Need motivation to quit smoking?

Disclosure: I am not a smoker, never was. I never could see spending all that money, having my clothes smell, suffering through a cross country air flight unable to feed my addiction, putting my body though the health issues involved, and putting up with the ostracizing that non-smokers inflict on smokers. (Like I said, I am a non-smoker; these are just some of the complaints I have heard from my brothers.)

But maybe you are a smoker. And maybe you aren’t happy about the daily expense of your “habit” and all the other non monetary costs you have to suffer to maintain this habit. And maybe you have quit, maybe several times, but you’ve never been able to stay quit. Sounds like you have never been motivated to make the change you want in your life permanent.

Can the self motivation model be used to make this change? Yes, it can. Any change you want in your life can be made using the model.

Let’s look at how this could be done.

The self motivation model looks like this:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means that your motivation is related to your vision (How worthwhile to you is the change you want to make?), your successability (How confident are you in your competence, your ability to make the change?) and your environment, both your physical environment (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

The first step is to state the vision, the change you want to make in your life. In order for your vision to be motivating it has to be to be clearly stated and it has to be valuable to you. You can’t get much clearer than this: “I do not smoke.” To make this vision valuable to you, you should write out the benefits of making the change, and the detriments of not making the change.

Benefits of making the change:
*I can use the money I save by not purchasing cigarettes to take a vacation.
*I won’t have to get my clothes dry cleaned as often (saves cash and time)
*I will be better able to taste the food I eat.
*Add your own items here

Detriments of not making the change
*I increase my risk for strokes
*I get winded when I exercise
*I limit the field for a significant other
*Add your own items here.

Next we look to successability, our confidence in our ability to make the change.
One way to increase successability is to break down the change into its component parts, the steps we need to make to accomplish the change. Breaking it down makes the change not seem as daunting. For example, we can break down I am not smoking into:

*I julienne some carrots, so that when I get the urge to smoke, I will eat a piece of carrot instead.
*I place a rubber band around my cigarette pack so when I reach for it, I will see the rubber band which will force me to make a conscious decision, smoke or not smoke.
*I quit buying cigarettes so I am forced to mooch and become a pariah.
*I buy a nicotine patch, so abstaining is easier.
*Add your own items here

Finally we look to our environment. To make our physical environment (the place where we are making the change) help us make the change, we remove all ash trays to a high shelf, so that any time we want to smoke, we need to pull out a kitchen chair to reach the ashtray.

Our social environment (the people and organization available to us) can be very helpful in making this change. We can enlist friends to help us stay cigarette free. We can ask our smoking friends not to give us cigarettes when we mooch. We can join a smoking cessation program. We can enlist a medical professional to help us in our desired change.

Quitting an addiction like smoking can be very difficult, but using the model for self motivation will keep you moving toward your goal.

If you have quit smoking or some other addiction, please share with your fellow readers a strategy or two you used, by leaving a comment below.