If you have been a smoker for any length of time, chances are you've contemplated quitting smoking at some stage in your smoking career, or even tried to quit at least once.

One of the more popular ideas to be rid of the evil nicotine monkey, is cutting down on the amount of cigarettes you smoke each day. The idea is, you eliminate one cigarette from your daily schedule each day for a set period of time, until you have said goodbye to the remaining cigarette of the day for good.

Looks great on paper doesn't it.

Let me explain why this has to be the most absurd reasoning anyone could have ever thought up.

Honestly, only some sort of mad scientist, or a cigarette company exec, or a mad cigarette company exec, could have ever dreamed up something so insane. They also must have looked up the nearest sadist and invited them over for lunch, just for good measure. Then giggling evilly, they unleashed this form of cruel and unusual punishment on the nearest smoker, just for kicks.

Let me elaborate.

Human beings are a notoriously rebellious bunch. It starts when we are first able to pull ourselves completely upright, and reach just high enough to get one little pudgy hand down the neck of the cookie jar to paw at the freshly baked, delicious smelling treats. The ones with the special pink frosting. The ones we have been expressly forbidden to touch.

So when we are told we are no longer allowed something we have previously had full access to (for a good few years mind), what do you think will happen?

All hell will break loose, that's what.

Suddenly, the power nicotine has over the smoker doubles.

Suddenly, thoughts of smoking fill their brain to capacity, allowing little else to enter, be it children, work, driving or __________ (insert everyday activity here).

Suddenly, not much else matters except when that next fix of nicotine is going to come. The one that until now, came with soothing regularity. The one they previously had full access to, that has suddenly, without warning, alarmingly, been restricted.

Now instead of having to wait one hour (which was bad enough thank you very much), the smoker has elected to wait two. This grueling extra hour is spent with the evil nicotine monkey bouncing around their brain, shrieking to the high heavens for its fix.

In that hour, all the smoker has been able to think about is the precious.

In that extra hour, that cigarette has become more valuable than anything that is very, very valuable to them.

The smoker has done nothing, but erected an almighty, gold plated pedestal in their mind for that cigarette, that Michelangelo's David would be proud of.

What happens next is what makes this story sound like something out of 'Grimm's Fairy Tales.'

After they have put themselves through all that agony, they then light up the cigarette!

The pedestal they've erected in their brain now touches the clouds. Their pleasure responses are firing full cylinder. The smoker, squeaking with gratitude, finally allows themselves outside to light up their precious. They suck twice as much carcinogenic smoke deep into their lungs where it does the most damage, to make up for their impending separation once again.

Repeat ad infinitum.

Is anyone else seeing the pattern developing here?

The last thing a smoker wants to do, is turn a cigarette into a reward of any kind, in any way, shape or form.

The smoker knows they can have the cigarette, eventually, so it is all they can think about. Their craving for the drug they are addicted to, causes them to feel heightened anticipation and stress. They don't want to admit they are addicted to a drug, so they blame their stress on the people around them, and may even take their frustrations out on some poor innocent party.

When their time is up, they allow themselves the cigarette they are craving so powerfully. Those first few hits of nicotine further ingrain the sense that cigarettes are relaxing and relieve stress, when it was cigarettes that were causing all the hoo-haa in the first place!

One extremely important aspect of smoking cessation I teach in my Successfully Stop Smoking System, is all it takes to quit painlessly, without any hunger and without feelings of loss, is a simple, step-by-step shift in your thinking. It's so easy, once you know how.

This is the key to a successful, painless, stress-free quit.

For example, one common emotion felt by many smokers is envy. They see others outside with their cigarettes and think: "I wish I was outside smoking." The smokers on the other hand are all out there thinking: "I wish more than anything I didn't have to be out here smoking!"

The next time you see someone outside with a cigarette, think to yourself, "I cannot wait for the day I don't need to be out there smoking."

The day I was able to systematically exchange every one of my own personal thoughts, was the day I was able to quit cold, and never look back. There was no craving or feelings of loss, because cigarettes no longer had the power.

I had the power, and not the other way around.

The only way to quit successfully is the take your power back, not hand it over by restricting the very thing that's causing all the trouble. Change your thoughts, and you can change your life.

And quitting becomes almost embarrassingly easy.