I’ve been smoking cigarettes since I was a junior in college. That was a dozen years ago. At the time, I was working as a bartender and spending lots of time on the other side of the bar as well. The bar manager hid a pack of Marlboros behind the Southern Comfort bottle. After our shift we’d share a drink, a smoke, and some laughter. And somewhere in that period, I started buying cigarettes.
I recently stopped smoking. Don’t know if I’ve had my last cigarette or not. That’s not really important to me. What is important right now is that it has been very easy for me to make this change in my life. And this is a behavior that’s consumed some of my mental energy for over a decade.
We all have our addictions in life. Smoking, working, overeating, fear of failure, stress, negativity. There’s lot to choose from, I know. We all have something about ourselves that we want to change. We all have something great that we want to allow ourselves to accomplish. And yet we can go through a lifetime, never becoming the person we really want to be. Doesn’t that seem odd to you? Why is it so difficult for us to change behaviors that we know keeps us from having the kind of lives that we most want?
Why did I continue to smoke for so long when this never fit the concept I had of myself? I think I have some perspective on this question being a couple months removed from the behavior. The truth of why I smoked has nothing to do with nicotine. It has nothing to do with the neurons in my brain or the science of addiction. There’s a much simpler truth as to why I repeatedly engaged in a behavior that left me feeling bad about myself.
I wanted to.
It the same reason we fail to make the all of changes we say we want to make. We’d rather keep doing what we are currently doing. Over the past ten years, if you asked me if I wanted to stop smoking, it’s very likely that I would have said that I did. So why didn’t I? (or rather, why couldn’t I?). Yes, there were dozen of reasons why I knew if would be beneficial for me to stop this behavior, but only one question really matters in any change that we want to make. How do you feel about this change?
I associated not smoking with “quitting.” And thus this change would be about sacrifice, it would be about pain, it would be about being deprived of the pleasure of smoking. None of those associations feels very good. I kept smoking was because I could avoid the pain I associated with stopping. Whether I was aware of it or not, I wanted to keep smoking.
And that’s the same reason we do anything. Because we want to.
Whether we realize it or not, we always get what we want. By this I mean that we always attract to us that which reflects our wants, our feelings.
When you ask yourself what you really want, the critical step is to identify how you really feel about what you are asking for. Again, not your thoughts about what you are asking for, not the knee jerk response that you “feel good” about the idea. Look deeper.
Do your emotions behind what you are asking for match what you are telling the universe that you want? When there is a match, you attract what you want easily. If you are struggling to get what you say you want, there is not a match. For example, you cannot easily become thin when you when you feel fat. You cannot easily become abundant if you feel poor. You cannot easily move toward your ideal life when deep down you doubt that it’s possible. There may be a source of anxiety, frustration, or fear associated with what you want. And that will need to change.
I wasn’t even trying to stop smoking. In fact, I dropped the pressure to stop altogether for I knew that old cycle well. Put pressure on myself to quit. Stop the behavior. Revert to old behavior. Feel bad about self. Repeat. I knew that did not work, so I figured I must be smoking for a reason (even if I didn’t really know what it was) and I began to allow myself to just smoke. I stopped looking at this as a problem that I had to fix and accepted it as being part of who I was at the time.
Without this pressure on myself to “quit” something or do “what I should do” the positive feelings about what I wanted were allowed to take root and grow. With time they overtook the power of the negative feelings about what I’d be leaving behind. I now had positive emotion behind no longer smoking, rather than feelings of denial and sacrifice. What I said I wanted and how I felt were finally a match. Simple. Easy. Effective.
Remember, you always get want you want. Always. Double check what you are really asking for by becoming more aware of the emotions behind your desires.