Quitting Through Willpower Does Not Work

I am sure a lot of smokers would chide at this statement. Will power was always the excuse you laid back on stating "I can quit when I want, that’s the kinda will power I possess". Here I am stating that will power will not help you quit. The reason is simple, it is impossible to maintain a constant level of will power unless you are inhuman. All humans have varying moods, varying emotions and situations. Let’s say you are extremely superior in will power wielding, as compared to the entire human race, and still there is a possibility that you would fall back to smoking when you are mightily drunk or faced with a highly depressing situation. You need will power to swim across the Pacific, because it’s very painful. There are few that possess such will power and most of them are professionally trained. Normal humans without superior and professional training would find it impossible to wield such a will power.

It is possible to quit smoking when you are put in a prison for a year while depriving you of cigarettes. You will stay without smoking for a year, nicotine would have completely lost control over your mind with a few weeks, so here you are in a prison for a year without smoking and you survived it. Great willpower? Not really, just those circumstances were such that you did not have a choice. Now let say you come out of the prison, what is the first thing you would want to do? If are being honest you would say go to the nearest tobacco selling shop and get me a pack of cigarettes. Go outside the shop and smoke at least ten of them in one shot. That’s what will power quitting does for you. It will help you imprison yourself and torture you into not smoking but there will come a moment when you feel a little liberated and will head right back to smoking.

Why Does Willpower Fail to Help Quit?

Its quite simple, you are trying to beat yourself up to quit based on a reason like "smoking is injurious to my health". So you are quitting against your desire to smoke. You desperately want to smoke but you avoid it through sheer will power. You are fighting your own mind by numbing it through force. When the force is slightly lifted, and it’s bound to happen sooner or later, it won’t be long before you find yourself smoking. Even if you stay quit for a year or more under will power it’s a given that you would end up smoking the moment you let your guard down. If you quit under a severe fear like the fear of acquiring a heart disease, lung cancer or living with impotence for the rest of your life, then there is a possibility of staying quit forever.

Force of Fear

Fear is a strong force in some people. The fear of becoming impotent can make the most blatant smoker quit when he realizes it to be true for himself. Imagine a smoker who starts getting soft erections and is unable to pleasure himself or his wife/girlfriend, if he wants to regain his potency he has to quit and stay quit. Sometimes the damage is permanent. Knowing this to be a fact is a strong reason to quit. Fear based quitting can lead to a relapse though. Lets say you decide to become celibate and hence the fear of impotence no longer plays a role in your life, now that’s an extremely example but I am just giving you a scenario where fear based quitting can fail. When the fear is lifted the quitting goes for a toss. Will power based quitting can be for health reasons or because you promised your son/daughter. It won’t last in most cases as addiction transcends relationships.

Willpower Entails Sacrifice

Remember the last time you decided to quit and stayed quit for a few days. What was your mind state? Weren’t you continuously bragging about this feat you were performing? Every friend and relative got to know that you had taken the supreme step of self-sacrifice by quitting. Humans are inherently selfish, and it’s not in a negative connotation that I use the word. Selfishness is the reason why we survive, we hold our lives and our needs to be very dear to us and that’s the reason for our evolution. Sacrifice is always a selfless behavior if done for others. At times we sacrifice things for our own good. In either case sacrifice is about leaving a good thing and living with it. It works for sometime but the moment you see that your sacrifice is not being acknowledged any further, you will go back to what you sacrificed because it does not seem to be worth the effort. At the crux all I am saying is that it’s impossible to force or beat you mind into quitting.

Quitting Through Fear As Opposed to Willpower

Fear of death is a strong motivator as is the fear of disease. This fear is ingrained in each of us since out most important priority is to survive. Quitting through fear will work in most cases. You will go through a lot of anger and frustration, you will feel that life is extremely unfair and detest life for being this way. A smoker who starts becoming impotent and desperately quits to regain his erectile functions would hate every part of his life. It is seems unfair that something which was giving so much pleasure had to be sacrificed for the sake of health or relationship. But it works, you will stay quit as long as the fear lives and eats into your mind. You won’t be a very happy person but you will stay quit. Will power or forced quitting based on a promise you made, or a resolution you took up without a concrete base, is very short lived. You would have broken umpteen promises to yourself and to your close ones in the bid to continue smoking. You will power does not have a chance since your mind becomes your enemy.