Quit Smoking: Smoking and Stress

SMOKING AND STRESS
Smoking is often a reaction to stress and tension. Do you smoke when you are experiencing stress? What do you suppose the act of quitting smoking is like? For most people, it's very stressful! So you are caught in a "Catch 22" situation. When you understand how stress affects you, you can learn new ways to cope. Then you can break the over-stressed habit as you break the smoking habit.

Let's take a look at what stress really is. Write down three situations that you find stressful. Next, write down the emotions you feel when you are in each of those situations. Choose words that describe how you feel:

Examples of anger, fear, sad and happy words:
ANGER angry mad aggressive rage hate guilty	FEAR scared inadequate helpless nervous anxious pressured	SAD disappointed hopeless empty nothing tired exhausted	HAPPY glad excited determined grateful

The first column contains words that suggest a desire to strike out. They are all anger words. The second column has words that suggest something has been done to you. You end up wanting to run away. These are fear words. The third column suggests a desire to hide. They are words that go nowhere. These are the sad words.

There are many stressful situations, but only three basic feelings common to all stress. Anger, sadness and fear are the emotions we feel when we are experiencing stress. The emotions are the source of our stress, not the situations. The situation is the stressor. The stress is the painful emotion we feel in response to the situation.

Therefore, stress equals the emotion we feel in response to a situation. And to manage stress, we must manage the emotions. When we successfully manage stress, we experience the happy, excited and determined feelings listed in the fourth column.

Whenever we have an emotional response, we also have a physical response. What do you feel physically when you are stressed? What is happening in your body? These symptoms happen because you are producing a chemical in your body. This makes you chemically imbalanced. Your body is responding to the chemical imbalance. The first step in dealing with this chemical imbalance is to practice deep breathing. Deep breathing is a simple relaxation exercise that you can use often to overcome the stressful urge to smoke.

Adapted from the American Lung Association: Freedom from Smoking

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