When I first began this quit, that was my major worry. What if I get in an accident and am under such tremendous stress and experience total chaos in my life that I risk having a nervous breakdown in front of the police and they eventually cart me off to jail because I punched somebody in the stomach? Oh No!
What if, I need a cigarette so bad at work and my head is a jumbled up mess and my boss thinks I'm a total idiot and I blow my chances at a promotion! Oh No!
What if, I need a cigarette so bad and I'm at home and my kids are driving me crazy and I lose my cool and scream and yell at them and throw the phone across the room and it hits one of them in the head and I have to take them to hospital and I get arrested for child abuse! OH NO!!!!!!
These are the thoughts that ruled my world before I knew how to control them and tell them to all SHUT UP! "Everybody shut up and go back in your little quiet places in my brain and don't come out again! Everybody stop it!"
You have to learn how to play Cops and Robbers with your mind. The robbers are the crazy wild thoughts that run up to you and demand your immediate attention, nomatter what is happening in your life at the moment, and they start this horrible annoying "what if" syndrome! You have to learn how to be the cop and tell them quite sternly to get back in their homes and shut up.
I have had several of them come at me together, in large groups, committees of them, all talking at once. Collectively they were so convinced that I would need a cigarette that they were leading me to the store. I listened like a brainless robot and allowed them to convince me that they made sense. Don't listen to them. They're talking nonsense!
Sometimes you have to take charge of your mind and that means screening your calls. Get that receptionist at the front desk in the waiting room of your life to say "Who's calling please? Is this an emergency? Do you have an appointment?" You must learn to recognize real and honest thoughts and separate them from "what if" thoughts that are generated by the addiction to motivate you to smoke. (whew! What a mouthful!)
What I'm trying to say is this .... stop the worry when you sense it is a worry, look at it as it is jumping up and down in front of you screaming nonsense, and then tell it to leave your mind. It will. It will go if you command it. That is called "taking control of your worries and evicting those that are non essential." I have evicted them time and time and time again until they finally learned that I wasn't going to pay any attention to them. They finally left me alone. I drowned their loud voices with soft music entitled "Stress Relief for your Mind" and I lit candles and I physically turned my back on those worries.
You know the ones - they worry & fret that you can't handle life without that cigarette. I knew those voices so well. They led my life for 30 years. They ruled my decisions for 30 years. When they finally were expelled from my kingdom, tossed over the borders, evicted from my life - I learned a whole new way of living.
Take control of the voices that worry you. Tell them to stop it and go away. Then take charge of the day and find new ways to deal with life. You are going to love this!
One last thing - I came up with a motto, a mission statement for my own personal life and it was very simple: I refuse to live in fear.
