What's the Best Way to Quit Smoking? And Yes, There Really is a Quit Smoking Laser

There are a ton of different ways to quit smoking available to you. There's nicotine replacement therapy (which includes the nicotine patch and nicotine gum) as well as a variety of pills and sprays. I even saw an ad once for a quit smoking laser. Yes, a laser.

One would think that, as a result of competition, over time people would find a couple of pretty good ways to quit smoking, and then everybody would hear about it and then nobody would smoke any more and life would be good. Yeah, that hasn't quite happened yet. Instead, we have a world filled with people who either chain smoke or try to quit by slapping on a nicotine patch or popping whatever the latest trendy quit-smoking pills is these days.

Surprisingly, nothing seems to quite work. The only people who manage to quit smoking end up being massively irritating because their nicotine withdrawal drives them absolutely insane. I think that's the only thing that sounds less fun than the laser, and the laser sounds like it would probably hurt.

So, what? Well, the problem is that everybody tries to quit smoking in a horribly backwards way. All the pill-popping patch-slapping people in the world all happily think that smoking is a physical addiction that can be cured by, say, a laser-beam to the head. Probably, but you'd be without a head, and that doesn't really solve anything, does it?

Either way, the proper way to quit smoking is to realize that smoking isn't addictive because your body is addicted to it, it's addictive because your mind wants it to be. You've convinced yourself that you absolutely need cigarettes to live through the day. You need a cigarette to be on the phone, you need a cigarette after you've talked to your boss, etc. You don't. What you instead need to do is realize how much your mind is merely connecting the two things, when really there is no connection.

Non-smokers don't need cigarettes to deal with their bosses, they go home and drink themselves under the table like the rest of the happy world. The only difference is that you're more broke because you have to buy cigarettes when you go to buy booze.

Why Most People Fail at Quitting Smoking

Quitting smoking isn't easy. Getting hooked, yeah, that's a walk in the park, but dropping the habit is probably one of the hardest things you can do.

This isn't because it's actually a difficult process, however. It's hard because nobody really knows how to do it. Most people think that you can cure a smoking addiction by taking some sort of magic pill (be it in the form of a gum, patch, doctor-prescribed thing, or otherwise), but nothing could be further from the truth. Let's examine a few of the wrong ways to go about quitting:

1. Nicotine Replacement Therapy Nicotine replacement therapy works by giving you a supply of nicotine that you don't need to smoke to get. While this seems like a great idea, it doesn't curb your want for cigarettes, it merely stops your want for nicotine. When you want a cigarette, you don't tell yourself that you want some nicotine, you want a smoke!

2. Nicotine Blocking Medication Nicotine blocking medications work by preventing your body from receiving the enjoyable effects of smoking a cigarette. This has a leg up on replacement therapy because you can still smoke, but it doesn't stop your want to actually hold the cigarette and go through the smoking process.

So, What Does Work? In order to properly quit, you need to break the mental ties that bind you to cigarettes. You need to stop the connection between, for example, hanging out at the bar and lighting up. Once you break those simple ties, smoking is merely a thing of the past.