It’s difficult to describe how effective this method is of inducing your desire to smoke as a means of quitting smoking. At first glance, the idea of inducing your desire to smoke can seem perverse and masochistic: why tease yourself with temptation if what you really want to do is to never smoke again?
The reason is your memory. Just because the desire, and perhaps the cigarettes, is out of sight, it cannot be truly out of mind, because of your memory. By inducing, you learn to accept that part of your memory – the desire to smoke – whenever it becomes activated. If you use this technique, you will see for yourself how well it works.
When you first learn how to quit smoking, you can expect to feel your desire to smoke at least as often as normal, in situations where you would have smoked. If you are in a situation where you never smoked – in a cinema, for example – then don’t try to induce but make sure you feel and manage your desire as soon as you leave that situation, if that’s the time you would have smoked.
To begin with, the more you feel and experience your desire to smoke, the better. Inducing the desire is a very effective and powerful technique, and any time you use it – whether you think you are repressing or not – you will not be going wrong.
I have seen, through working with hundreds of smokers over many years, that those who use the technique of inducing their desire have an extremely high chance of success in the long term.
As time goes on, you will need to induce the desire less often but if you keep inducing it from time to time, your chances of staying stopped are excellent.
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