 8 separate strategies for using the capabilities of your own Right Brain to interrupt the urge to smoke. You may mix and match them in whatever way works best for you. You may be saying, “But the urge always comes back.” Yes, and it is almost always weaker each time it returns. As one of our students declared, “I am now uninterested in smoking.”

Step 10. If you would like another intervention , this one is called a “Circle of Excellence”, and it does more than put you in your Right Brain. For at least one of our Quit Smoking students, it worked better than the others. We are all different when it comes to using the 100 trillion synaptic connections in our brains. The “Circle of Excellence” actually calls on both sides of your brain to set up a resource state that probably will curtail or erase your need to smoke. It also will serve you well in any crisis when you need to be at your absolute best. It takes longer to explain and demo than the first 9 steps. Here’s how you can view it; on our web site is a list of our video casts which are all recorded. One of these demonstates and explains how to achieve the State of Excellence.

Step 11. Now, it is time to review all the different strategies for using your Right Brain to Resist or Erase the Urge to Smoke.
First: Put your attention in your big toe, then stay in your body for 90 seconds.
Second: Take deep breaths.
Third: Practice the new habit. Awareness. Shift brains. Breathe.
Fourth: Notice objects.
Five: Eye movements.
Six: Meditate.
Seven: Ground yourself.
Eight: Color meditation
Nine: Notice any changes in the Urge.
Ten: Circle of Excellence.