I want to quit smoking - I know I should quit smoking, but do I feel I MUST quit smoking? I love smoking! I also know I’ll be miserable without my cigarettes. They’ve become a part of me, and I almost can’t bear the thought of giving them up...yet I know I have to...

Does this sound familiar? Does your mind bounce back and forth on the issue of quitting smoking? Do you think you should quit smoking and yet you find it impossible to go more than a short time before you’re smoking again? Does smoking make you feel weak? Powerless? Do you wonder if you'll ever succeed at cessation?

You’re not alone.

Nicotine addiction is powerful. Smoking cessation involves a lot of work for most people - it’s not handed to us on a silver platter.

It is doable, however, and the good news is that thousands of people quit smoking successfully every year. Many of them thought at one time or another that they couldn’t do it, yet they have...

So, how did they do it? How did they turn a feeling of should into the certainty of must? How did they make their dreams of quitting permanently a reality?

While there is no magic bullet that makes quitting easy and pain free, there are steps you can take to create the commitment you‘ll need to boot cigarettes out of your life for good.

“If you want to change your life, change your mind.”

Positive thinking is great, but positive thinking alone isn’t usually enough to help a person make permanent changes to their life. If, however, you can find a way to alter the meaning of the thing you’re trying to change; if the associations you have to smoking and quitting smoking change in a way that helps you, then you’ve got a good shot at success.

The path to commitment involves changing how you feel about quitting. Intellectually, you can rationalize that you need to quit smoking until you’re blue in the face, but until your emotions engage, and you begin to feel better about quitting than you do about smoking, you’re not going to get anywhere.