Stop Smoking: Avoid the Willpower Trap by Using Skillpower

By Aslam Goolam Hoosen

Many smokers are blind and outnumbered when they try to quit smoking. Effective identification and planning are required to prevent relapses. Skillpower helps you identify the sources that trigger your unique smoking behavior with its smoke-diary. It provides additional skills that that target your behaviors on a personal, social, and environmental level. You can avoid the willpower trap like many that have quit using the skillpower method. It is a self-help, drug-free approach to quitting smoking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aslam Goolam Hoosen
• Release date: Jan 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005092207

Book preview

Stop

Smoking

Avoid the Willpower Trap by Using your Skillpower

Aslam Goolam Hoosen

Copyright © 2020 Aslam Goolam Hoosen

Published by Aslam Goolam Hoosen Publishing at Smashwords

First edition 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without permission from the copyright holder.

The Author has made every effort to trace and acknowledge sources/resources/individuals. In the event that any images/information have been incorrectly attributed or credited, the Author will be pleased to rectify these omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Published by Aslam Goolam Hoosen using Reach Publishers’ services,

P O Box 1384, Wandsbeck, South Africa, 3631

Edited by Caroline Webb for Reach Publishers

Cover designed by Reach Publishers

Website: www.reachpublishers.org

E-mail: [e-mail]

Aslam Goolam Hoosen

www.skillpower.co.za

I dedicate this book to my wife Kathija and my kids Azeem, Raul, Nasya and Chleo, for inspiring me to do all that I can to help people change.

Table of Contents

Author Profile

1. Introduction

2. How Did You Learn to Smoke?

3. The Willpower Trap

4. Misconceptions and Beliefs About Smoking

5. Nicotine

6. Environmental and Social Influences

7. Essentials for Quitting

8. Part-Time Smokers

9. Use Your Skillpower

Conclusion

References

Author Profile

Aslam Goolam Hoosen is a registered nurse, practicing in South Africa and on cruise ships based in the USA. He holds a Master’s degree in Gerontological Nursing. This book was written with inspiration from his patients and clients whom he has helped over the years to quit smoking. He struggled with nicotine addiction himself for 27 years. This book focuses on what influences smokers to smoke and not on the reasons to stop smoking. It helps smokers recognise their own set of behaviours, and devise their own strategies to target each behaviour. The book is easy to understand, written in simple English and avoids using medical terminology. He calls his method ‘Skillpower’ as you develop skills that give you more power and control over your nicotine addiction.

Aslam Goolam Hoosen

Website: www.skillpower.co.za

Chapter 1

Introduction

Growing up in the 1980s, smoking was regarded as normal behaviour. My entire family smoked, including both my parents and siblings. When I was five years old my family members would ask me to go light their cigarette on the electric stove if they had run out of matches. (Lighters were a luxury back then.) I was lighting cigarettes until the age of 14, when I became a proper smoker. This is when I started buying my own cigarettes.

The 14th year of my life was notable in many ways – I became a rebel, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and making new friends who were older than me. I would get arrested for weed, truancy and assault and be released into my parents’ custody. That is the year I failed Grade 9 and my report card stated that I had only attended school for five days that year.

At the age of 15, I repeated Grade 9, got a job in a supermarket after school, and developed a sideline business selling cigarettes in school and in my neighbourhood. I completed school and went to college, still selling cigarettes, and became an accountant. I did not think about quitting until the age of 27 when I started my nursing degree at university.

I quit smoking for three years until one fateful day, I was standing outside on a balcony and talking to one of my colleagues at university. He was a young guy who had just started smoking and was struggling to light his cigarette due to the wind. I watched him struggle and then I ended up lighting it for him. I was hooked again, and it was a depressing thought. I felt so guilty and wanted to kick myself. I thought to myself, I quit before and I can do it again. But it was not that easy.

I tried medications which had horrendous side effects. The gum, the patches and hypnosis did not work either. I attended one of those quit smoking clinics that use persuasion and cognitive behavioural therapy, and that lasted only a few weeks. From the age of 14 until the age of 41 (27 years), I have made over 20 quitting attempts, mainly by the cold turkey or willpower method. The success rate of these attempts ranged from a few weeks to a few months, at most six months. The longest was my first attempt that lasted three years. In truth I have probably actually smoked for half that period of 27 years due to all my quit attempts. Currently, I have not smoked since 2016 and am going strong.

Many people ask how I did it, and I say that I always had a positive attitude, a self-belief about myself. I believed I had the confidence to stop smoking, which I knew was associated with successful outcomes. I did not view those 20+ quit attempts as failure; instead, I was impressed by my willingness to make positive changes in my life. Now I have helped many people stop smoking using my method. I call it skillpower to stop smoking, as it is based on identifying your own skills and to empower yourself to control your addiction.

Smoking is a self-defeating behaviour that fits two patterns. One is short-term gain combined with long-term cost. The other is definite gain but merely possible cost. In my mind, when I was smoking, I assigned greater weight to immediate outcomes than to delayed ones. Like all other smokers, I fixed on outcomes that are assured as opposed to ones that are merely possible. Both these trade-offs are evident with cigarette smoking.

The rewards of smoking are immediate, mainly in the form of pleasure and satisfaction that are experienced within 10 seconds of inhaling the smoke. In contrast, the costs, such as lung cancer, typically come only after decades of smoking. Furthermore, and worsening