The ultimate way to increase your willpower to stop smoking forever

Zelda became fast friends with Mary another smoker when they both became members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).  CORE is a civil rights organization which helped organize the March on Washington and ended with Martin Luther King giving his famous "I have a dream" speech. 

After smoking for 30 years Zelda and Mary decided to quit together. While it was difficult, Mary was successful but Zelda was not. Like many smokers, over the years she tried many times to quit but her willpower was not stronger than the temptation to smoke. 

Years later they met up again at conference and Mary said, "Why are you still smoking?"

Zelda didn't have a good answer but Mary's words haunted her for the next few days. When she drove Mary to the airport, Zelda turned to her and said, "If I ever smoke again, I'll write a check for $5000 to the Klu Klux Klan."

She quit cold turkey right then and every time she was tempted to smoke a cigarette, she thought of writing that check to the KKK which was such an abhorrent thought that she never smoked again.
Click here to hear Zelda's story

Zelda gave herself no way out of this deal. This type of action is called a "pre-commitment" which involves making a binding agreement with a huge cost if a temptation is acted upon. Neuroimaging studies on the brain are now showing how pre-commitment is different than willpower and uses different parts of the brain. Click here to read about it.

As any smoker who has tried to quit knows, using willpower alone makes it almost impossible to resist temptation when it pops up. Even with the best of intentions and having good reasons to quit, the long term benefits of becoming smoke-free are not strong enough to overcome that immediate pleasure of smoking a cigarette. Willpower breaks down when an immediate temptation creates that strong impulse or craving to act now by smoking.

Using a functional MRI, we can now see how pre-commitment can help in staying smoke-free. Our brains have a memory and a smoker's brain may recognize that in past experiences willpower has failed to resist temptation and that failure is repeated when faced with a new temptation. But when a smoker has made a pre-commitment and is tempted to smoke, a different part of the brain is used which eliminates this short term temptation. A pre-commitment, or a binding choice becomes an alternative to willpower.

So the trick is to make a deal with yourself that is so horrible that you will do anything to avoid it and tie that commitment to the act of smoking, like Zelda did by imagining writing a $5000 check to the KKK if she smoked even one cigarette.

What deal will you make with yourself? Make the decision to follow through if you do smoke and stick to it. Give yourself no way out. Making a pre-commitment may be all you need to stay smoke-free forever.

Did a cold turkey sabotage your resolution to quit smoking?

Midnight on New Year's Eve was my favorite time to quit smoking. One particular time stands out. My roommate and I were having a New Year's Eve Party. I rigged a bunch of balloons up in a net to be released at midnight, which is when I smoked my last cigarette. As the balloons dropped and the smoke curled out from my lips, I thought how great it will be to stop smoking. As a cancer survivor, each cigarette only reminded me of my mortality. As I crushed the butt out, I just knew this time would be different, yet I was so wrong.

By 3am, most remaining partiers were smokers. No one noticed as I sat with arms crossed, watching every drag they took and angrily waited for everyone to leave so I could find a pack left behind or even a long butt.  After my big midnight production of quitting, there was no way I was going to smoke around anyone from the party. This quit attempt didn't even last 4 hours, let alone last one week. This time was one of my shorter tries but many times lasted for 3 months and even one time lasted as long as 1 year before I relapsed. My mistake was relying on willpower instead of making a plan.

Maybe you  have found yourself in the same position: wanting to quit but finding it almost impossible.  Yet every ex-smoker will tell you exactly what works and what doesn't work (implying there must be something wrong with you if you tried their final method and it didn't work for you). Statistics say that the average smoker will attempt to quit 6 to 9 times before being successful. The most often used method is "cold turkey."

"I tried everything and nothing works, the patch, gum, hypnosis, and finally I just quit cold turkey."

But what does "cold turkey" really mean? It means relying on willpower alone to quit without any help. But I argue that anyone who is quitting a second time, 3rd, or 4th etc. can't be going "cold turkey" because with each quit attempt, the smoker gains knowledge and different skills that they use on subsequent tries. They are no longer a  "tabula rasa" (blank slate).

With each of my quit attempts, I learned something new:
1. I learned how to deal with the withdrawals without using medications (I pretended I had the flu, drank lots of OJ and stayed in bed until I felt better, about 3 days).
2. I learned what to do with my hands (coffee stirrers from Carl's Jr.), which also worked for driving the car.
3. I learned to not quit when drinking alcohol (like at that New Year's Eve party) and to abstain for a couple of weeks after quitting.
4. I learned one of my weakest moments was being around other smokers. Smoke-free laws weren't in force yet and you could smoke almost everywhere.  When someone around me lit up, I learned how to excuse myself without pointing out that I didn't want to be around them when they were smoking.
5. My final lesson was how to be mad at someone without wanting to smoke AT them and smoke my  anger away.

What I found interesting was even if I relapsed, I had learned something new about my relationship to smoking, so that on the next quit attempt, I didn't have to deal with that aspect again because I had already learned what to do. The hard part was that new stuff would pop up with each quit attempt and it was like starting all over again.

I had to learn many different things before I was finally successful at remaining smoke-free. So my last cigarette was August 19, 1990 and it was a very anti-climatic event. As I put out my last cigarette, I knew this time was different and I would be successful because I had learned how to deal with the physical, behavioral, social and habitual rites associated with the way I smoked and this time I had a plan lasting 1 year on what to do to avoid relapsing.

To say I quit "cold turkey" (even though I used NO medications and it appeared that I just put it out and walked away), is stating an injustice to all the hard work I had done each quit attempt before. Only my very first attempt was "cold turkey", because with every attempt after that, I built on my knowledge until my last quit was an accumulation of skills, behaviors and techniques I had mastered to be successful.

Quitting smoking is like learning calculus: you have to learn how to add and subtract, do your multiplication tables, a little algebra and trig before you're ready for that first calculus class. When you pass the class, you wouldn't say that I know that 1 + 1 = 2 and that is why I passed calculus, yet if you didn't know the basics of math, you would never be successful at that calculus class. Successful quitters are at the end of a journey you are still taking, they have already passed the advanced class, while you may still need to learn some basics.

So if your New Year's Eve resolution was to quit smoking and now after a week, it didn't happen, did you try to learn calculus without learning your multiplication tables? Change your resolution to let this year be the year you start learning the basics of what you need to be successful and develop a personalized plan.  Start by signing up for my blog and I will send you a free PDF copy of "Tips to Win At Quitting". Why not start today?